“Whatcha doin’?” I asked, dodging the necktie she threw past my head.
“Where is it?” she hissed.
“Sweetie, did you lose your backup flash drive again? Because we agreed not to hide that in things Josh loves after the last time.”
“I found the ring,” Sadie grumbled under her breath so the others couldn’t hear us. The rest of the team was involved in a spirited game of Boggle in front of the lobby fireplace. “Three weeks ago, I was looking through Josh’s old T-shirt drawer for something to sleep in and I found the box.”
“What ring?” I asked, trying to sound innocent.
“Oh, Kelsey, please, I saw that gorgeous setting. There’s no way he picked that without you.”
“Okay, yes, I helped,” I said.
“Of course, none of that matters now, because he hasn’t proposed. Who holds on to a ring for three weeks and doesn’t pop the question?”
“Maybe he’s just trying to find the right moment,” I suggested.
“He’s had three weeks to pick the right moment,” she whispered. “What if he’s decided that there is no right moment, because he doesn’t want to marry me? What if he’s realized that I exceed the recommended daily allowance of crazy most men want in their lives? I mean, let’s face it: I’m controlling and rigid and I schedule away most people’s will to live.”
“Sadie, I’m sorry, this has to be done,” I said, tweaking her nose.
“Ow!” she yelped, drawing the attention of our coworkers.
“It’s fine,” I told them, stuffing Josh’s clothes back into his bag. “Sadie just bumped her nose.”
“You tweaked my nose, you lunatic,” she said, clutching her face.
“Because you are talking crazy, lady,” I told her. “You are fantastic. You are creative and brave and generous and an awesome friend, not to mention sexy as hell. Any man in his right mind would be thrilled to be married to you.”
“Do you want to be married to me?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.
I smacked her arm. “You know what I mean.”
“Stop hitting me!”
“Not until you stop freaking out over Josh’s bad timing,” I said, smacking her arm again.
“Hey!” She gasped. “You’re being supportive and violent. You’re only supportive and violent when you’re trying to keep something from me.”
“Well, that’s not true.”
Sadie’s eyes narrowed. “What aren’t you telling me? What’s going on with you and Darrell? Something is going on and I want you to tell me right now. Oh my God, Kelsey, if you tell me you’re pregnant, I’m going to murder you. No jury would find me guilty under these extenuating circumstances. We had the ‘you can’t have babies with Darrell’ talk. I brought out the demonstration banana and the condoms and everything—”
“Shh,” I hissed at her. “We broke up, okay? A few weeks ago.”
Please don’t notice that I didn’t mention who was the breaker and who was the breakee.
“Really?!” She squealed like a little kid, throwing her arms around me in a mama-bear hug. “Forget my ring freakout. I am so happy right now!”
“Please try to contain your joy.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she exclaimed, her bright hazel eyes sparkling as she hopped up and down. “And why the hell did he come to see you off when we left the office parking lot?”
“Because I didn’t want to see that look on your face. That triumphant, ‘Christmas has come eleven months early and Santa brought me a big bag of “I was right” for my stocking’ look. And because he needed to give me bills for accounts he opened in my name without telling me, which sort of leads back into the ‘I told you so’ thing.”
Sadie put a tight damper on said triumph and gave me her best supportive face. She squeezed my arm. “I wouldn’t say ‘I told you so,’ Kels, you know that.”
“I don’t know that, because you did tell me so,” I retorted. “You told me Darrell was no good over and over again. But I didn’t listen and I don’t know why. Frankly, an ‘I told you so’ billboard wouldn’t be overkill in this situation.”
“You weren’t ready to hear it yet, that’s all.” The temporary lid on Sadie’s glee busted loose and she ran to the lobby and yelled to Bonnie and Josh, “Guys! Guess what? Darrell and Kelsey broke up! Weeks ago!”
“Shh! Sadie, hush!” I cast a nervous glance at the lobby. I didn’t particularly want the others knowing my business. Tom and Jacob flashed me the thumbs-up. Bonnie squealed and threw her Boggle pad into the air. Gina, as expected, rolled her eyes and went back to her magazine.
