Love After Layoffs novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Box
Carrying her desk box out of the tower on layoff day, Janine sees her husband kiss a woman in a camel coat in the lobby, hands him the box with her ring on top, and hears that he cut her contract himself.
The lawyer from Ketterman Holdings read our termination out loud in under a minute.
Three hundred vendor contracts ended that Tuesday, and ours was the ninth on the list.
Larkin & Dietz had fourteen people and one client that paid the rent.
Now we had a cardboard box each and a guard who wanted our badges.
"Thirty minutes to clear your desks," the guard said.
Yvonne Dietz, my boss for eight years, put her red glasses on top of her head and sat down on the carpet.
"I'm fifty-one," she said to nobody. "I'm too old to cry in a carpeted hallway."
I handed her my packet of tissues and went to pack.
I had a stapler, a plant, and a framed photo of my mother laughing at a county fair.
I put the photo in last, face up, so it wouldn't get squashed.
My phone buzzed twice while I did it.
The first was Justin: "Stuck in Cleveland all day. Don't wait up."
The second was an email from the Ketterman vendor desk.
It said, "Janine, I am so sorry. I argued for you. I lost. Can I buy you a drink? B. Hale."
Brooks Hale was the client manager I had emailed every day for two years.
I had never met him.
I knew he took his coffee black, hated the word synergy, and sent jokes at six in the morning.
I typed, "Yes," and carried my box to the elevators.
The lobby of Ketterman Tower is four stories of marble, and that afternoon it was full of people in my exact situation.
They stood in clumps holding boxes and plants and framed diplomas.
Someone near the revolving door was crying quietly into a coat sleeve.
I walked past them and stopped dead beside the big stone fountain.
Justin was standing ten feet away.
My husband was supposed to be in Cleveland.
He was in a gray suit I had picked out for him, under the building's tall clock, and he was smiling.
A woman stood very close to him.
She wore a long camel coat and a cream scarf pulled up to her chin, and her blond head was turned away from me.
A thin gold bangle slid down her wrist as she lifted her hand.
She laid her palm on his jaw.
Justin leaned down and kissed her.
It was not a quick kiss, and it was not a mistake.
It lasted long enough for a man beside me to say, "Whoa."
I stood there holding a box that held my whole working life, and something in my chest went very quiet.
Then I walked across the marble.
My heels rang on the stone.
Justin saw me when I was four feet away.
His smile went out.
"Janine," he said. "What are you doing here?"
"Being fired," I said. "What are you doing in Cleveland?"
The woman in the camel coat turned her shoulder to me and pulled her scarf higher.
She walked away fast, toward the side doors, and did not look back once.
Justin watched her go, then looked at the crowd that had gone silent around us.
"Not here," he said through his teeth. "People are watching."
"Good," I said.
I pushed the cardboard box against his chest until he had to catch it.
He stood there with his arms full of my stapler and my dead plant and my mother's photograph.
I pulled off my wedding ring.
It came off hard, because I had worn it for six years and my hands were swollen from the cold.
I set it on top of the box, right on my mother's laughing face.
"Hold this," I said. "I'm filing for divorce."
Somebody near the fountain started to clap.
It was one person, then three.
Justin's ears went red, which they only do when he's lying or cornered.
"You can't afford a divorce," he said, low and fast. "You can't afford lunch. You just lost your job."
"I noticed."
"Then notice this."
He stepped closer and set his mouth next to my ear so the crowd couldn't hear.
"I signed the cut myself, Janine," he said. "Your agency was the easiest name on the list."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend