Page 136 of Wait for Him

I was there for the count.

Every woman who stood up and put her name on the record was another door closing behind him, and I wanted to hear every single one slam.

Rose knows all of it, I'm sure. Jade would've kept her informed wherever she is. I wonder sometimes what it gave her, if anything. Relief. Closure. Maybe just one less thing in the world she has to carry by herself.

My phone rings on the desk and yanks me out of the pity party.

Bennet.

"What's up?"

"Are you still in the building? I need your help."

"Yeah? What's going on?"

"It's an emergency. Get up here quick."

I'm out from behind my desk and crossing the floor before the phone's back in my pocket. Something doesn't sit right. Bennet doesn't hang up like that, the man narrates his own coffee order. Is it Blaire? Or…

Rose.

Maybe something happened. Maybe Jade heard from her. Maybe she stopped checking in, maybe she's hurt, maybe...

Fuck.

I hit the elevator button three times like that's ever made one come faster and spend the ride watching the numbers crawl upward with my stomach lodged somewhere in my throat, praying that whatever Bennet is waiting to tell me, it isn't the worst version my brain has already managed to build.

The doors open and I'm moving before they're fully apart. I sprint down the hallway toward his apartment, find the door cracked open an inch and shove through it.

"Ben! Bennet!"

"SURPRISE!"

I spin in a full circle. People are everywhere, the dining room packed with faces I know from every corner of my life, and my pulse is slamming so hard my lungs can't seem to decide what to do with any of it. The adrenaline drains almost as fast as it flooded in, leaving my knees weak, and I bend over with my hands braced on them, trying to remember how breathing works.

Voices wash over me. Hands land on my back.

We got him good.

Happy birthday, Jackson.

When will I see you again? You won't.

And in a moment of absolute vulnerability, standing in a room full of everyone who came, the tears just come.

I straighten and look around at them. Bennet grinning like an asshole. Blaire with both hands pressed over her mouth. Emily. Jade. Samson. People from work, people from outside work, people who spent weeks conspiring and lying directly to my face for me, on the one day every four years that's actually mine.

I've spent seven months and seventeen days measuring everything I lost.

I forgot to count any of this.

I've never felt less alone than I do in this moment.

"Hey. Hey, man." Bennet gets to me first and pulls me into a hug, slapping my back the way men do when they're giving each other permission not to pretend for a minute.

I wrap my arms around my best friend and let myself cry right there in front of everybody, and not one person in the room makes it weird.

"Thank you." It comes out rough, meant for the whole room and nowhere near big enough for it.