The Other Side - J. D. Robb [162]
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s a Ryan Doyle on the phone who insists on speaking to you. He says it’s an emergency.”
“An emergency? For me?” Three meetings, ten phone calls, one date, and one great night of sex, and he was calling her with an emergency? Was she ready for this? Well, that would depend on the emergency, wouldn’t it?
No, she decided in the next quarter second, a string of emotions busting loose in her chest. Concern. Happiness. Curiosity. Pride. Fear. An eagerness to respond. The hope of not failing him. It didn’t depend on the emergency at all. He was calling for her help, and she’d answer him as best she could. She loved him.
It was that simple.
“Excuse me, please. This’ll only take a moment.” Her eyes met the assistant’s. “Put him through again, please.”
Once again, the cell vibrated. She picked it up, turned her back to the board and her boss, and stepped to the long window that overlooked Route 123.
“Ms. Biderman? M.J.?” her employer’s voice seemed to come from far off when she turned back to the room. “Is everything all right? Has someone died? You look very pale.”
“No. No one died.”
“Are you going to be sick?”
“No.” She looked around the room until her eyes focused on him. “I’m just going.”
“But can’t it wait? What about Longwire and Barren Electronics? Your presentation . . . You have a responsibility here.”
All the late nights and long weekends over the last nine years flashed through her mind; her ambitious dedication and the fatigue and frustration of having to deal with the Old Boys’ Club who seemed hell-bent on proving to women that they can’t have it all—and her sudden shame of having believed them.
Or maybe it hadn’t been the Old Boys at all. Maybe she’d just been trying so hard not to be her own mother that she’d lost sight of all the truly important things in life.
Her laugh was small and ironic. “Wow. You know, I never dreamed I’d be put in the position of having to choose between my job and my life. In fact, until recently I thought my job was my life—but it’s not.” She took a deep breath and several steps toward the door. “Now, I’ve been over my PowerPoint more than once, and I think it speaks for itself. If you don’t want to hear what it’s saying, there’s nothing more I can do here anyway. So I’m leaving. And if that costs me my promotion”—she sighed and tried to swallow the lump in her throat—“so be it. If it costs me my job . . . well, then that would be a big mistake because . . . I’m honest and I’m good at what I do and . . . the loss would be yours.”
She pushed through the conference room door blindly, hoping no one had seen the tears in her eyes. She wanted her job, but she was being driven by a far greater fear than that of losing it: an overwhelming fear of losing the things she hadn’t—until recently—even known she believed in.
Faith. Hope. Love.
Ten
She straddled the line between rational and crazed as she drove out of town to Johnnie’s Bend—not wanting to waste time getting tickets or causing a pileup on the highway. She was still traveling exactly nine miles over the speed limit when she skidded to a halt in front of Hedbo House.
Ryan was on the porch. He looked frantic.
There was a spark of anxiety for her favorite spring silk suit that fizzled out the moment she opened the car door to get out. Her heels made a nervous clattering noise in the muddy road and across the wet sidewalk as she watched him leap from the porch and join her halfway.
“I called the cops. I knocked on every door in the neighborhood. . . . Everyone’s looking for him. I was just going to break a window and go in and look around for him. . . . I just have this gut feeling he’s in there. . . . Where else would he go? But . . . hell, I didn’t know they even had shatterproof glass when this place was built. And the doors are like granite. They don’t build houses like this anymore. But I’ve looked all around . . . have this sick feeling he got in somehow, through some