Chapter 13

E veryone stopped talking, like, a dead stop, so that the only sound I heard was a quiet hiss from the expensive coffee machine that my old boss Annis had purchased on the company credit card (I'd helped her to pick it out). They all looked at me, eyes wide, and even though they didn't speak, their guilty expressions told me a lot. At this moment, my coworkers reminded me of my sister Addie, who had the worst poker face…no, I wasn't going to think about poker.

"What's going on in here?" I asked sharply.

And suddenly, every person in the lunchroom got busy. Three jumped up from the chairs surrounding the table and said they had too much work to sit around, two slammed the refrigerator and cupboard doors and said they weren't hungry, anyway. One was left staring at me while holding a mug, but then she announced that she was allergic to coffee, dropped it in the sink, and ran. I watched their exits and knew exactly what was going on.

"You don't need to worry," Camille told me later as we sat in her office. Then she glanced again at my sandwich with a skeptical expression. "Are you sure that you don't want mayonnaise on that? It seems a little dry."

"No, thanks. I've kind of lost the taste for it," I explained. "If you eat dry food often enough, you get used to it."

She still seemed dubious, but returned to the former topic. "Offices are always full of rumors. When I first started here, there was even a betting pool going about when Beckett and I would get together."

"Was there?" I asked, trying to sound innocent.

She nodded. "He told me about it after he had what he called a ‘discussion' with the person who started it. Can you imagine if he said that he needed to ‘discuss' something with you?"

Well, at one point, I might have cut and run. Now, though, I knew that he talked tough, but there was no reason to be scared. He was fair and he was also so sweet. That wasn't a word I would have used to describe him before, but he…I sighed and felt a funny tightening in my chest, but it wasn't anxiety. It was happiness, and I thought I might have been smiling, too.

And that was precisely why the people in our office had stopped whispering about our boss hooking up with Camille, and had switched to a different target: me.

"I'm not really worried about it," I assured her, but that wasn't entirely true. I wasn't worried that we would get in trouble with the CEO, Beckett's cousin Steve, and I wasn't worried that people would treat me poorly or lose respect for me. I was worried because they were partially right. No, we weren't together, but yes, I really wanted us to be, and that was apparently obvious to others.

Even Camille, who was so bad at men and relationships, was eyeing me. "You're not interested in him, right?" she confirmed. "A while ago, you mentioned that you had a boyfriend."

"Not really," I said.

"Huh? You don't have one?"

"Not really," I repeated, and then admitted, "No."

"I remember how you said that you don't want to settle down with someone." She picked through the lettuce in her salad. "I do. I really do, and I want to have kids within the next few years."

I wanted to move us past my issues, so I started talking about hers. "What's happening with your fiancé?" I asked, because there was always a lot.

First she tried her move of shaking her head, waving her hands, and frowning. "Nothing! We're great." She stuck out her tongue.

"Really?" I asked skeptically and almost immediately, she changed her tune.

"Ok, well, I wasn't going to tell you this, but I have to talk to someone and you have so much more experience than I do."

She was trying to be complimentary, I told myself. This wasn't like my mom's friends who sometimes mentioned my "long history" of "so many, many different men" in a way that was very, very far from being a compliment.

"We've been going around in circles about a little difference of opinion," Camille confessed, but what she told me next was hardly little. "There was something in his car. A thong."

"Underwear? Underwear in his car, and it wasn't yours?"

"I wouldn't have sex in a car. All those windows…" She shook her head. "I don't even wear that kind of panties," she said. "I find that they chafe."

"What was his explanation for why it was there?" Mine was that he had found a willing woman who didn't mind all the windows.

"He said that it got left by the car detailers and that I was getting pissy for no reason, but I told him that strange underwear was actually a good reason to be upset," she answered, and she threw up her hands, blew a raspberry, and rolled her eyes. Then she stopped all that and looked at me anxiously.

