“She did?” Beau suddenly looked nervous. Oh no, she should have come up with some other story to get him out of the kitchen. “Okay. Now?”
“Yeah, but it’s nothing bad, or anything,” she said, in an attempt to fix her mistake. Nope, he still looked stressed.
He stood up. “I’ll be right back,” he said to Michaela.
Michaela nodded, still with that smile on her face. “Sure, no problem.”
Izzy shut the door of the library as soon as Beau walked in.
“Marta didn’t ask me anything about your book,” she said right away. “Sorry, I just had to get you alone to talk to you about something, and it was the first thing I could think of.”
Beau looked relieved. And then he grinned. “Well.” He took a step toward her. “What a nice surprise. Couldn’t wait until later? I like it. Does that mean we’ve suspended the library rule?”
Izzy laughed. “No, not that either.”
He looked at her closely. “Something good happened?”
She bit her lip and nodded. “I think so? At least, it has the potential to be good. But also, it’s…” She tried to come up with a word to describe how she was feeling right now. Excited? Terrified? Worried? Conflicted? Thrilled? She didn’t know.
Beau walked over to the table and pulled out her chair. “Sit down.”
She sat, and then he walked around the table and sat across from her. “Now. Tell me.”
She tried to figure out what to say. “Okay. Do you remember how I told you that a long time ago, I applied for that job at Maurice, working with that editor I really respect, and I didn’t get it and how I have always sort of wondered what if?”
He nodded. “Of course I remember. Why, what happened?”
She still couldn’t believe it.
“She emailed me this morning. That editor, Josephine Henry. She said they have another opening, for a job that would be a promotion for me. She said she thought of me immediately, and she wants to bring me in for an interview.”
Beau’s face lit up. “Izzy! That’s fantastic news. Congratulations.”
He looked so happy for her. That look on his face made her want to leap across the table and throw herself into his arms, but she held back.
“Thanks,” she said. “I can barely believe it. Granted, it’s just an interview, but—”
He brushed that off. “You’ll be fantastic,” he said. “When’s the interview?”
She took a deep breath. Would it matter to him? Would he care? Suddenly, she felt weird about rushing downstairs to tell him.
“She said she wants it to be soon. Sometime next week, but I’m not sure what day. So that means—”
“You’ll have to go back to New York,” he said. His voice was flat.
“Yeah. I’ll have to go back to New York. I haven’t…I didn’t email her back yet. I wanted to tell you first.”
He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “Obviously, you don’t want to tell Marta that you’re going back early for a job interview. Why don’t you schedule the interview, and then I can tell Marta I don’t need you here anymore, and you can just let her think you’re going back to New York a day later than you actually are, so you can go the day before the interview. Does that work?”
Oh. He’d thought the reason she wanted to tell him first was to help her deal with Marta. That was nice of him. But she hadn’t even thought about Marta until he’d brought her up. She’d only been thinking about him.
He’d tell Marta he didn’t need her anymore. Why did that sting so much? Maybe because it came to him so quickly. She tried to shake that off.
“Yeah,” she said. “That works great. I’ll email her back right now.” She took her phone out of her pocket, read over her draft email, and pressed send.
“Okay.” Beau stood up. “Just text me when you hear back. I’ll email Marta when I hear from you.”
Izzy stood up, too, and walked to the library door. “Yeah. Okay. That sounds great. Thanks for your help.”
That sounded so cold and businesslike. But it suddenly felt so businesslike between her and Beau.
No, she was being silly. They were in the library, remember? She was the one who had made the work-only-in-the-library rule. And he was helping her. He’d probably assumed she came to him because she needed help with the Marta part of the problem. Which she did, actually. She was overreacting again.