The Wicked Redhead. Beatriz Williams

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      Fortunately, the lobby was still empty at this hour, and only the security guy noticed Ella’s misstep. Most of the Parkinson Peters staff wandered in around eight thirty, though you were expected to stay as late as it took, and certainly past six o’clock if you wanted a strong review at the end of the year. And that was just when you were on the beach, between assignments, performing rote work in the mother ship. (The cabana, if you didn’t want to mix your metaphors.) Ella crossed the marble floor like she owned it—that was the only way to walk, Mumma had taught her—and pressed the elevator button. While she waited, somebody joined her, and for an instant made eye contact in the reflection of the elevator doors. A woman Ella didn’t recognize, dressed in a charcoal-gray suit similar to hers. Nice suit, Ella wanted to say, a final act of transgression while she still had the chance. But of course she didn’t say it. There was no point. Ella thought she had a finite amount of rebellion inside her, which she had used up considerably on Saturday night, and she didn’t want to waste any of the remainder. Unless rebellion was the kind of thing that fed on itself. Unless breaking the minor code of elevator silence—they had boarded the car by now, rushing upward to the thirty-first floor, where Ella was shortly to be made an ex-employee of Parkinson Peters—unless committing that misdemeanor gave her the courage to break other, larger rules, a courage that she was shortly going to need in spades. In which case—

      But it was too late. The elevator stopped at the twenty-fourth floor and the woman and her suit departed forever. Ella continued on to the thirty-first floor and unlocked the glass door to the Parkinson Peters offices with her pass. Strode to an empty cubicle, dropped her bag by the chair, went to the kitchen, and poured herself a cup of coffee to replace the one she had left behind at Starbucks. The room was in the center of the building and had no windows. The fluorescent light cast a sickly, anodyne glow, so that even the new granite countertops looked cheap. Ella was stirring in cream when an apologetic voice called her name from the door. She turned swiftly, spilling the coffee on her hand.

      “Ella? I’m so sorry.” It was Travis’s assistant, Rainbow, crisp and corporate in her Ann Taylor suit and cream blouse. Ella always imagined a pair of hippie parents serving her Tofurky at Thanksgiving and wondering where they had gone wrong. “Mr. Kemp asked me to send you to his office as soon as you came in.”

      Ella turned to reach for a paper towel. “I’ll be just a minute, thanks.”

      She took her time. Cleaned up the spill and washed her hands. Stuck a plastic lid on the coffee cup and took it to her desk, so she could drink it later. Her hand, carrying the coffee, setting it down on the Formica surface, remained steady. The nausea had passed. She unzipped her laptop bag and took out a leather portfolio, a yellow legal pad, and the Cross pen she used for business meetings, the one her father had given her when she first landed the job at Parkinson Peters, and as she walked down the passageway between the cubicles, it seemed to her that she could hear his proud voice as he gave it to her, Ella, his firstborn. Use it for good, he’d said, wagging the box. There’s power in this.

      She reached Travis’s office, which was not on the corner but two offices down—he’d only made partner a few years ago—and knocked on the door.

      “It’s open,” said Travis, in a voice that was neither stern nor angry, and in fact sounded as if he’d just been sharing a joke.

      So Ella pushed the door open and discovered she was right. He had been sharing a joke—or at least some pleasant morning banter—with a muscular man sitting confidently in the chair before the desk.

      Ella’s husband.

      Before she even comprehended that it was Patrick, before her eyes connected with her brain and lit the red warning light, he was bounding up from the chair and kissing her cheek. “Well, hello there, Ella,” he said, just as if they’d woken up in bed together this morning, as if he still owned the right to her kisses.

      “Patrick? What the hell are you doing here?”

      There was a brief, nervous pause. Patrick took a step back and laughed awkwardly. Ella looked from him to Travis, Travis looked from her to Patrick. He was jiggling a pen in his left hand, and an artsy, black-and-white photograph of his family smiled over his shoulder. The sight of it, for some reason, maybe its black-and-whiteness, made Ella think of Redhead Beside Herself. She turned back to Patrick and said, Well?

      He tried to lay an arm around her shoulders, but she edged to the side.

      “I’m here for you, babe,” he said. “I heard what happened on Friday.”

      “How? Who told you?”

      He shrugged. He was smiling—Patrick had one of those room-lighting smiles, it was part of his arsenal—and Ella realized he wasn’t wearing a suit. Just a pair of chinos and a navy cashmere sweater over a button-down shirt of French blue. He looked like he was off to race yachts or something.

      “Just heard from someone at work,” he said. “I tried to call you this weekend, but you weren’t answering. So I came down here this morning to see my man Kemp and explain.”

      Travis had turned his attention to some papers on his desk during this exchange, making notes in his quick, tiny handwriting that had always confounded Ella. But she could see that his ears were wide open. His neck was a little flushed above his white collar. He was going to tell his wife all about this tonight.

      Ella folded her arms. “Explain what?”

      “I quit my job,” Patrick said.

      “You what?”

      “I quit. Tendered my resignation over the weekend.”

      “This is a joke, right?”

      Patrick shook his head. Still smiling. “Nope. I figured if one of us had to take a fall, it should be me. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

      “Neither did you.”

      “Well, then call me a gentleman.”

      “Ella,” said Travis, looking up from his papers, “I got your husband’s email over the weekend and discussed the matter on the partner call this morning, and we’ve agreed to keep you on at Parkinson Peters. You’ll be moved to a different project—”

      “No,” she said.

      If she’d taken a pistol from her pocket and fired a bullet through the window, the two men would probably have been less startled. The pen dropped from Travis’s hand and smacked on the desk.

      “No, what? No, you want to stay on the Sterling Bates audit? I’m afraid—”

      “I mean, no, I don’t want to stay at all.” Ella opened up her leather portfolio and removed a sheet of paper. Set it on the desk in front of her, edges exactly straight. “My resignation letter.”

      “Jesus,” said Patrick.

      Travis stared at the letter and said, Well.

      Ella snapped the portfolio shut. “So that’s that. I’ll stop by HR with a copy for them—”

      “Can I ask where you’re going?” Travis said, looking up from the letter. He gathered up the pen and started clicking the end. His eyes were bright and narrow. “Who’s recruited you? Deloitte?”

      “No СКАЧАТЬ