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Max silently runs beside me. He knows this route as well as I do. The two of us are the best of friends, even if he is a dog.

“Good job, Max,” I encourage him as we make our way around a little pond. I don’t hear anything except for the thump of my shoes against the path. Max is quiet. He’s in better shape than I am, apparently, which is saying something because I’m in pretty good shape.

My dad and I used to come to this park when I was little. He’d jog while I played on the playground. Sometimes Mom would come along and the two of us would hang out on the swings together. Mom was never much of a runner. She liked to watch Dad, though. She always said he had good form, that he made it look easy. A college knee injury meant Mom was never able to match his pace, so she stayed on the sidelines while he took off.

It’s hard sometimes to believe that two years have passed without them, without Jessica. My entire world imploded on the same night, and even now, I still don’t know what to do. I think about the desperate voicemails she left me, and I wonder sometimes how I could have just left her hanging. My therapist says I was in shock, that it’s understandable, but the truth is that I got overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing.

Out of all of my available options, I chose the absolute worst one.

It cost me the girl of my dreams.

I’m lucky that I still have Max. He’s a sweet dog that Jessica and I picked out together. We were going to adopt him as a couple, but the night before my parents died, I secretly adopted him without telling her. My plan was to surprise her with Max after I proposed to her. I wanted to ask her to marry me at the restaurant and then take her back to the house so she could see him. I feel like it would be a really good surprise.

As it turns out, everything about that night was just a terrible surprise.

As I run, I realize my phone is ringing. I pause long enough to answer it.

Hillary.

“We’ve got trouble,” she says. “Get here as soon as you can.”

“I’m at the park.”

“Just jog right here, then.”

“Max is with me.”

“We’ve had worse dogs in the office,” Hillary says. Then she hangs up and leaves me wondering what the hell is going on. I don’t want to head right in, but I decide to, anyway. I’m right between home and the office, which means it’ll take me twenty minutes to get home. If I shower and change, that’ll take another twenty even if I’m fast. Driving to the office will be an additional ten minutes, plus parking time. If I just jog straight over, I can be there in twenty minutes. Fifteen if I’m fast.

I decide to listen to my assistant and get my butt there instead of doing math problems in the park.

When I reach the office, I realize that something is seriously wrong. There’s a media van outside of the building. While there are no reporters outside yet, I have a feeling they’re going to be. Why is there a van here? And what’s so important that Hillary would have told me to hurry in?

I dart up the steps with Max in tow. When I enter the building, Hillary is on me instantly.

“What do you know?”

“Nothing. Fill me in.”

“We got this.”

She hands me a sheet of paper. It’s an email explaining a social media crisis that’s currently happening online involving our company.

We’re just a little business.

We’re nobody special.

“What happened?”

“Last night, someone Tweeted about you and Jessica,” she explains. “They said that your companies are competing entities and that you have a goal of taking each other out.”

“That’s not true at all.”

“It’s a little true.”

“Did you turn this in?”

“No.”