But it was Josh’s response that surprised me. Grinning broadly, he jumped from his seat and threw his arms around me. It was my first real hug from Josh, which made me feel sort of warm and fuzzy. He’d always been friendly, but appropriately office-distant. I hadn’t known he cared that much. “Good to know! I guess that means I can call off that amateur hit squad I booked.”
“Amateur hit squad?” I asked, arching a brow.
“College kids who live in my building,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re looking for beer money. They wouldn’t have actually killed him, just gone after his kneecaps.”
I gave him a little squeeze. “Well, it’s the thought that counts.”
Bonnie threw her arms around the pair of us and squeezed for all her tiny, bony arms were worth. “I’m so happy!” She sighed, resting her head against Josh’s back. “Ignore what Sadie is going to say about your being stubborn and immature and keeping this from us for no reason. This was definitely the right time to share, Kelsey. We needed some good news.”
I frowned at Bonnie over Josh’s shoulder. “Stubborn and immature? That seems unfair.”
“No, it’s about right,” Sadie told me.
“Not that I mind being the sandwich filling, but this hug is starting to feel inappropriate,” Josh muttered.
Charlie walked in from the lobby just before the Josh sandwich split apart.
“Uh, what’s going on?” he asked, eyeing the way Bonnie and I were wrapped around Josh. He shot a curious look at Sadie, who simply beamed at us.
“Darrell and I aren’t together anymore. It’s not a big deal.”
“Not a big deal?” Bonnie scoffed. “I feel like I should get you an ice-cream cake or a fruit basket or something. Personal growth like this should be rewarded.” She turned to Charlie. “They’ve broken up before, but never for longer than a few days. It’s been weeks. And we probably won’t get out of here for another week. I think we may be reaching the detox stage. It’s so exciting!”
Charlie’s eyebrows winged up. I shot Bonnie a stern look, which she blithely ignored. “I don’t think Will is a good influence on you,” I said.
Still seated at the table, Will threw up his hands in a helpless gesture. Bonnie jabbed a finger at me, grinning at Will. “He’s an awesome influence on me. You want to know why? Because he showed me the difference between the kind of relationship where two people stimulate each other through occasional disagreements and the kind where one person being an enormous douche bag drags the other down.”
“Bonnie said ‘douche bag,’ ” Sadie whispered to Josh. “Bonnie never says ‘douche bag.’ This could be the beginning of snow madness!”
“Which kind is yours?” I asked Bonnie.
“The stimulating kind,” Bonnie retorted, while Will beamed cheekily.
I smirked at her. “Oh, you lucky girl.”
Bonnie poked my shoulder. “I’m going to ignore your feeble attempt to distract me with crude jokes because I am so very happy that you and Darrell are no more. Finito. Kaput. Finished. A thing of the past. Ancient history.”
Sadie rubbed her hands together gleefully. “We should make a Darrell piñata.”
“Oh, sure, now you want to use my arts and crafts expertise,” Bo
nnie shot back. “But when I want to collage, it’s all ‘this is lame’ and ‘the adhesive is giving me a contact high.’ ”
I pouted, sticking out an exaggerated bottom lip. “My attempts weren’t feeble. I didn’t . . . feeble.”
I glanced toward Charlie, embarrassed. He was just grinning like crazy at our antics. Behind Sadie’s back, he mouthed the words Thanks for telling me first.
I didn’t have time to process this gesture, as Sadie had side-tackled me into another fierce hug. If I wasn’t mistaken, my sweater was growing damp at the neck.
“Are you crying now?” I asked her. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate Sadie’s enthusiasm. I recognized that there were many benefits to a Darrell-free life (clean apartment, full purse, laptop uncorrupted by viruses accumulated in Darrell’s search for naked pictures of Heidi Klum). But I’d processed all this already, and hearing Sadie’s raptures felt like just a little bit too much positive reinforcement.
