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With my hand immersed in a puddle of broken glass, we held our breaths for a moment, but in the next, we sprang into action. Or Ellie did, and I found myself moved by her momentum. Ellie guided the glass shards and other bits into the trash can with a small bundle of paper towels while I carefully moved to the sink to clean out the wound. Or wounds, I wondered. Once again, I found myself debating the semantics at an inopportune time. It could have gone either way, but all the breaks in my skin were surface level cuts: nothing that would bleed but reserved the right to do so. But with the cleaning came a low, painful, throbbing that worsened with each drop of water. The muscles of my hand protested as I tried to clean the injury, the harm to myself that I had caused through my own stupidity.
When I pulled away from the sink, Ellie was right behind me. “What was that?”
“Me being an idiot,” I tried to explain. “So just an ordinary day.”
“Could have been a shoddy glass,” she pointed out.
She took my hand and examined it for herself. The bright red of the offended flesh had not yet faded, and it seemed to only deepen in color from her touch. The temperature shift between her warm hands and my cold ones worsened the sting. But I didn’t care about that. I didn’t want to pull away.
Instead, I said, “It just hasn’t been my day. Or week. Or month.”
Or life, I wanted to joke, but before I could finish gauging how well the joke would land, Ellie pointed out that the day, in fact, had a disproportionate number of terrible things to it. So while it was fair for me to be dismissive and critical of the day itself, I couldn’t write off any swatches of time beyond it. On the surface, that was a completely valid point, but when Ellie said it, I couldn’t help but think she was thinking about the past. The future was an entirely different beast, and as I saw it, my upcoming weeks were still going to suck. Explaining that (while trying to listen back to myself to see how slurred my voice was) became my main focus. But that “focus” soon devolved into a rambling mess.
“Okay,” I began, “so it starts today, right? Like, yeah, today was a particularly bad day, but then it’s going to be a bad week. Because I need to give the ring back and then I need to deal with my mom and my aunt and every Billy, Bob, Joe, or Sally and their opinions about why my engagement broke up or when it should have happened or why I need to get over it, and Erika’s going to call me back soon about something she didn’t specify when she called me this morning, and maybe that’s another surprise sibling. Maybe I have a brother. Who knows?”
From that alone, I was winded. The lack of air forced me to stop. It was the only stopping force I would heed. I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.
Ellie jumped into the space created by my gasping. “I’m pretty sure if it was another sibling Erika would have made that a two for one call.”
Her observation momentarily stopped my descent into near-madness.
She seized the moment. “Think about it. She is maybe overly practical, and if it’s going to be a shock no matter what, why not make it a two for one?”
She wasn’t wrong, but the anxiety still lingered. It came out when I spoke. “Okay, but she said she was going to call me back. Why does she need to call me back? Ellie, I haven’t sent her any work.”
“Maybe someone wants to hire you to ghost write their memoir,” she hastily said.
“That might be even worse,” I groaned. “I can’t write anything anymore. Something’s wrong with me.”
I hadn’t meant to say that. But drunk voice, sober thoughts or however that expression goes.
Ellie’s hold on my hand tightened. The physical wounds didn’t need any more of her care, but the rest of me did. “Okay, maybe things are going wrong,” she said with a shrug. “But it’s nothing that can’t be fixed. You just need to give yourself that chance. Take care of yourself instead of making demand after demand after demand.”
She meant well, but her advice nearly brought me to tears. It’s never easy to be called out, and I was already in a delicate headspace and drunk and had this simmering frustration that was coming out because there was clearly a crack it could all escape from. Right then, all I wanted to do was crawl into some little corner and hide it all from her: the same thing I had originally planned to do, but that hadn’t worked out. At that point, I had next to no pride left to protect, but at least I wouldn’t be a burden on her. But Ellie had an unrelenting grip on one of my hands, leaving me with only one more to hide behind. I raised it to my eyes, but it too was peeled away.
“You don’t have to justify anything. You don’t have to prove anything. And even if you did need to, you already have,” she told me. “You’re an author. You’re living your dream.”
“I’ve written one book,” I pointed out.
“One amazing book. Most people don’t even get that.”
It wasn’t amazing, though. But even if it was, that didn’t prove anything. So what if I had just gotten lucky? In some ways, that was worse. Because now everyone was standing around waiting for a second or third or fourth lightning strike that I knew wasn’t going to come. A light sob escaped my throat at the thought.