"A car detailer took off her thong and left it under his seat?" I asked. "I'm sorry, but I find that very hard to believe."

"Do you think your sisters would agree?" She always loved to hear about them and she knew that they were never short on opinions.

I already had a very good idea of what they would say, but I obliged her by texting a short summary of her concerns in our sibling group chat, and she eagerly awaited their answers. Unfortunately for her, they did agree with me, some in a nicer way than others. I read aloud that Addie was so sorry, but she just couldn't think that people cleaned cars without their underwear. I didn't share what Brenna had said: "How dumb is your boss? How are you not laughing in her face?"

My sisters and I were back to getting along, at least on the surface. I was over at my parents' house visiting with Esme when I didn't have to go to the restaurant, so I saw a lot of Sophie. We were also preparing for Addie's wedding and there was plenty of forced togetherness that went along with that, like bridesmaid dress fittings and decisions about flowers, seating, et cetera. The bachelorette party was fast approaching and we'd be going out as a group. I was trying to act as if things were fine, because I did understand why they'd kept me away from the hospital on the night that Nicola had given birth—I really did get it. Beckett and I had talked a lot more and I saw his points and theirs, even though I didn't agree with everything he'd argued.

I'd apologized. I'd said sorry to Sophie for tattling about how she'd planned to hitchhike to see a cemetery and also for some other things I'd shared with Mom that were supposed to have been secrets. I'd said sorry to Nicola, Addie, Brenna, and Grace, too, because Beckett had gotten me to remember even more instances where I might have, as he'd put it, tattled on them. I'd tried to apologize to my brother, but he wasn't talking to me.

They'd accepted it and said it was ok, not to worry, but also not to do it again. "Maybe take a break from Mom," Nicola had suggested. She'd been hovering as I sat in a rocking chair and held her daughter, but she was trying not to let me see how anxious she was that I was in charge. "It's a hard position for you to be in, JuJu, in between your siblings and your mom. Step back and I think you'll see that too."

I understood what she meant and I understood why they'd been angry, but they still didn't get my point of view. Mom loved us. She wanted to help us. Maybe sometimes she got a little crazy or took things too far, but it didn't mean anything if you believed in what was in her heart. Beckett didn't get that, either. He thought I was jealous of the attention that my brother had received and that I'd been spiling secrets to my mother in order to foster more of a relationship between us. But we already had a relationship! I knew how much she loved me, no matter what any of them said.

So I only nodded at Nicola and agreed that maybe she was right, and I didn't say that I had plans to see our mother later that same day because she'd wanted to talk to me about Patrick and how we were going to draw him back into the fold. But that afternoon when I sat at Mom's kitchen table, I also didn't answer any questions about how Nicola was doing with breastfeeding, about when my big sister planned to return to work, or about any of the other things that Nic hadn't shared with her. I only said that I didn't know and that it would be better to ask Nicola herself.

At the current moment, Camille was also going to the source and trying to see the comments on my phone, and I didn't want her to read where Brenna had continued to insult her ("box of rocks" and "does she need her hand held when crossing streets" were two texts that had recently popped up). "I'm sorry," I told her. "It seems like they think that the thong story is weird. They all said that they would be very suspicious if they found a stranger's underwear like that." Not Grace, because she hadn't answered, but I was pretty sure that every woman in the entire world would have been suspicious, and we were correct to feel that way.

She sighed. "Sometimes I think I trust him too much. You know, he stays out all night. A lot," she confessed. "He won't let me see his phone and I have no idea about his finances. I told him that I would have to know everything before we get married, and he got upset and stormed out of the apartment and over to the place we got for his mom." Camille was paying to rent that place, I'd realized. "We haven't talked about it since."

Holy Mary. I thought that I might have to start holding her hand to cross the street. "You're such a good lawyer," I started out. "You can see legal issues coming a mile away and you don't allow anyone to be sloppy or imprecise. You don't let them get away with pulling something over on you, either."

