The Boss Project by Vi Keeland

My forehead wrinkled. “Why?”

“So you’d break it off, so she could hurt you before you hurt her.”

That wouldn’t make much sense for a lot of people, but he’d clearly gotten to know Amelia pretty well. His theory wasn’t that far-fetched. Though his answer just made me angry, and I wasn’t sure why I’d asked those questions to begin with.

“Is Eloise…okay?”

Aaron’s face lit up. “She’s very okay. At the rate she’s going, she’ll be smarter than me in a few years.”

I smiled for the first time in a week. “And her hearing?”

He nodded. “She’s completely deaf. It’s common in premature babies.”

“Her legs?”

“Just a little bowlegged. Doc says she should be done with the braces in a few months. Other than that, she’s perfectly healthy. Small for her age, but that’s also another common preemie issue. She caught up a bit in her first year. But I think she’s just going to be on the low end of the height chart, like her mother.”

I blew out a deep breath. Since I hadn’t planned on talking to Aaron, there wasn’t much else I needed to say. I nodded. “Thank you.”

“I know I must have caused you a world of pain during those difficult times, and I’m very sorry for that. Not that it helps, but on the rare occasion I get out and meet a woman, I run the other way if she’s involved in any way.”

Aaron walked behind me to the door. He opened it, and I stepped into the hall and lifted my hand in a wave before heading to the elevator.

“Merrick?” he called after me.

I turned back.

“Would you like to see her? To get to know Eloise a bit?”

I wasn’t sure I could handle that, but I appreciated the offer. “Can I get back to you?”

He smiled. “Sure. You obviously know where to find me.”





CHAPTER 33

Evie



“I wasn’t sure you’d come today.” I sat down in my usual chair, across from the patient couch. “Today is your last day, right?”

Colette nodded. “It is. But I have a lot of mixed feelings about it. I thought it might help to talk to someone. I don’t have a lot of friends anymore, and the ones I do have I’m more likely to discuss my day’s buy orders than feelings with.”

“Well, then I’m glad you came.” I pointed to a giant tray of cookies on the table. “Please have some. I’ve been on a baking spree, and if I take them home, I’ll eat them.”

Colette smiled and grabbed a cookie. Biting into it, she looked around the room. “This place was my first job out of college. For the last three years, I couldn’t wait for this day to come, but now that it’s here, I don’t feel relieved and excited like I thought I would.”

“What are you feeling?”

She shook her head. “Sad, mostly. Maybe a little regret.”

“Regret for leaving?”

“No. It’s time. The regret is more to do with Merrick.”

I wished I could have said, “I feel your pain, Colette.” Then maybe cracked open a bottle of wine and shared stories. But I was a professional, and my own feelings needed to be kept out of it. So instead, I said, “Tell me about that. Can you pinpoint what it is you regret?”

She shook her head. “It’s so many things… Some of them don’t even make sense.”

“Like what?”

Colette looked down. “Well, for some reason, lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the times I went out to dinner with my then boyfriend and Merrick and Amelia. I knew she was having an affair, yet we all went to dinner and acted like everything was normal. I’m not sure why those memories keep popping into my brain after so long.”

“Oftentimes the secret we keep is irrelevant. It’s the fact we kept it that bothers us most.”

She nodded. “Maybe.”

“You said lately you’ve been thinking about the secret you kept during dinners. Does that mean these are new thoughts, or that they’ve just popped into your mind more in recent times?”

“I never gave the fact that I kept my friend’s affair a secret any thought until the last month or so. That might not say a lot about me, but it’s the truth.”

“Did something happen recently that made you think of the affair?”

“Not really. But I did notice a change in Merrick. I’m not sure if that’s relevant or not.”

“What kind of a change?”

“Well, he hasn’t been around much the last couple of weeks, but before that I noticed that he smiled more in meetings. And he laughed more. It wasn’t until I saw him seeming happy the last few months that I realized how long he must have been unhappy. It made me realize how much he suffered after Amelia’s death.”

My forehead creased. “Did you think he didn’t suffer?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I blamed him for her death. But maybe I just needed someone to blame.”

“Why would you blame him for her death?”

“Because he was her health care proxy and made all the medical decisions. He found out she was having an affair when she was brought into the hospital, and then got to decide what drugs she would take and what procedures she would undergo.”