Ellie gave it no attention and paid it no mind. She continued on, undeterred.
“And look,” she added. “Maybe cutting yourself some slack is what you need to make another one. So moving on from George will help. Improving this apartment will help. Not tracking every single second of every single day will help. Stop and breathe, Mia.”
As if to prove how futile this whole thing was, rather than breathe, I started coughing, presumably because the crying had actually started to clog up an already not perfectly arranged airway, but maybe I just fucked that up too.
Between gasps, I told her, “I just... don’t want to deal with... this right now.”
“With what?”
So many things, but I had to pick one. “George... Stupid ring.”
“He can come get it from me,” she assured me. “And it wasn’t cheap, so we could probably encourage him to come right now. Sooner he gets it, the sooner he can sell it. What else is his?”
I shook my head. Nothing, I tried to tell her. George never left anything here on the rare occasions he came over.
She took my phone from the counter and helped me back to my bedroom, all the while promising me that I didn’t have to see him if I didn’t want to. And I really didn’t want to. All she needed me to do was send the text message myself: to officially break it off by my own hands. And I agree I needed to do that part, but she didn’t need to do the rest. She just insisted.
And so, I sent George the following texts:
I don’t want to be engaged to you anymore. I also don’t want to be with you anymore.
Come get the ring from Ellie at my place. Her, not me. I don’t want to deal with this. I don’t want to talk to you.
I know you didn’t end things with Charity. That’s all I need to know.
Maybe have all your girlfriends lock down their privacy settings next time. Because I saw all the proof I needed.
It was a bit of a garbled mess, but the point was made: I knew what happened, I knew this relationship was over, and I knew I had some obligation to him in the form of the diamond I never really wanted in the first place. This was the sort of thing that should have happened a long time ago and with fewer inciting forces, but my deficits aside, once Ellie was brought into this, there was no backing down. I couldn’t spit in the face of all the work she was doing for me.
The breaking point had been hit, and just like the glass in the kitchen, I couldn’t pull it back together. Some of the glass had been washed down the sink, so I would never even have all the pieces again, but beyond even that, there was clearly something wrong with it that it could break down so easily.
Despite all of that, however, I wanted George to write back to me. I wanted him to fight, so that I could at least pretend I was losing something. Then my misery would make sense. But no, George didn’t write back. There was no protest of innocence or pleas for a second (or third) chance. There was nothing. The app told me that the message was read. And that was it.
Drunk off of wine and disaster, I lay in bed lost within some sort of thick haze while the rest of the world, including Ellie, moved without me. I closed my eyes and felt the rush of life’s currents sweep pass over me. Then, suddenly, I heard the events of my front room seeping into my bedroom: the front door opening, a few words from Ellie, and fewer from George.
“She said there was nothing else of yours here,” Ellie explained with her Chester accent cutting through the walls. “She didn’t mention having anything at your place. She might be willing to call it a loss if she does.”
“I don’t think she does, no,” he said.
“Well, if you’re wrong, I can drop by your place. Mia can give me your number.”
I could only imagine what was going on in George’s mind during all of this as he tried to make sense of it. He knew Ellie as my friend from work. She was one of the few friends of mine that he had met. She was also the only friend I had made in this era of my life. And there was Ellie, taking charge and sweeping up the smoldering ashes of our engagement. Maybe he thought she was his replacement, but if he did, he didn’t make the accusation aloud. Then again, he wouldn’t have had much of a moral leg to stand on, but that didn’t have to stop him.
It felt like forever between the front door opening and when I heard it close, but that might have been the wine talking or my expectation of some grand spectacle going unfulfilled. I wasn’t sure why I was expecting one in the face of so many reasons to think that it wouldn’t happen. George wasn’t the type for a spectacle, I had laid down my declaration more firmly than I had ever laid anything down, he was talking to Ellie and not me, and maybe he did prefer Charity to me. Charity was more fun, more free, and more of everything I wasn’t. We didn’t seem like sisters at all. Consequently, if that’s why this had all happened, I would have wanted to know. I would have understood. Heck, I probably would have agreed.
But no, there was nothing. It wasn’t like any of the books I read or movies I saw where the man gave it one last stand on his way out. He was just gone, and a couple moments later, Ellie came in and dropped onto the bed next to me.
“Dirty work’s done,” she declared with the smallest hint of reverence in her tone, a nod to the ramifications despite her contempt for it all. “What other muck can we dive into today? Since it’s already shite and all that.”