"That's what you think Dax is doing," she said, and I nodded reluctantly. "That's hard to hear."

"Am I the only one saying it?"

"My friends at home aren't his biggest fans," she admitted. "My friends from college weren't very impressed by him, either, and the people from law school didn't like him at all. One girl always grabbed her purse when he was around, I think unconsciously. My parents can't stand him and my grandmother said she wishes he were dead."

"Camille!"

"They just don't see the good in him," she told me, and then spent a while trying to convince me that the good was there, just like I'd heard from my sister Addie about her former boyfriend whom we'd all hated. Like, Dax sometimes took out the trash without being asked, so wasn't he wonderful? It meant that he cared about their home, and in extension, about her. He was meticulous about nail care, which was a sign that his career was important to him because he needed to look his best to succeed. Wasn't that a great character trait?

There were more reasons and they were even more of a stretch. Did leaving a note that they needed more milk actually mean that he loved her cooking? No, I thought not—but the bottom line was that she loved him. That was why I didn't say even a smidgen of everything I really thought. She was my superior, after all, but it was hard to hear from anyone that your boyfriend sucked, and I probably would only have taken it from one of my sisters. Even then I would have been angry at them, so I only listened to Camille and shrugged a little, not agreeing that he was secretly wonderful but keeping most of my opinions to myself.

Finally, she stopped with her rationalization and sighed, and she pointed to my hand. "I wonder what I would do if I had that."

I looked at the phone I held; she definitely had one of these. "What do you mean?"

"If I had five sisters behind me, backing me up, I might do things differently. You're lucky."

"You have my support," I answered. "If you need help carrying your stuff out of that apartment, I have a strong back and I only ask for food-based payment. Just saying."

She had a lot to think about but we also had our jobs to do, as I kept telling everyone else at this place. Beckett was already working hard and when I was back at my desk, I looked over at him for a while before I realized that all of our colleagues could also see me staring. These stupid glass walls didn't help me because I spent way, way too much time watching him and trying to figure out…everything. Everything seemed wonderful and also, like it was such a huge mess. He was my boss! He had scruples and standards and there was no way…

There was no way that the things I wanted were going to happen, and I tried not to let myself believe that I even wanted them. I didn't and I never had—Camille had just reminded me of how I was happier single and how much boyfriends sucked. But I looked through these walls and rested my eyes on him, and I felt my face get hot. I knew I was smiling.

A few hours later, I happened to be watching (just a little) when I saw him stand and then lean forward, holding onto the edge of his desk. I sat straight up in my chair: something was wrong, so I also stood, ready to go help him. Just as I started to move, he left his office and walked quickly down the other hallway, the one that led to the stairwell. He was out of sight but I had the same feeling as when my sisters hadn't answered me the night that Nicola had given birth: something was definitely wrong.

I left my office and casually walked toward the elevators, the opposite direction that Beckett had headed, and I jammed both the up and down buttons until a car finally stopped on my floor. Whatever was going on with him, he didn't want anyone here to know about it. He didn't even want me to know, but I couldn't just ignore it. So I took the elevator one story down and then, as the people working on the nineteenth floor stared through their own walls, I went to their stairwell access and I ran back up one flight.

He was sitting on the steps in almost the same place that I had planted myself when I had to answer the messages and calls from bill collectors and from Leni's pimp, the guy who had paid off all the money I'd owed after the poker game and then had wanted me to work for him to make it up. Beckett looked as miserable as I'd felt then, as if he couldn't take this life for much longer. He opened his eyes and saw me, and then he closed them and shook his head slightly.

"Juliet, go back to your office." He spoke so quietly that it was hard to hear him and his body slumped against the wall for support.

"No, I won't," I said. "What's the matter? What can I do?"

"Nothing.I'm fine."

He was clearly very far from "fine." I looked at his bloodless cheeks, the dark circles under his eyes, and his pale lips. "Do you need a doctor? Do you need to go to the hospital?" I asked.

