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His mom was right about needing to be in a place where he could listen to Marsie’s point of view. But he also needed to be in a place where he trusted what she said and didn’t pick apart her truths for the bits and pieces that could hurt him.
And he wasn’t there yet.
* * *
MARSIE SPENT MONDAY concentrating on her grant. The entire team pulled together to organize the forms the granting organization required, and they set up a series of meetings to plan what would happen after they officially got the grant. The team was nothing if not hopeful.
She didn’t look at the door for Jason.
Or, she didn’t look much.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MARSIE DEALT WITH her grief the way she had always dealt with everything bad in her life. She worked. Beck texted her, suggesting they get together. Marsie felt guilty for ignoring her best friend, especially when her friend was still in pain herself. But Marsie needed to hide in a cave and lick her wounds for a while.
For a week she came into work at seven in the morning and worked until nine at night. She brought a cheese sandwich and pretzel sticks for lunch, and ate a frozen dinner when she got home.
She got a lot done. By the time the week was over, she’d planned out the entire five years of the grants, created the spreadsheets she thought she would need for tracking the money and the work, set up reporting mechanisms for all the statistics they would collect, drafted templates for the reports they were to send back to the reporting agency and added reminders and tasks to her calendar. Hopeful reminders.
Five years’ worth of them. At least she was smart enough to stop short of setting up reminders for the rest of the team. And she was smart enough to know that, no matter how well planned she felt, avoiding meetings and work lunches meant she’d probably have to adjust everything she’d spent her week doing.
But it bought her a week of not thinking about Jason—too much. And no matter what they found in their research, no one would be able to argue that she hadn’t thought through the research, that she wasn’t organized.
All those algorithms, all that thoroughness that Jason had been so angry about was welcome here.
Welcome, but hollow without the cup of coffee he would set on her desk with a smile.
With a heavy sigh, she closed her email, saved all her spreadsheets and signed out of her computer. Then she reached into her drawer for her purse and headed for her car.
If she had the calendar right—and she did—tonight was Jason’s poker night. She wasn’t invited this time. Maybe she would never be invited again. Jill had no reason to pick her over Jason.
She hoped Jason would win a lot of money off his friends. Enough to take himself out to a nice dinner, though she wasn’t so magnanimous that she wanted him to take another woman out for that nice dinner.
She was eating alone. He could, too.
Her car was the only one in the parking lot. At least during the week there had been other workaholics here with her. Now, she was alone, without even her fellow spreadsheet-lovers to share her sad life. Even Françoise, who she could usually count on to be here later than she was, had gone home.
She got into her car, exhausted for the first time this week. Work had been a nice distraction, but she was going to go home, and unless she wanted to face that she was working all weekend to keep herself from thinking about Jason, she would need to find something else to entertain herself with.
Beck wasn’t even in town to keep her company.
At least it was spring. She could garden, even if it meant she was trimming her grass with kitchen shears to keep her mind off her mistakes.
And then, like a bad dream, her car wouldn’t start. The engine wouldn’t engage at all. Her battery was probably dead and she might be able to jump it, but there was no one else in the parking lot to lend their car.
Or their jumper cables.
She called her roadside maintenance. The person on the other end of the line was nice, sympathetic even, about the fact that the tow truck might not be available for an hour and a half. She checked her phone. According to the rideshare app, there was something happening downtown and so there was surge pricing throughout the Triangle.
As an economist, she recognized the genius of surge pricing.
As a consumer, it irritated her.
