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“I have to go back now. I have a job.”
“Okay,” she said. “But, he has to know, Addie. The only thing that willreallyhurt him is if he doesn’t know. Will you think about that?”
“I will,” I said, sniffling a little and wiping the tears from my eyes before they could fall. “I’ll think about it, I promise.”
We left it at that and finished breakfast.
_______________
That evening, I was at the front door of my building, ready to go upstairs to my apartment when the beeping of a car horn startled me. I whirled around and there, on the street in front of the building, was a sporty-looking black two-door. The horn beeped again, confirming that it was for me. Curious, I came back down the front walk and squinted at the vehicle.
The passenger window slid down, and I peered in at a familiar face in the lights of the dashboard. Ben Diamond smiled at me and pointed forward to where there was a parking space on the street. He rolled ahead and pulled into the space, and I went to where he had pulled over. In a second, he climbed out of his car to face me.
“Evening, Corinne,” he said, friendly as always.
“Hi, Ben,” I greeted him as he came up onto the curb and stepped onto the street with me. “Heading home from the gym, I guess.”
“Yeah, I am,” he replied. “But, I’m glad that I caught you before you went inside. There’s something I want to say to you.”
I didn’t want to be rude. I thought Ben was sweet and I knew he was a loyal friend. I just wasn’t prepared to deal with him right now, under the circumstances. I breathed out a soft sigh that only I could hear.
“Ben,” I told him, “I think I can guess what you want to say to me. There’s something you probably just found out, and I know… Well, I know you must be concerned because that’s the kind of friend you are. But honestly, I’ve been driving all day and I’m really tired, and all I want to do is go inside and…”
He cut me off. “I get that. So, I’m not going to keep you. There’s just one thing I want to say and then I’ll leave it at that. Promise.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t give up on Elijah. He’s been through a lot. He thought he was making a sacrifice for the good of both of you. I don’t think it’s all that good. There was something he needed, and for a second he had it, and he let it go because he thought it was the right thing. It wasn’t.
“So, I’ll just tell you the same thing I tell some of my clients when it doesn’t look like they’re getting the results they want from their workouts. Don’t give up so easily, okay? The thing you want the most? Sometimes it would have happened right after you gave up.”
As impatient as I’d been to get back into my apartment, I had to admit to myself that what he said was the most interesting piece of advice I’d ever gotten. Leave it to a fitness trainer to look at it that way.
“Okay,” I simply said. “And…thanks, Ben. You’re really very sweet.”
“Tell that to the guy who’s carrying around fifty pounds he doesn’t need, whose tail I just worked off,” he grinned. And, he actually made me smile, saying that. It had been days since I smiled. “Goodnight, Corinne.”
“Goodnight, Ben,” I said.
My big, muscular neighbor got back into his car and drove off down the street. As I turned and headed back to my place, I pictured a certain someone probably settling down for the night in a penthouse elsewhere in town.
“And, goodnight, Elijah,” I whispered.
CHAPTER25
Elijah. Wednesday
“Um…Elijah? Are you even listening to me?” Barbara’s voice came to me as if it were filtered through cotton balls stuffing my ears.
Shaking my head as if to shake out the cotton, I reacted, “Oh, sorry. Yeah, yeah, right.”
Barbara stared at me, standing there in front of my desk as I sat bewildered behind it, pretending that I’d heard her. Being respectful of our positions, my secretary didn’t come right out and shake her own head at me, but it was obvious she was thinking it.
“Okay, no,” I surrendered. “I have no idea what you just said.”
“I asked you,” she said with her usual patience, “if everything was okay.”
It’s such a relative term, “okay.” It can mean different things to different degrees in different situations, and I really wasn’t in a frame of mind just then to sort it all out. It was better to come clean with her instead of lying and having her know I was lying. Of course, she wouldn’t call me out about it, but she would still be aware that I wasn’t leveling with her, and if nothing else I knew that I could always trust Barbara.