"No. Return to your desk." He grimaced, his mouth clenching, and then he doubled over his legs.

"Beckett—"

"God damn it!" he burst out, but his voice sounded weak. "Leave me the fuck alone."

Ok. I nodded and backed up, and I ran down the steps, this time to the eighteenth floor because I still didn't want to call too much attention to the stairwell. Then I went to the elevator bank, and I jammed the button a hundred times, as if that would make one come faster to take me upstairs. I rode until the light stopped at thirty, the floor where we'd first met Beckett in a conference room with the CEO of Whitaker Enterprises.

And he was the person I needed to see right now. "I need to speak to Stephen Whitaker, please," I told the assistant at the desk in front of his office.

Her eyes flicked briefly to her computer and she looked at me apologetically. "He's very busy today. Can we schedule—"

"This is urgent," I told her, but she shook her head. "It's urgent. It's an urgent matter about his family!"

I'd repeated the word "urgent" three times but "family" appeared to be the one that did the trick. As soon as I said it, she got up and went into the CEO's office. In another moment, she was gesturing me in and then closing the door behind herself as she left.

Stephen Whitaker, the one who bossed us all, sat behind his desk. "How can I—"

"It's Beckett," I interrupted. "Something's really wrong and I don't know how to help him. Could you please come?"

Mr. Whitaker stood and started moving before I'd finished the question. "Where is he?"

We took the stairs together, hurtling down ten flights to where he leaned against the wall, so still that I thought he might have passed out or…

"Oh, sugar. Beckett!" I kind of knelt but mostly fell down onto the marble tread next to him. I put one hand on his cheek and gripped his shoulder with my other. Of course I knew CPR after all that lifeguarding, but I'd never done it in real life. I could, and I would do anything. "Beckett!"

His blue-grey eyes opened. "Juliet, I told you to leave me alone."

"Go ahead to your office," Stephen Whitaker now ordered me. "I'll take care of him."

I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to go. "Ok," I agreed, but it was only a word. My body didn't move.

"Go," the CEO repeated to me, and then he knelt in front of his cousin. "Beckett, how are you doing?

First I dropped my hands and then, slowly, I stood. As my panic ebbed, I realized that the faster I left, the faster he would get help. "Ok," I repeated, meaning it that time. I went all the way down to the lobby, twenty floors of walking as slowly and quietly as I could so that I could hear what was happening above me. The only thing I caught, though, were some unintelligible murmurs, and then a door closed with a loud slam and there was nothing after that.

The day dragged on. At one point, Camille asked me where Beckett had gone and I shrugged and looked at a contract on my desk with eyes that didn't really see it. "I'm not sure," I answered, which was true. He often had meetings outside of the office, so I alluded to that. "I think he said something about going to Birmingham." That part was a lie, but she seemed to accept it and left me alone. Then, when it was around a normal time for me to leave, I raced down to my car and drove as fast as I could to Grosse Pointe.

His big gate didn't open when I pushed the button, no matter how many times I hit it with my finger. Now that all the trees had leafed out, it was hard to see the house but I didn't think that there were any lights on back there. So where was he? The hospital? I quickly texted my sister to ask a question and she called me right back.

"Why? Who?" Nicola demanded.

"I just need to know if it's possible to find out if a certain patient is in the emergency room or was admitted," I told her. "It's a general thing, not about someone in particular."

My sister didn't speak. Silent seconds ticked past.

"It's about Beckett Forsman," I confessed. "I'm really worried."

"I can hear it in your voice, but there's no way that anyone will release that information to you, JuJu. I'm sorry."

"Oh." I swallowed. "I figured that, but I wanted to make sure."

"Do you want to come over here?" she asked, and I really did. I wanted to go to Nicola's house and let her play with my hair and tell me that Beckett was fine, and to mind my own business.

