Three
A MONTH LATER, I was still enraged about it.
A bad kisser? A bad kisser?
I mean, “workaholic”? Fine. There’s no shame in being fantastic at your job.
“Not fun”? Whatever. Fun was overrated.
But a “bad kisser”?
That was the kind of insult that would haunt me to my grave.
Unacceptable.
Just like the state of my entire life.
My mother died. Then I got grounded from my job. Then the longest relationship of my life ended with the most insulting insult in the world. And there was nothing I could do about any of it. My mother stayed dead, my ex-boyfriend and my best friend left for three weeks on my assignment to Madrid, and I stayed home. In Houston. With nothing to do and no one to do it with.
It’s a blur how I even survived.
Mostly, I did anything at all to keep busy. I reorganized the file room at the office. I did local mini assignments. I repainted my bathroom tangerine orange without asking my landlord. I cleaned out my mother’s place and listed it for sale. I took six-mile runs after work in hopes of tuckering myself out. I counted the purgatory-like seconds until I could get the hell out of town.
Oh, and I slept every night on the floor of my closet.
Those four weeks took a thousand years. And in all that time, I can only remember one truly good thing that happened.
Going through my mother’s jewelry box, I found something I thought was lost—something that would have seemed like junk to anybody else. Buried under a tangled necklace, I found a little silver beaded safety pin that I’d made at school on my eighth birthday.
The colors were just like I remembered: red, orange, yellow, pale green, baby blue, violet, white.
Beaded friendship pins had been big at school that year—we all made them and pinned them to our shoelaces—and so on the day our teacher brought in pins and beads, we were ecstatic. She let us spend recess making them, and I’d saved my favorite to give to my mom. I loved the idea of surprising her on a day she’d be giving me presents with a present of my own for her. But I never got to give it to her in the end.
Somehow, before the next morning, it was gone.
In the wake of that day, I’d looked for it for weeks. Checking and double-checking the floor of my closet, the pockets of my backpack, under the hallway rug. It had been one of those long, unsolved mysteries in my life—a question I’d carried for so long: How had I lost something so important?
But fast-forward twenty years and there it was, safely stashed in my mom’s jewelry box, waiting for me like a long-hidden answer. Like she’d been keeping it safe for me the whole time.
Like maybe I’d underestimated her a little bit.
And myself, too.
Right then and there, I’d looked through her necklaces to find a sturdy gold chain, then I’d clipped the beaded pin to it like a pendant.
And then I wore it. Every day after that. Like a talisman. I even slept in it.
I found myself touching it all the time, spinning the smooth beads under my fingertips to feel their cheery little rattle. Something about it was comforting. It made me feel like maybe things were never quite as lost as they seemed.
On the morning when Robby and Taylor were coming back from Madrid—a morning when we were having a meeting in the conference room where Glenn had promised to give me a new assignment, at last—I touched that pin so much I wondered if I might wear it out.
The point was: I was about to get an assignment. I was about to escape. It didn’t matter where I was going. Even just the idea of leaving turned my heart into a rippling field of relief.
Now I would disappear from here.
And then, for the first time in so long, I would feel okay.
All I had to do was survive seeing Robby again.
We’re very dismissive, as a culture, about heartbreak. We talk about it like it’s funny, or silly, or cute. As if it can be cured by a pint of Häagen-Dazs and a set of flannel pajamas.
But of course, a breakup is a type of grief. It’s the death of not just any relationship—but the most important one in your life.
There’s nothing cute about it.
“Dumped” is also a word that falls short of its true meaning. It sounds so quick—like a moment in time. But getting dumped lasts forever. Because a person who loved you decided not to love you anymore.
Does that ever really go away?
As I waited at the table in the conference room, the first person there by a mile, that’s what hit me: Robby leaving had felt like a confirmation of my worst, deepest, most unacknowledged fear.
Maybe I just wasn’t lovable.
I mean, yes—I was a good person. I had many fine qualities. I was competent, and I had a strong moral compass … and let’s add: I was a pretty great cook. But how does anybody just ever assume they’d be somebody else’s first choice? Was I better than all the other great people in the world? Was I special enough to be the one somebody picked over everybody else?
Not for Robby, I guess.
I didn’t want to see him again. Or think about it. Or have a self-esteem crisis.
I just wanted to get the hell out of Texas.
THE FIRST PERSON to arrive in the conference room was Taylor. My best friend. Freshly back from Madrid with my ex. Though that wasn’t her fault.
Her hair was shorter—a little European bob—and tucked behind her ears, and she was wearing mascara, which was new, and made her green eyes pop. I squealed at the sight of her and took off running, catapulting myself into her arms.
“You’re back!” I said, hugging tight around her neck.
She hugged me back.
“I killed all your houseplants,” I said, “but that’s the price you pay for leaving.”
“You killed my plants?”
“Didn’t you see the corpses?”
“On purpose?”
