Too Late to Beg: I'm No Longer Yours novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Day One

Marin starts at Caldecott Studio, freezes the card Troy has been using, and fields Danica's lecture about the declined card in Maui, until Troy says he is landing in Toronto tonight.

At five to nine on Monday morning, a stranger in a charcoal sweater handed me a key to the fourth floor.

"You're Marin Lowell," he said. "You're early. Nobody's early on a Monday."

"I landed at one," I said. "I didn't want to sit in a hotel room."

He looked at my coat, my one suitcase and the dark circles under my eyes.

"Elias Caldecott," he said. "Leave the suitcase behind the reception desk."

I had interviewed with him twice over video.

Both times he had sat in front of a bookshelf with the camera too close.

In person he was taller than I had pictured.

Gray was coming in at his temples, and his sleeves were pushed past his elbows.

He had ink on his right thumb.

I noticed it a second longer than I should have.

Caldecott Studio took up the top two floors of an old brick building near the lake.

The receptionist waved me through with a coffee already in her hand.

Elias showed me my desk, my drafting table and the model of the waterfront park I would be taking over.

"Two hundred meters of shoreline," he said. "One council that changes its mind weekly, and a client who wants a fountain."

"You don't want the fountain," I said.

"The fountain is a mistake. You'll tell me why by Friday."

"By Wednesday."

He looked at me for a moment.

"Wednesday," he said.

It was the first thing anyone had asked of me in months that wasn't an apology.

I sat down and opened my phone.

There were sixty-one messages.

Twenty-eight were from Troy. I did not open them.

Danica's came in as I scrolled, one after another.

"Are you seriously ignoring everyone?"

"Troy's card got declined at the resort dinner last night. In front of the whole restaurant."

"Leigh had to pay. He was humiliated. Unfreeze it."

I wrote back with steady thumbs.

"It's my account. He has his own card."

"Ten years of friendship and this is how you do it?"

I read that line twice.

In ten years Danica had never once said she was proud of me.

She had said I was a lot. She had said I should relax.

She had said it kindly, every time.

"I'm at work," I wrote. "I'll talk when I'm off."

"You are SO controlling," Danica wrote back. "Leigh cried in the bathroom."

I put the phone face down on the drafting table.

When I looked up, Elias was standing at the end of my desk with a stack of site drawings.

He had not meant to hear any of it.

He looked at the drawings, then at me, then at the drawings again.

"If there's a person you need to avoid today," he said, "the reception desk screens calls."

"There's a long list."

"Give it to the receptionist. She'll stop all of them."

"She doesn't know me yet."

"She knows you work for me. That's enough to scare people."

He set the drawings in front of me.

I almost laughed. It surprised me, so I stopped.

By lunch I had marked up half the park.

By two I had four pages of notes on why the fountain was a mistake.

At three, my brother's message arrived.

"Where are you? Troy says you went dark. He's worried."

I typed: "Did you let Leigh keep Mom's necklace?"

He answered in a second.

"She's borrowing it. Don't make it weird."

I held the phone against my chest and breathed.

In my bag was the folder I had carried onto the plane.

Inside it was a note, signed by Troy, for forty-eight thousand dollars.

It had a date on it and a line for when it was due.

I had made him sign it five years ago, and he had laughed and called it very Marin.

I took it out and set it flat on the desk beside the park model.

Everyone I knew called my carefulness a flaw.

Tonight it was the only weapon I had.

At five, a message arrived from a number I knew by heart.

"Landing in Toronto at 7," Troy wrote. "Don't make me come get you."

Another one came before I could set the phone down.

"Fourth floor, right?"

I had never told him the city.

I had never told him the building.

I had never told anyone, not even Dean, which floor.

Across the room, Elias looked up from his screen.

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