Then I heard a baby cry in the background: it was Nicola's daughter, the tiny human who needed her more than I did. "No, that's ok," I answered, and I tried to put hearty happiness into my voice instead of worry. "I'm sure that there's no problem. And it's none of my concern, anyway. He's only my boss, not someone I should be checking up on. Don't tell anybody, Nic." I realized how that must have sounded, coming from me after they'd all been so angry at how I'd handled secrets.

"No, I won't tell. Let me know when you hear something, ok?"

I said that I would and hung up, and then I tried the button on the gate a few more times, just in case I hadn't been pushing hard enough on it before. The outcome was the same: nothing. So I turned around, since the driveway was wide enough to do that in this little car, and I made my way to my new place.

It was mine, just for me, and it was a studio, just like Brenna's. After spending the night at Beckett's house, I'd woken up to find him with a bunch of apartment listings open on his laptop, and with a route mapped out between the buildings so we could check them out. He'd also prepared a spreadsheet with pertinent information about each place and had added personal comments, his opinions about the management companies in charge, the neighborhoods, the number of potholes in the surrounding streets, et cetera.

He and I had driven around to look at them and I'd found several places that I said seemed fine. I would apply, I promised. Of course, acceptance of those applications was going to be a problem, given my credit history. I hadn't told him about that, and I hadn't fully explained why I'd rented this little studio. It wasn't one he'd starred and put at the top of his spreadsheet, and it was in a location he'd described as "bland" and "marginal" with no street trees but plenty of potholes. It was because they hadn't said no, of course. I'd wedged my stuff into my parents' garage and had to humble myself to them, saying that I just needed to stay a week or two before I could move to my new place. My dad had questions and my mom was worried but I'd managed to put them off, mostly. They were still suspicious.

So Beckett didn't like my apartment, and I didn't enjoy it much, either. I would rather have been in the house on the lake with him, but actually, this studio also would have been fine if he were here with me. Where was he? I spent the night on the cheap mattress I'd bought and wished that I knew what was happening, that I had any scrap of information. I made attempts to get some, but no one responded.

The next morning, with my eyes red and swollen with exhaustion and worry, I went to work. And…there he was. There he was, sitting behind that stupid desk like nothing had happened at all. I froze and Rashelle, who was coming right behind me from the elevators, stepped on the back of my shoe.

"Sorry. I forgot something in my car," I said to her, and turned around and went into the bathroom. I got back under control so I wasn't going to start screaming, throwing things, or hitting people like Sophie did when she got mad. I continued to my office calmly and purposefully, focusing on my shoes instead of the man in the corner office, but there was already a message from him waiting on my screen, ordering me to come to see him.

So I carefully picked up my notebook and a pen and I walked sedately a little further down the hallway, right to his door. I knocked and he impatiently gestured for me to come inside.

"Good morning," I greeted him as I entered. He looked a little tired, maybe slightly pale, but he was dressed in his usual suit and was wearing a shirt with monogrammed cuffs, a perfectly knotted tie, and a pocket square. He was here, the big jerk, and mostly ok. He hadn't bothered to tell me that, though, and it was a fact that would have interested me at about three this morning as I awoke from another nightmare and said another prayer that he was all right.

I sat and flipped to a new page in the notebook, dated it, and didn't drive the pen point straight through to the back cover—or into him, either.

Beckett skipped the greeting and didn't check his monitor for conversational prompts. "I thought it was better to speak to you in person this morning, but I'm questioning my decision to wait," he stated.

"That was a very dumb idea," I agreed. "You should have responded to my texts. You should have called me." I tapped the pen on the page. Hard.

"Steve told me that you emailed him, but he didn't see it until we were in the elevator coming up this morning. He doesn't check his work account when he's with his family."

Yes, I had jeopardized my job by demanding information from the CEO of the company. "He doesn't need to respond now. I don't care," I said.

"You seem angry. Were you…" He hesitated. "Were you worried about me?"

"What do you think, Beckett? Yes, I was worried about you!" That had been much too loud and when I returned my gaze to the notebook, I saw that I had jammed the pen through several pages. Oops.

