“Your appalling timing?” I asked, stalling for my brain to catch up. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Or maybe not,” Robby said. “Because don’t forget. You weren’t even all that close.”
Just because it was true didn’t make it right. “That’s not relevant,” I said.
I guess timing really does matter. I’d been sleeping on a hospital sofa for days, up five times a night while my mother retched into a plastic bucket. I’d watched her shrink to a skeleton in that flimsy hospital gown.
I’d watched the life that had given me life drain away before my eyes.
After that, I’d arranged the funeral. All the details. The music, the food. I’d played host all day to high school friends, coworkers, ex-boyfriends, AA friends, and drinking buddies. I’d ordered the flowers, and zipped the back zipper on my black dress all by myself, and even put together a slideshow.
Robby had it wrong.
Because, despite everything, I loved her.
I didn’t like her, but I loved her.
And he’d underestimated me, as well. Because it’s so much harder to love someone who’s difficult than to love someone who’s easy.
I was stronger than even I knew. Probably.
But I guess I was about to find out.
Because as the rain started to ease up, and as I pressed the pads of my fingers to the window glass, I heard myself say, in a soft, uncertain voice that even I barely recognized, “I don’t want to break up. I love you.”
“You only say that,” Robby said then, his voice tinged with a certainty I’ll never forget, “because you don’t know what love is.”
* * *
GLENN HAD WARNED us about this a year ago—back when it all started.
As soon as he’d heard the gossip, he called us into the conference room, and shut the door, and lowered the mini blinds.
“Is this really happening?” he demanded.
“Is what really happening?” Robby asked.
But this was the legendary Glenn Schultz. He wasn’t falling for that. “You tell me.”
Robby held his best poker face, so Glenn turned to me.
But mine was even better.
“I’m not going to stop you,” Glenn said. “But we need a plan in place.”
“For what?” Robby asked, and that was his first mistake.
“For when you break up,” Glenn said.
“Maybe we won’t break up,” Robby said, but Glenn refused to insult us all by responding.
Instead, like a man who’d seen it all and then some, he just looked back and forth between the two of us and sighed. “It was the rescue assignment, wasn’t it?”
Robby and I met each other’s eyes. Had we fallen for each other in the wake of an assignment to rescue a custody kidnap in Iraq? Had we survived gunfire, a car chase, and a death-defying midnight border crossing only to fall into bed together at the end—if for no other reason than to celebrate the fact that we were, against all odds, still alive? And was the adrenaline of that assignment still powering our semisecret office romance all these months later?
Obviously.
But we admitted nothing.
Glenn had been in this business too long to need something as pedestrian as verbal confirmation. “I know better than to interfere,” he said. “So I’m just going to ask you one question. It’s the easiest thing in the world for agents to get together—and it’s the hardest thing for them to stay together. What are you going to do when it ends?”
I should have held eye contact. That’s Negotiations 101. Never look down.
But I looked down.
“Really?” Glenn said to me, leaning a little closer. “You think it’s going to last? You think you’re going to buy a house with a picket fence and go to the farmers market on weekends? Get a dog? Buy sweaters at the mall?”
“You don’t know the future,” Robby said.
“No, but I know the two of you.”
Glenn was pretty pissed, and that was not unreasonable. We were his investment, his kids, his favorites, and his retirement portfolio all rolled into one.
Glenn rubbed his eyes and when he looked up, he was breathing in that noisy way that had earned him the nickname “The Warthog.”
He stared us down. “I can’t stop you,” he said, “and I’m not going to try. But I’ll tell you this right now. There’ll be no ‘leaving the company’ when this crashes and burns. You’ll get no pity from me, and you won’t get a letter of recommendation, either. If you apply somewhere else, I’ll torpedo you with the worst reference in the history of time. You’re mine. I made you, I own you, and goddammit nobody in this room gets to quit. Not even me. Understood?”