I chuckled. But if Ellie was serious about taking the trash out, I’d have to ask why she was in bed with me and not taking me out to the curb. Seriously, why was she bothering at all?
“I owe you, like, a lot already,” I muttered. “You might need to cut your losses.”
She thought about it for a second, and I swear, I was expecting her to say, “You’re right” in an overly chipper voice, jumping upright and out the door with the leftover wine and pizza in hand, never to be seen again except in the office break room where things would be so much more awkward. Honestly, it would be in her best interests to keep away from me. It made sense to so many other people. They saw the lack of value I was bringing and acted accordingly. Heck, we had literally just experienced a great example of that.
But when I turned my head to the side, Ellie was still there. Rather than being relieved, I was surprised and anxious. Because it was going to happen, right? She was going to leave. It was only a matter of time. I was just waiting for it.
Sensing my nerves, Ellie turned onto her side. Once she was facing me, she asked, “Do you remember when my grandfather died and how out of sorts I was?”
This is where I could have made a call back joke to her “off-colour” comment, but that likely would have been ill-thought-out and in poor taste. So I only nodded.
“And you came with me to the hospital for the final time. You didn’t even know him.”
“Yeah, but I knew you,” I added.
“And that I needed you,” she finished, echoing the sentiment I had said to her a thousand times or more as we kept that final vigil.
Yes, I wanted to say, but it went beyond that. I knew how much death genuinely sucked, how much it hurt, how confusing it all was, how funeral homeowners could make it infinitely worse and that it was about a 50/50 shot if you were going to get a bad one or a good one. Above all, however, I knew something that people weren’t inclined to think about in that situation: that you as the decedent’s next of kin could leave a bad funeral home and go to a different one whenever you wanted, which is a long and roundabout way to say that I knew how to be empowered when everything sucked.
But I didn’t say any of that. It wasn’t my turn to talk.
“And so you stayed with me and Grandma throughout the whole process. And when they tried to get us to embalm him, which he never wanted, you argued and argued. When they tried to tell us that’s what the law said, you corrected him and pulled out your phone right then to make a report to the state. Then you even offered to pay for the whole thing, which was too much.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Well, I was pretty sure they were going to put an additional ‘your friend was kind of a bitch’ tax, and there’s no reason you should have paid that. But they weren’t going to label it, so I had to cast a wide net.”
Ellie chuckled. “Sometimes I think you don’t remember all that you did for us. For me and literally everyone around you. Which is odd because you keep thinking in terms of transactions and balance sheets.”
I flinched, feeling as if she had struck me roughly across the face with that remark. I didn’t appreciate being called out like that, but beyond that, her language forced a memory into the forefront of my mind. It made me think about the yearly audit we had to go through at work because that was the only time I heard the words “balance sheets” in a capacity where I had to pay attention. Apparently once upon a time, one employee was able to embezzle fifty thousand dollars in six months without anyone noticing. From that theft, the yearly company audit was born. And while that is not a small sum of money in a short window of time, I didn’t know if it was enough to justify the yearly torment that came with opening up every spreadsheet and card statement to a couple auditors who were really bad at small talk but insisted on trying. Nor did it necessarily justify the work required to get and maintain all those physical records. For example, the filing cabinet at my desk had gotten stuck shut once, and not only did it have to be replaced, but I also spent multiple PAID hours breaking it open with a screwdriver. If the company wasn’t so genuinely stubborn and inefficient about it, the yearly audit wouldn’t have been anywhere near as painful as it was, and the necessity of it wouldn’t be drowned out by my screams of frustration and anger across all the departments.
Right then, Ellie and I were having a similar moment. And in that moment, I could either listen to Ellie’s necessary audit of my (lack of) self-worth or the screams of frustration initiated by my newly naked ring finger and the image of a surprise sister in her loving relationship. As always, I chose Ellie.
I let myself fall into her eyes, but I felt the weight of the moment and all my anxieties come with me. In response, I heaved a large sigh, pretending that it could shake off whatever I was carrying. Obviously, it couldn’t. And as if to drill the point in, just as I was getting settled, my phone rang.
“Are you kidding me right now?” I loudly groaned.
Even without checking, I knew it was Erika. Of course, it was Erika. She said she would call me in two days, and it had been a few hours, meaning that she was due to call me at any time.