“No!” Sadie insisted, but when she pulled back, her eyes were shiny. “Do you promise this is the last time? And this isn’t me joking around, here. Bonnie and I were on the verge of staging an intervention. Darrell is no good for you. In fact, he is bad for you. Actively bad. Please, I’m begging you. We may joke around about you rebounding or relocating to a Darrell-proof containment facility, but you don’t have to do any of that. Just please, please don’t go back to him. Change your number. Move in with me if you want. Just don’t go back to him.”
“Thank you,” I told her. “Although I can’t move out of my building. I love the Mayfair. And I couldn’t leave my boys. But I won’t go back.”
“Since you didn’t give us a chance to give you a proper postmortem of the Darrell breakup, Sadie and I are going to take you to one of the nicest rooms on this floor, liberate one of the better bottles of vodka from the bar, and get you rip-snorting drunk.”
“I don’t think that’s a proper use of state resources,” I mumbled. “And for the record, we can’t actually dissect Darrell.”
I heard Sadie mutter something that sounded like “We have the technology.”
I blinked awake, snuggling into my nest of blankets. The snorting and snuffling sounds of my friends sleeping were muted under a constant hum of white noise. At first I thought it was the crackling of the fire, but the rippling sound was too constant. It was more of a pitter-patter, like raindrops against the windows.
Rain.
My head popped up from the blankets and I jumped out of bed, hoping that this was a sign of thaw, that warmer rains would wash away some of the snow and make it a bit easier for the road crews to free up the highways. Luke was already at the dining room windows, coffee in hand, staring through the glass.
“Kelsey,” he began as I practically pressed my face to the cold glass.
I gasped. The blanket of snow, which had just started to melt ever so slightly, was now covered in a slick sheet of ice. Great dripping icicles were forming from tree limbs in the distance. Trees that were already weakened had snapped and were lying broken on the ground.
Rather than improving, our situation had just gotten exponentially more screwed up. Oh, and so had Josh’s plan to propose to Sadie outside by pinning glittery cardboard cutout letters to trees on a trail through the woods. That was not going to improve Sadie’s state of mind.
“Oh come on!” I exclaimed, startling those who were still sleeping.
Freezing rain on top of snow, on top of freezing rain: it was a parfait of bad-road-condition weather. “So, I’m guessing this is going to complicate the rescue efforts of that chainsaw crew we heard yesterday,” I said.
“Yep,” Luke said, handing me a cup of coffee, which I hoped would mask the as-yet-unbrushed state of my teeth. “This has added a whole new layer of complications. The houses that just had their power restored? They’re out again. The lines that were just repaired got dropped by the most recent round of falling limbs. And the roads are even worse than after the first storm. We’re here for at least a few more days, and that’s if the temperature warms up.”
“Did we piss off some sort of weather deity?” I asked. “Did we miss a scheduled sacrifice or something?”
“We’re looking at one of those ‘storm of the century’ experiences,” Luke said. “It’s—”
“If you say ‘unprecedented’ one more time, I will poke you in the eye,” I told him.
He smirked at me and very deliberately pronounced the word. “Anomalous.”
“Curse you and your thesaurus,” I hissed in mock fury.
“I am brilliant in a way most people would not expect. So how are we going to explain this new, even crappier set of circumstances to the group?” Luke asked.
“Impose a matriarchal dictatorship in which I make all decisions and install a justice system determined by gladiatorial combat?” I suggested.
“Nah.” He shook his head. “It would take too long to build a gladiator ring.”
“Yeah, because that’s the problem with a Kelseyocracy,” Sadie muttered, joining us at the window.
Luke shot me a helpless look and I patted her shoulder. “Sadie—”
“Yeah, yeah, I heard,” she said. “We’re much more screwed this morning than we were when we went to bed.”
“That sounds wrong, even in my head,” I told her.
Luke handed her yet another mug of coffee. “Even though you’re basically right.”
