The following morning, which was Monday, sunlight streamed through the enormous glass panes overlooking San Francisco Bay, and Arielle knew something had gone horribly wrong.
“Shit! My phone!” She leaped out of bed, dragging the sheet with her and wrapping it around her nude body as she ran.
Behind her, Mitchell grabbed at the comforter and dropped it over his lap. “Arielle? What’s wrong?”
She yelled behind herself, “I didn’t charge my phone last night and it died because the battery is shit so my alarm didn’t go off and I’m supposed to be on a plane for home in an hour and a half!”
“Get in the shower,” Mitchell said, tugging his underwear over his hips. “I’ll pack your luggage and call a driver.”
An hour and fifteen minutes later, Arielle was sitting on the floor at San Francisco International Airport for her return flight as the gate attendants called the next-to-last group to board, willing her phone to suck enough charge out of the wall before she had to board the plane, but the dead battery continued to flash on the screen.
The plane was an older jet without outlets, so Arielle read a magazine on the short flight to Phoenix and mentally berated her stupid phone for being stupid.
In the limousine back to her apartment, she was too embarrassed to ask the driver if she could plug in, and then she threw her luggage inside the front door and ran to her car to get to work because it was, after all, already past noon on Monday morning.
Even while driving to work, her phone didn’t get enough juice to rise from the dead.
Which was why when she parked in front of Match Play’s office, she hadn’t heard what everyone else in the office had discovered that morning.
Their office was half its previous size, bifurcated down the middle with cheap drywall, and all their desks and cubicle walls had been crammed into what space remained.
And a dog groomer now occupied the office next door.
Everyone must have been waiting for Arielle because they swarmed her as soon as she walked in.
Her friends shouted above the barking, squealing din audible through the shoddy interior wall.
“Look what he did! Look at what that asshole did!”
“I can’t work this way. I will quit today.”
“Sure, a lot fewer people are working here than five months ago, but this is ridiculous.”
“I can’t even find my desk! I think it’s under that pile of cubicle dividers over there.”
“This is it. This is the last straw.”
Arielle couldn’t find her desk, either. It had been against the back wall with the other small rooms, but that whole part of the office was gone. “I can’t believe Mitchell did this.”
Carlyn’s mouth was an angry slash on her face. “This is too far. I’m giving you my notice that I am quitting right now. It’s not two weeks. I’m leaving right now. I cannot and will not work under these conditions.”
She had her purse hanging from her elbow, and she pushed past Arielle and left the office.
Arielle weakly lifted the pink box she’d been holding. “I brought doughnuts?”
Bobby Jones, the coder, snarled, “Our break room is gone.”
She tried to help people push their desks around and reorganize the office because customer service calls were coming in from people who needed help with the app. They rotated people between caring for the customers and trying to make their office livable.
Arielle found an outlet behind her new desk and plugged her phone in. It finally powered up.
Text messages from her office mates when they discovered what had happened that morning poured down her screen.
Arielle tapped Mitchell’s name and texted, You are such an asshole.
And yet, Arielle was obligated to fly to Chicago on a private plane the following weekend, which did take off because the air temperature was down to a comparatively chilly 103°F, to meet that jerk Mitchell Saltonstall for yet another golf trade show.