I looked at Ellie as I tapped the screen to accept the call with a half-hearted apology in my eyes. It was probably rude to answer my phone when I had a guest who had just moments before taken it upon herself to scrape me off of the floor and handle the shards of my broken engagement, but on the other hand, it was probably rude to constantly ignore the calls of the agent whose livelihood depended, in part, on my ability to do something that I was not doing (i.e., writing). I already ignored a bunch of her other calls because I wasn’t writing and couldn’t handle the knowledge that she had noticed I wasn’t writing. But I had to answer one eventually. And this time, I had two more reasons to answer besides a perceived obligation. One, I wasn’t alone, so the emotional fallout wouldn’t be so bad. And two, after that earlier conversation, I really wanted to know why she was calling again or what infection was festering beneath the band aid that she was so anxious to rip off.
When the call connected, I immediately snapped. “Erika, it has not been two days.”
“I’ll use my cut from your next book deal to buy myself a calendar.”
I knew she was joking, but it didn’t feel like a joke. Nothing could feel like a joke right then.
“I’m not...” I started, but I didn’t know where to take that sentence. “Erika, if you need to tell me that I have yet another surprise sibling, can we please just get it over with?”
“You sound tense,” she said playfully.
Generally, Erika was not flippant. She wasn’t rude or the type to rub salt into wounds or to run over emotions maliciously. Her world just moved a lot faster than everyone else’s. According to her clock, eight hours was enough time to settle with the shock that another sibling was out there, particularly when one factors in my father’s history with children and women. Also, she couldn’t have known the depths of this breakdown. She didn’t know that I had managed to stalk my sister on social media or that I found out what her name was. And I wasn’t going to tell her about any of that.
But there was something I could say. “I literally just broke off my engagement. But hey, George has a kink for members of my family, apparently, so that news you gave me this morning was great for him.”
“Well, that sucks,” she replied.
And that sounded callous, but Erika and Ellie shared the exact same opinion on George. The resulting indifference was somewhat inevitable, born out of the frustration I had provoked.
“Maybe you should get away from the city for a while,” Erika then added with a great deal of exuberance.
That sort of thing would make sense, right? I should get away, take a break from the chaos of my usual life, especially while the intensity was cranked up that high. That’s the conventional wisdom, but when Erika said it, there was something in her tone that made it very clear that there was a purpose to that remark. It was meant to lead me to some sort of conclusion.
“I guess I should be grateful you aren’t springing bad news on me,” I said, cautiously.
“Quite the opposite.”
I didn’t see what “the opposite” could be in a situation like this, but I was willing to write it all off with a silent “whatever” and shrug of my shoulders.
In front of me, Ellie was sitting with her legs crossed, watching my movements as she listened to my half of the conversation. She tilted her head in curiosity as she waited to be informed, but given how well this conversation was going, she couldn’t expect anything right away.
“So,” Erika began with a click of her tongue, seemingly flicking an extra drop of honey my way for good measure. “Do you remember that Murtagh Writing Fellowship that Stella Maris offers?”
I raised an eyebrow. “I remember all the promotional, ‘please give us money’ material that they sent me and all the other alumni about a Murtagh Writing Fellowship. I haven't read any of it, though. So if you need me to know something specific, then you’re going to have to spoon feed it to me.”
I knew more than I let on though. I knew some behind the scenes details that were never meant to be public knowledge. Most glaringly, I knew who was on that selection committee, though that was definitely the sort of thing Stella Maris didn’t want to make public but had slipped out in conversations no one else knew about. If Erika said it to me though, I would have a valid reason for knowing, which meant I could claim ownership of what I knew. It would be information laundering, really. Also there were genuinely some gaps in my knowledge that Erika would likely need to fill for a conversation to go smoothly.
She paused for a moment. “So you didn’t see who got selected for the fellowship this year. Academic year, I should say.”
I was about to say ‘no’ in a very long, drawn out way because I felt a vague familiarity brewing in my core that really just confused me. This familiarity suggested I had encountered that information at some point, but I couldn’t back up that assertion with a name. As I started to speak, however, it hit me.
“That Shitty Guy!” I exclaimed, much to Ellie’s confusion.
She was familiar with the nomenclature, but the context in which he would ever come up was harder to grasp.
I pulled the phone away from my ear and put it on speakerphone. I probably should have told Erika about that. Not telling her was rude and potentially illegal, but I was just going to tell Ellie everything Erika said anyway. This way was more efficient.