The team did not respond well to our new circumstances, particularly the part about the extended stay in said circumstances. Sadie tried to rally our spirits by narrowing down the campaign ideas on the board while Luke and Will surveyed the (additional) damage around the lodge. Both efforts failed miserably. My coworkers didn’t produce so much as a brainbreeze, much less a brainstorm, with Gina actually suggesting that we just put new covers and graphics on promotional materials we published ten years ago. I was surprised Sadie didn’t send her outside into the snow for a time-out.
“What is this blah-ness?” Sadie demanded of the mostly silent table. “I know we’re cold and we’re tired, but come on, people, we still have work to do. Give me some energy, some enthusiasm. Give me something.”
“Look, Sadie, maybe this isn’t the best time for a meeting,” Jacob said in his best diplomatic tone. “I don’t think anyone is feeling particularly creative right now.”
“We’ve got to get this done sometime, Jacob,” Sadie shot back. “Do you have any idea the crap-storm of e-mails and voice mails and every other kind of mail I’m going to have waiting for me when we eventually get back to civilization? It’s going to take me weeks to catch up. If we don’t have a comprehensive plan ready to go when we get back, we’ll be running behind until summer starts. And honestly, I don’t feel like missing printing deadlines and distribution dates because you don’t feel particularly creative right now.”
“Sadie,” Josh said, softly nudging her arm. I watched the mood around the table shift as brows furrowed and mouths pressed into unhappy lines.
“Hey, it’s not just you,” Gina countered. “You have no idea what my desk is going to look like when I get back. I run Commissioner Bidwell’s whole life. His phone calls, his calendar, his correspondence. This isn’t all about you, you know. Some of us have real responsibilities.”
Sadie’s eyes narrowed and I could practically see her response forming in her head. Our brave commissioner rarely came into the office, electing to “work from home.” (Translation: leave the staff to operate the Commission on Tourism while he ran his family farm, coming to Frankfort only for high-profile events and meetings with the governor). I knew exactly what Sadie thought of Ted Bidwell and his management of his “responsibilities.” But for Sadie to actually speak those thoughts in front of Bidwell’s personal flying monkey, even under duress, would be career suicide.
Charlie made his “Do something quick!” face.
So I took drastic action.
“Commissioner Bidwell—yowch!” Sadie yelped as I kicked her under the table. She turned on me, rubbing her now-sore ankle. I gave a sharp shake of the head. Sadie’s face froze in horror, as if she was finally processing the job-ending vitriol that was on the verge of escaping her mouth.
“Yes?” Gina asked in a saccharine-sweet voice. Given the sly look on her face, I had this weird feeling she had a hidden recording device somewhere on her person.
And into this barrel of fun tromped Luke and Will, stomping ice and slush from their boots.
Please Lord, I prayed, unless they’re here to announce that the trees have magically shifted away from the road, allowing us to jet from this hellhole, please, just let them say “Nope” and walk away.
“Well,” Luke started. “Uh . . .”
“I knew it!” Gina cried. “We’re never getting out of here! Damn it, Sadie, your stupid retreat is going to get us killed!”
“Oh, calm down and stop trying to start shit, Gina,” spat Dorie Ann, who as far I knew had never actually cursed before. “You’re about as subtle as a sack of hammers. We all know why you don’t like Sadie, and it has nothing to do with the retreat.”
Gina’s face flushed red, though I wasn’t sure whether it was Dorie Ann’s defection or having her former crush on Josh dragged out in front of everybody.
“Hey, don’t yell at her,” Tom shot back. “She’s just saying what the rest of us are thinking. Nothing about this trip has gone right. If Sadie had just paid attention to the damn weather reports like a normal person, we wouldn’t be in this mess!”
“I am literally standing right here,” Sadie said.
Tom continued as if he hadn’t heard Sadie, and given the head of steam he’d built up, it was entirely possible that he hadn’t. “We’re all just standing here, Sadie, freezing our asses off because you were so all-fired eager to get us up here to ‘bond’ or something that you didn’t care—”