The Boss Project by Vi Keeland

Since the store was loud, I stepped out front. After way too many prompts and pushing zero angrily five times, I finally got a human on the phone.

“Hi. My credit card was just declined, but it shouldn’t have been. I have plenty of available credit.”

“Account number?”

After I read the number to her and went through a few verification questions, the woman put me on hold for a moment. When she came back, I was hungry and frustrated.

“Hi, Ms. Vaughn?”

“Yes.”

“It seems your card has been closed.”

“What do you mean it’s been closed? I didn’t close it.”

“It’s a joint account. The joint account holder closed it.”

“What joint account…” Oh my God. I felt my face turn redder than the delicious hot dog I should’ve been eating. Christian. I’d forgotten that we’d applied for this card together. They’d offered it to us when we opened our joint bank account, even though I’d been the only one to ever use it.

I shut my eyes. The joint bank account that I now used as my personal account. I guess that explained why my ATM card wasn’t working either. I was seriously going to kill that man.

I took a deep breath. “Can I reopen it under my own name?”

“Of course. I can take the application over the phone for you, if you’d like. And if everything gets approved, we can have your new cards shipped to you in three to five business days.”

No Gray’s Papaya. So no point to this call right now.

“I’ll call back tomorrow and do that.”

“Okay. Is there anything else I can help you with this evening?”

“Can you buy me a hot dog?”

“Excuse me?”

I shook my head. “Never mind.” I just wanted to go home and crawl in a ball. Except I didn’t have a home. I lived at my sister’s.

So with shoulders slumped and my stomach growling, I started toward her place. But that route took me back past the wine shop again, and as I approached the store, I realized I could at least borrow ten dollars to get something to eat from her register and leave her a note. So that’s what I did. I unlocked the door, rang in a one-cent sale so the drawer would open, and took out a ten, replacing it with a note in case I forgot by the time I got home.

When I shut the drawer, I tossed the ten in my purse and headed out. But not before grabbing another bottle of wine from the display Greer had looted earlier.





CHAPTER 5

Evie



On Sunday, despite thinking about it for most of the last forty-eight hours, I still hadn’t decided whether or not to take the job with Kitty’s grandson’s company. My sister thought I was insane to turn down the only offer I’d had after searching for a while, but the idea of taking a job where I wasn’t really wanted didn’t sit right with me. I’d asked the woman from human resources if I could get back to her in a few days, and we’d agreed I’d let her know by Monday morning. I’d figured at some point a moment of clarity would hit me, but now I’d begun to think having any type of clarity in my life would never happen again. Oddly, the person I often talked to when I had doubts was the grandmother of the man who was giving me doubt about accepting the job.

But this was also the day I usually spoke to her, and I felt like that might not be a coincidence. So I picked up the phone and dialed my unlikely friend.

“Hey, Kitty.”

“Hello, sweetheart. How’s the world treating you this week?”

Like that poor ninety-eight-year-old man who died the day after winning the lottery in Alanis Morissette’s song. “Pretty good. How about you?”

“I can’t complain. At my age, you can either see your aches and pains as a burden or see them as a reminder that you’re still alive with plenty left to do. I choose the latter.”

Ten seconds into our call, I already felt better than I had in days. Kitty had such a simple way of looking at things, and I needed the reminder. Things could always be worse. “Talk to any new relatives this week?” I asked.

“I did indeed—a bit of a crazy story actually. A woman who came up as a second cousin got the DNA testing kit for Christmas from her daughter. Her results came back saying her uncle was only a half uncle. She did some digging, and it turned out her grandmother had an affair and got pregnant. She’d passed the kid off as her husband’s her whole life. The grandmother was long gone, but the grandfather was still kicking. They did a little investigating and discovered the grandmother had had an affair with a guy who lived in the same town. When the grandfather found out, he went to his wife’s grave to talk to her about it, only to realize his wife was buried right next to the guy she’d had the affair with. The grandmother had bought the plots and never said a word. Talk about taking a secret to your grave.”

“Oh wow. The dirt you get from genealogy is better than watching a soap opera.”

“And to think, I used to say those shows were too outlandish. Turns out, most people do have a dirty little secret that could turn their world upside down.”

Don’t I know it. “There’s no such thing as a secret these days with the Internet.”

Kitty laughed and then told me all about a trip she was planning to take with the new guy she was seeing. They were going to try ziplining for the first time. It dawned on me how much more exciting this seventy-eight-year-old woman’s life was than mine.