“Yeah,” Erika replied with a slight constriction in her voice. “Apparently no one told the selection committee about his past.”
A sense of dark foreboding washed over me, but I tried to push past it. “Well, what did you expect? Academics keep themselves locked away in towers with their books. That’s how they like it.”
“Well, they’ve realized their mistake now,” she explained, “but there were concerns it would be too late to save the reputation of the fellowship, even with the offer retracted.”
“Why?”
“Optics,” she deadpanned. “You and I can both think the selection committee didn’t know and didn’t think they needed to know anything about current events when making their choice, so no infrastructure for that sort of thing, but at the end of the day, they could have done even a cursory internet search and found this out. There’s some great SEO on those articles.”
“So it looks like they don’t care,” I finished weakly. “About the victims or ethics or the law.”
But I knew they did care. I knew some of the faculty on that committee. I took classes with them and was a research assistant to one. They were scatter-brained, not malicious. And heck, all the mistakes that came from them being perpetually disheveled were quickly owned up to and corrected. That’s what happened here. They found out. They retracted the offer. What did everyone want? Blood, apparently.
My task-driven mind took over. “Okay so where do I come in? Do I need to write something in their defense? Because I knew Professor Howard better than any of his other students. And Professor Evory saved my ass more times than I can count. When I peeled my toenail off, he drove me to the podiatrist twice when the standard and expected number would be zero.”
I felt Erika lift up. She had my attention and was thrilled about it. Her resulting excitement was hard to contain. I could feel it spilling over the phone.
She cheered, “Well, I’ve got an even better idea!”
Of course she did. This was Erika.
“Because, really, what they need is a non-problematic author to take the fellowship. To cleanse the space, if you will. Better if it was a woman. Of color. Whose entire first novel was about the damages of childhood not unrelated to the ones he inflicted. Different yes, but same general umbrella, you could say. They just need you to confirm the appointment as soon as possible. Today, ideally.”
She kept trailing off her words like she expected me to jump in and fill in the blanks, preferably in a grandiose fashion that resembled leaping out of a cake. But she must have known me better than that. I didn’t leap. Or hide in cakes. Or run, as I had pointed out earlier.
In fact, right then, I could hardly even speak. With a flat voice, I asked for clarification, “Did you offer me up or did they offer it to me?”
I heard paper shuffling on the other end of the line as Erika gathered her thoughts and her notes. “It was their idea, but if you want specifics, I can give you a name. Hang on one moment... Ah yes! Here it is. ‘Richard Evory gave her a glowing recommendation.’” She paused. “Didn’t you mention an Evory just now?”
Yeah, you bet I did, I wanted to say.
That was when I could have told Erika that it was Professor Evory who got me through college, whose encouragement kept me writing and spurred on the creation of that first novel. I could have told her that the paydays she got when she sold that novel and the movie rights were saved from my destructive insecurities by him constantly cheering me on. And I could have added that I signed the contract with the publishing house not because I was excited about the opportunity but because I didn’t want to disappoint him.
All I wanted to do was to make him proud of me. So what was I going to do right then? The answer seemed so obvious, but I couldn’t get myself to accept it.
My shoulders fell, and Ellie noticed. She reached out and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Take it,” she mouthed.
But I couldn’t. “Erika, I need to think about it, okay, but I...”
My voice was cracking. Erika noticed and changed gears. “Okay Kiddo, my timing could have been better, I know. But this is as close as I can get to giving you a chance to crawl into the proverbial womb until all of this blows over. And when Stella Maris called me today, they made it abundantly clear they need your answer as soon as possible. Like today, preferably.”
Right then, I was sitting in bed, on a phone call I didn’t really want to be on, wondering if the wine was wearing off or if I could still blame it for the breakdown I was having. This offer was a good thing, wasn’t it? It was an opportunity in so many ways and for so many things. And honestly, it was something I had thought about. The mailings were meant to elicit donations, but they had accidentally sold me a dream that, in theory, I could have. It was pitched as the perfect opportunity for a writer, and I was a writer (technically) who was looking for something to call my next step in the endless and amorphous realm of adulthood. But those distant and far-flung hopes didn’t make this easier.
“I know,” I stammered. “Okay? I know. I know. I know. But Erika, I need you to fix this.”
“Fix what? The engagement? Because Honey, that ship has sailed.”
