Page 37 of Piece By Piece

And the truth sitting between them like an open book.

He’d given her something real.

The least she could do was give him something back.

“I didn’t just leave my job,” she suddenly said. “I had a panic attack at my desk in the middle of a meeting with a dozen other people right there. My hands actually went numb first, and then my chest, and then I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I truly thought I was dying. So that’s what it felt like when my body decided to shut down and didn’t care that I was in an office with twelve people staring at me.”

She pulled at the thread on a cushion.

“So then my assistant called 911 because she thought I was actually having a heart attack. Paramedics came. They put me on a stretcher and wheeled me through the office while my coworkers just stood there gawking at me. Nobody said a word. My boss sent me home with a look that was half concerned and half annoyed that I disrupted the meeting.”

She exhaled.

“I quit the next morning. I didn’t even go in. I just sent an email like a coward. And now I’ve been pretending it didn’t happen ever since then.” She stared at the flame of the candle. “The bad part is my mom thinks I left voluntarily. She thinks I’m strategically pivoting in my career. That’s the version I sold her anyway. But the truth is I fell apart in front of everyone, and then I ran away.”

“That’s not running away. That’s surviving.”

She looked at him.

His voice was steady. He didn’t sound like he was pitying her. He just sounded firm and certain.

“I’m thirty-two years old, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to be,” she said. “I used to have an answer for that, you know? Like when people asked me what I wanted to do, I had a title, a salary and a five-year plan. And now I have a beanbag chair and a children’s section that’s still not finished.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he spoke.

“Well, maybe you’re not supposed to be doing anything right now.”

She frowned.

“Okay, either that’s a very Zen thing to say or very depressing.”

“I mean, maybe you’re not supposed to be something. Maybe you just are. And whatever you do next comes from that instead of the other way around.”

She rolled the words around in her head.

It was the kind of thing she would have thought sounded empty coming from someone who didn’t mean it.

But Grant Whitmore didn’t say things he didn’t mean.

That was the one thing she was absolutely sure of about him.

“When did you get so wise?”

“Oh, I’m not wise. I’m just familiar with running away.”

“Well, we’re a pair, aren’t we?”

“Apparently.”

Earlier that day, before the storm had rolled in, Julie found Francine in the inn’s supply closet, reorganizing their cleaning products by category.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,” Julie said.

“Oh, I know. It was just bothering me.” Francine straightened a few of the spray bottles without looking up. “You know, you have three different brands of glass cleaner in here. You only need one.”

Julie leaned against the doorframe.

She had been watching Francine for most of the week now, looking for cracks, looking for that moment when the polished competence would slip and reveal somebody who didn’t actually have a clue what they were doing.