"I was at the hospital for hours and then I spent the night at my cousin's house. I'm sorry—"

"What?" My eyes went straight to his face and then to his body as I searched for damage. "Are you all right?"

"I have cancer, Juliet."

At first, I couldn't say anything. "What?" I asked finally, and he told me. It was why he'd left his former firm in New York, he explained. It was too much to handle when he learned that his illness had recurred.

"I was first diagnosed when I was thirteen," he said. "Last fall, I discovered that it was back."

He gave me all the details about the type of cancer and its location. He told me the names of his doctors and talked about the treatments and their side effects. He told me the prognosis, which seemed uncertain and far from positive. He said how he'd always gone for checkups and exercised and ate healthy foods, but that hadn't been enough to keep illness at bay. He talked and I wrote down everything in the notebook, moving my hand as fast as I could so that I wouldn't miss any details, and flipping quickly from one page to the next as they filled.

"Juliet."

I flexed my stiff fingers. "Yes?" It didn't really sound like my voice had said that word.

"Go to the stairwell."

"What?" I asked.

"Go to the stairwell," Beckett repeated. "Now."

Ok, that made as much sense as anything else. He was young and he should have been healthy, but he was sick like this? I put the notebook on his desk, walked blindly down the hall, and opened the big door at the end of it. Then I stood on the landing and stared at the lighted exit sign, and I may not have blinked, and I didn't think that I breathed.

I heard footsteps on the stairs and Beckett walked up from the floor below. "Juliet," he said again, and opened up his arms.

This time when I hugged him, he also held me very close, with his arms wrapped around me and his hand pressing my cheek against his chest. "I didn't know it would affect you like that," he murmured. "I didn't realize. I could see you trembling as I spoke and your eyes were enormous. Are you crying?"

"No, but I can't believe this," I told him, and I held on just as tightly. "You've been coming to work…"

"I'm going to have to cut back, and we're going to hire another attorney. Steve became very heated last night about how much time I was spending here."

"Of course he did! You can't be at the office if you're not well! You'll be at home, and I'll make you soup and bring you juice and water and cold compresses, and a heating pad and a humidifier, and also medicine, and also everything. That was what Nicola did when we were sick and look how well it turned out! She's the best nurse in the world and we're as healthy as anything." I wasn't making a lot of sense and now I could also tell that I was trembling. "I'll do all that," I promised.

"It sounds very nice," he said.

"You were going through this alone, and that's crazy. It makes me so angry at you!" But I hugged him even tighter as I said that. "Now I'll be coming to your appointments, too, so you don't have to go by yourself. I'll have questions for the doctors and I'll drive very carefully so that you don't get sick."

"Do you think that your boss will give you time off?"

"He acts like he's mean, but he's not really," I said. "He's really a wonderful person." I pushed my face against him as my lips trembled, too.

"Juliet…"

I steadied myself. "I meant everything I said about helping you. I wrote down all that information and I'm going to study it and figure it out so I can be an asset, a good support."

"You're going to have a hard time with your notes," he told me. "Your hand was shaking a lot and it looked like scribbles from my side of the desk."

"Then I'm sorry but you'll have to repeat everything, so I can get it right."

"We'll talk more," he said. "We don't have to at this moment." I felt him breathe in and out. "For months, I've felt like there was a weight on my chest. It settled there when I heard the doctor tell me that the cancer had recurred and I haven't been able to shake it loose."

"I know what you mean," I said. "I know exactly."

"It feels better now."

Good. But I had to press my face against him again and nod instead of saying anything, because I didn't know if I could speak. We stayed in the stairwell for a long time, and then when we finally let go, he went up a floor and I went down one. After all, he was still my boss, and it would have looked weird if our coworkers noticed that we'd been hiding out together for hours.

Beckett was my boss, but he was my friend, too. And now, he was going to be my number one priority.