Wanted by My Three Bosses novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Gray Laughs Last

Gray's POV

The board chair's message was still on Daphne's phone when she showed it to us at her aunt's table that morning.

Restructuring. Please bring your partners.

"They'll come for her first," I said. "Monday, in front of everyone."

"Then we stand next to her," Anson said, and nobody argued.

I was always the one who laughed first.

It was the oldest joke about me, and it was true, and I knew what it was for.

The day Daphne put her key on that blotter, I laughed in the elevator until I had to lean my forehead on the wall.

I did it so nobody would see my face.

It took me days to say what I had felt on the forty-first floor.

I told her on the drive back from Ohio, with Anson at the wheel and Josiah asleep against the window.

"I thought you were gone," I said into her hair. "When the key hit the desk. My whole body went cold."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. I'm telling you because rule one says I must."

She found my hand in the dark of the back seat and held it hard.

By eleven that night we were in my apartment, with the city lit up in the glass behind us.

She stood in the middle of my bedroom in her mother's jacket and her sensible shoes.

She had never seen the room before.

"You're quiet," she said.

"I'm gathering my courage."

"For what?"

I opened the drawer of the nightstand and took out a small brass key.

I had had it cut the hour after the board meeting, at a hardware store on Clark Street.

I held it out in my palm.

"It's to this door," I said. "It's yours. You can put it on your ring with your own."

She looked at it, and then at me.

"This isn't the office key."

"No. That one you can leave on a desk anyone walks past. This one I'd like you to keep, even on the days you hate me." I swallowed. "I've been the funny one for eleven years. Everyone assumes I don't mean any of it."

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