Page 3

“Well, you can have fun in Texas. I’d rather stay out of the tin cans in the air.” I’d never been a big fan of flying. So if he wanted to take the long-distance gigs, he could have at it. “But don’tthink you’re getting out of your coffee days just because you’re not there. I expect mine to be delivered daily.”

He barked out a laugh. “Yeah. Since when did you ever have coffee sent when you weren’t gonna be here?”

“Fair.” I took a long sip of my cafe au lait. Boring, I know, but it was my favorite. “It can be a new tradition.”

He ignored me and instead went through the rest of our agenda for the day, my mind still wandering.

“And don’t forget, we’re going to happy hour tonight,” I reminded him.

“I...” He let out a groan.

“It’s Julie’s birthday, and all she wants is to go to ten-cent wing night.” And goddess knew why they called them ten-cent wings, because they were now 50 cents each, despite the name.

It was Julie’s birthday, and she wasn’t going to be paying, so to her the discount didn’t play a part in it. She just loved the trivia that came with wing night and was really good at it. I was not.

Harold and I always tried to make sure the people that worked for us were happy, because that was how you got them to continue working for you. No one wanted to go into an office and be underappreciated on a daily basis. That was for sure. And besides, sharing part of our dreams with like-minded people always felt good, too.

“I know… it’s just so people-y there.” He scrunched his nose.

“Yeah, it is, but it’s also ten-cent wing night.”

“Fine, don’t let me forget,” he conceded.

And I didn’t let him forget. At ten to five, I marched back into his office and told to shut down the computer. It was wing night, and we were going to be there with smiles on… and a cake, because birthday.

Everyone from the office came, all ten of us crowding into the little dive bar. We drank pitchers of beer and margaritas, ate gobs of wings, and got more questions wrong on trivia than right—still coming out victorious by some miracle.

We talked about work too much and a little about home lives. Mark just got a cat. Sally was thinking about buying a new sofa. Frances was on the lookout for a new babysitter, not for her children, they were all grown, but for her parrot. It was nice, normal, almost like family, without the whole toxic work vibes. But once again, a feeling that something was missing, a feeling that there could be something more for me, settled in.

Maybe this was what a midlife crisis felt like. I wouldn’t exactly call myself midlife, or at least I hoped I wasn’t at midlife. There was so much left to experience, but I needed to snap out of whatever funk this was, because just going through the motions, was that really life at all?

I paid our tab and went back to my place, where I took a shower to wash the scent of stale beer and grease off of me before heading to bed. I was really exhausted and made the false assumption that I’d fall quickly to sleep.

Two hours of tossing and turning later, I was still awake, wondering if maybe I should take some time off from work to travel. I could be like one of those vloggers and travel by van across the country. It wasn’t my normal thing. I was a homebody, usually, but this feeling that something was missing and I needed to find it was taking root.

And it was hard to find something you’d lost or maybe never had when you didn’t know what it even was. Going from one random odd tourist destination to the next was as good of a plan as there was to locate it. It was better than what I was doing about it now, which was exactly nothing.

But first I needed to talk to Harold and see what he thought. We’d been running this together for too long for me to leave him high and dry, especially when he was going to be out of town for a while. And who knew. Maybe by the time he came back, I’d be all settled and living a life of sunshine and rainbows.

Stranger things had been known to happen.

3

GARNER

“Today’s the day.” I was talking to myself. Even my fox was snoozing, having no interest in our company.

I’d spent a sleepless night, tossing and turning, getting up to pace the floor, my toes curling into the carpet. I’d chugged a bottle of water and stared at the night sky, wondering if Dad was up amongst the stars with the goddess.

On my computer were estimates of what I needed from a business consultant and what I predicted it would cost after trawling websites and chat rooms. After reaching out to former college classmates, I’d been recommended a firm run by a fox shifter. Not that I had any objections to working with humans, but if someone was going to be poking their nose into the division’s every nook and cranny, it would be easier if they were a shifter.

The initial inquiry was waiting patiently in my outbox—not that one email locked me into a deal, but before I hit send, I had to be committed to following this through to the end. If I pulled the plug in the middle because I was worried about money, I’d have solved nothing, be left with a large bill, and at a dead end.

Finally, at five in the morning, I sent the email, hoping the MD would check his messages first thing. To have sent the inquiry and not hear back would be agonizing and I might flood their inbox with questions, or worse, call them.

But as I was heading out the door to work, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but that wasn’t unusual. New clients often didn’t waste time with an email, they phoned, especially if a current customer had recommended us.

As I walked to the car, I opened the laptop to the information I might need if this was an inquiry. I was so focused on who I assumed the caller was that I missed his name, but he was from Denmarke Solutions. Ahhh, the fox shifter consulting firm. I applauded how he got den into the name.