Waking Up Married To My Crush! novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Her Old Desk

Katie slips out alone to the design firm she loved and learns her mother-in-law resigned for her. She takes the desk back on the spot and walks into Margaret waiting in the lobby.

Colin left for work at seven the next morning, and I was dressed by seven-ten.

I wore the only thing in my closet I could stand, a gray sweater, and my own jeans from a drawer Lindsey had missed.

I walked down the stairs past Margaret's wing with my shoes in my hand.

Nobody stopped me.

The black card with my name on it was tucked in the back of my phone case.

The first cab on the avenue stopped for me.

"West Loop," I said, and gave the address from the offer letter I had folded in my backpack in April.

It was the only address I knew by heart.

The firm was in an old brick warehouse with a green door, and it was still there.

I stood on the sidewalk and put my hand flat on the glass.

Inside, thirty desks sat in rows under a skylight, and half the drafting tables were covered in tracing paper.

A tall woman in a gray cardigan looked up from reception and dropped her coffee.

"Katie?" she said. "Katie Harnett?"

"Hi," I said. "I know this is strange. I don't actually work here, I think."

"Honey, you worked here for eighteen months."

"I don't remember it."

"I heard about the accident," she said, and came around the desk. "We all did. Oh my God, come here."

She hugged me hard.

She smelled like pencil shavings, and I almost cried right there on the polished concrete.

Her name was something I should have known, and I was too embarrassed to ask.

She sat me in the conference room and brought me a muffin.

"I am going to tell you what I know," she said, "and you can tell me if it helps."

"Please."

"You were the best junior we ever hired. You did the library on Division, the one with the reading steps.

You were up on the scaffolding in a hard hat and a skirt."

"I did that?"

"You did that. Then you married Colin Stanhope, and six months later you were gone."

"Gone how?"

"Your mother-in-law called the managing partner at eight in the morning," she said. "She said you were resigning, effective that day, for family reasons."

I stared at the muffin.

"And I got an email from you two weeks later," she said. "Very polite. It said 'with regret.'"

"I wouldn't write that."

"That's what I said. The partners said I was being dramatic."

"I would say 'I'm sorry' or I would say 'bye,'" I said. "I'd never write 'with regret' in my life."

She pointed at me and said, "Exactly."

The managing partner came in then, a stooped man with a pencil in his hair, and he stopped in the doorway.

"Well," he said. "Hello, kid."

I stood up.

Four more people crowded in behind him.

One of them was carrying a drafting lamp like a trophy.

"We never gave your desk away," he said. "We kept hoping you'd call. I didn't have the nerve to call you."

"Why not?"

"Mrs. Stanhope made it very clear," he said.

My stomach turned over.

I thought about Margaret in her cream suit, folding my life into a family reason.

I thought about sixty beige hangers.

"I want it back," I said.

Nobody breathed.

"I'm not asking for a favor. I'm asking for the job, if you still need a junior."

"I know I forgot some of it. I can learn it again."

"You didn't forget how to draw," the partner said. "You'll learn the rest in a week."

"When can you start?" he said. "Today?"

"The doctor said no ladders and no site visits," I said. "Desk work is fine. Tomorrow."

He grinned so wide that the pencil fell out of his hair.

They took me through the studio, and everyone touched my shoulder or said my name.

My old desk sat by the south window with a green lamp on it.

Someone had put a ceramic cup of pencils there, and the pencils were sharpened.

I sat in the chair.

It fit my back exactly.

"Four years," I said quietly.

For the first time since I woke up, it didn't feel like something that had been taken from me.

It felt like something I could go and get.

I signed a form, picked up a key card and shook six hands.

I told the receptionist to call me a cab.

"Take your time," she said, and when I stepped into the front lobby she added, "Oh. Katie."

"Yes?"

"You have a visitor."

A woman in a cream suit stood by the elevator with her pearls straight and her bag on her arm.

She had been there long enough to take off her gloves.

Her car idled at the curb, with a driver at the wheel and Lindsey in the back seat.

"Kathleen," Margaret said. "Get in the car."

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