“By accident,” I said. “A combination of neglect and overattention.”
“That does sound lethal.”
Taylor gave me that big smile she’s famous for.
We’d talked on the phone much more this time than we usually would on assignment. Mostly because I kept crying and calling her.
She was good about it, she really was. She let me process and vent and agonize to my heart’s content—even when I kept waking her up.
Seeing her now, I realized how long it had been since I’d asked her about her.
“How was the trip?” I asked.
“Fine,” she said.
Not much of an answer.
As we sat down, I could not rein in the impulse to lower my voice and say, “And how is he?”
“How is who?” Taylor asked.
“A person who rhymes with ‘Blobby.’”
“Ah,” Taylor said, her face tightening a little in a way that made me feel rooted-for. “I think he’s fine.”
“‘Fine’ is a thing for you today.”
“It means he’s not … not okay.”
“That’s a shame.”
“More importantly,” she asked. “How are you?”
“I’ve been stuck here for a month,” I said. “I’m dying.”
Taylor nodded. “Because you need water in your gills.”
“Thank you!” I said, like At last. “Thank you for believing in my gills.”
Just then, Glenn walked in. “Stop talking about your gills,” he said.
“She’s a shark,” Taylor said, in my defense.
“Don’t encourage her.”
Other folks followed him in, and the conference room filled up. Amadi—so ever-likable with his round nose and wide smile—was back from Nigeria. Doghouse, back from Burkina Faso, had grown a beard to cover the burn scar on his jaw. Kelly was just back from Dubai with some gold hoop earrings that exactly matched her blond curls.
I tried not to watch the door for Robby.
I maintained good posture. I arranged my face into a pleasant, fine-thanks-and-how-are-you expression so precisely that my cheek muscles started quivering. I ignored the white noise shh-ing in my ears.
Finally, just as Glenn was clearing his throat to begin, Robby strolled in.
His buzz cut was longer. He wore a new, slim-cut suit, a tie I’d never seen, and his famous Vuarnets—even though we were inside. Though he whipped them off just as he entered the room.
Dammit. He made it work.
He’d always been better at style than at substance.
Did it ache to see him? Did it suck all the air out of my chest? Incapacitate me with emotion? Feel like I’d just swigged down a whole bottle of heartbreak?
No, actually.
This is good, I thought.
Wait. Was this good?
This meant I was over him, right? My endless time in Houston-slash-purgatory had done the trick. They say time heals all wounds. Was that it? Was I done?
Or had the past month just destroyed my ability to feel anything at all?
As Glenn revved up the meeting, I held my breath.
Please, please, please, I found myself thinking. For once, just let me get off easy.
Sometimes I wonder if I jinxed myself in that moment.
Because when Glenn started the meeting—leading with my new assignment—it hit me pretty fast that it was not going to be the escape I’d been holding my breath for.
“First things first,” Glenn said, as the room quieted, pointing at me. “Let’s talk about the new assignment for Brooks.” Glenn always called me ‘Brooks.’ I couldn’t guarantee he even knew my first name. “It’s a juicy one,” Glenn went on. “Outside our normal wheelhouse. Should be pretty absorbing. It’s actually a new assignment for everybody in here. Kind of an all-hands-on-deck situation. But Brooks will be the primary.”
Glenn gave me a little nod. “She’s earned it.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
“I think what you want to know is ‘Who is it?’”
“Nope,” I said. “I definitely want to know where.”
“Because this client,” Glenn went on, his voice reminding me of how people talk to their dogs before they give them treats, “is really, really famous.”
We didn’t protect a lot of famous people at Glenn Schultz Executive Protection. If we’d been based in LA, that would have been different. But we were based in Houston—so we got mostly oil executives and business people. The occasional entertainer coming through town. I once did some remote location assessments for Dolly Parton, and she sent me a lovely thank-you note.
But that was about it.
I looked at Glenn’s face. He was suppressing a smile.
He was actually excited. And Glenn never got excited about anything.
He went on. “This particular assignment happens to take place in the great state of Texas—”
“Texas?!” I demanded.
Glenn ignored me. “Just right here in our friendly hometown of Houston, so—”
“Houston?!” I scooted my chair back.
In eight years of receiving assignments, I had never once protested a location. That’s just not how this job works. You don’t care where you go. You go where they send you. It’s fine.
But.
It had been a rough month.
Let’s just say I was right on the verge of doing something unprofessional.
But then Glenn told us who the principal was.
Pulling his lips back into a very pleased-with-himself smile, as if this good news would cancel out any bad news that might ever happen again, Glenn did his big reveal. “The principal for this one,” he said, clicking the remote for the whiteboard and flashing a movie poster up for us all to see, “is Jack Stapleton.”
The whole room gasped.
Robby launched into a coughing fit.
Kelly let out a shriek like she was at a Beatles concert.
And that’s when, despite everything I had just decided about how getting myself to London would be the answer to all my problems, I said, “You know what? I quit.”