I meant fix me. ‘Fix me,’ I wanted to scream. Don’t just work as my backbone. Give me one, one that I can use even when you aren’t on the phone with me or when I’m fighting my own head or fighting something else you can’t see. Fix me, I wanted to beg, but I knew she couldn’t do it. I knew no one could do it.
I can’t tell you how I broke. Maybe I was born that way. Maybe I was let down or figuratively dropped by my parents in my pre-self-awareness stage, but I’ve been broken for as long as I can remember, and there may not be any way to fix me.
But I did want to take that fellowship. Erika was right: this was as close to crawling back into the womb as I could get. I loved my days at Stella Maris. They were definitely my happiest, and that university was the closest thing I had to a real home. I wanted to go back to it. I wanted to be back there. I just couldn’t make myself say it.
“Stall for time. Please, Erika. I need to think about it.”
I need to convince myself to go for it, I wanted to add. I needed her to knock them off of any timeline that demanded an immediate answer and to give me time to pull my head out of my ass. Because then I could take it. But not right then. I couldn’t take it right then.
“Mia, they need an answer now,” Erika insisted. “There’s an entire PR campaign they need to run. On top of that there’s whatever onboarding they have in mind. You just need to take it, Kiddo.”
I was making an unreasonable demand, I knew, but agents get a lot of them. After all, they work with a group of people that run the gamut from desperate to entitled, causing chaos and needing their hand to be held while they cry and sniffle with snot pouring down their faces. Come to think of it, agents are like better-paid mothers, or that’s what I imagined their jobs to be like. Especially for Hollywood agents, but there I was giving my literary agent a curveball. Not quite the same thing her California peers get but close enough.
“Okay, but you work for me,” I pointed out. “Technically. And what if I make it worth your while? I...”
I thought about it for a moment. I searched my brain for something I could give her in exchange, something she would have found valuable, but there was really only one thing she wanted.
“What if I gave you all the drafts I have?” I finally asked.
I could hear her perk up at that. I had her attention again.
“Drafts?” she asked.
“Novels, short stories, I think I tried to write a middle grade series once. They aren’t ready for publication yet, but I’m willing to make edits. Or you can hire a ghostwriter to finish them if you want. Or cut them up. I don’t care. I’ll send you everything and sign whatever you tell me to sign. Just give me more time please. I just need a few days.”
At first, Erika said nothing, but in the silence, I heard some faint cricket on her shoulder urging her to take my counteroffer. And how could she not? A bunch of material from a somewhat established author with full reign over where it ended up? It wasn’t the sort of thing Erika could say no to.
“Alright. Alright. Fine.” She sighed. “I’ll stall. Maybe I’ll tell them that you’re on some sort of writer’s journey in the middle of nowhere without an internet connection,” she muttered. Reclaiming her voice, she went on, “But you better stop holding back on me, Mia. This is the first time I’m hearing of this supposed treasure trove of content you’ve apparently just been sitting on.”
“For the record,” I interjected, a bit more put together. “I have not been the one sitting on this stuff. My insecurity has. Common mistake.”
Erika was not amused.
“I’ll start sending everything this evening,” I promised. “But it might take a while.”
She was about to voice some sort of complaint regarding the proposed (and vague) timeline, but I stopped her. “If you want any degree of organization, you are going to want me to take my time. I have a folder on my computer that just says, ‘work that needs to be edited,’ and it’s increasingly looking like a pit of despair.”
There was a pause. “Mia,” she began, sounding every bit like the overworked mother I described earlier. “How much are we talking about?”
“I am not good at editing,” I said, as if that was an answer.
It wasn’t.
“I can hire editors,” she said coldly and through teeth not quite gritted but held together closely. “Or do it myself. How many pieces are we talking about?”
I didn’t want to answer that. Even though I had my doubts about the quality of the work I was holding onto, this was going to SSSUUUUCCCCKKKK for her to sort through. And I shied away from that fact.
Instead of answering her, I quickly said, “Okay, gotta go. Bye!”
As she was starting to object, I hung up the phone, knowing that if she called back, I was (in no uncertain terms) not going to answer. And I just let it be.
But Ellie was still there, looking at me. “How much is there?” she nervously asked.
I tapped my phone against my chin a time or two while I pondered her question, a repackaged version of what Erika was so eager to know. But once again, I couldn’t really answer it.
Instead, I asked, “Are wine baskets a thing? If so, can you help me put together one for Erika? Because I now fully accept I am not good at picking out wine.”
Ellie did not think wine baskets were a thing.