Page 13 of The Bodyguard

Three

A MONTH LATER,I was still enraged about it.

A bad kisser? A bad kisser?

I mean, “workaholic”? Fine. There’s no shame in being fantastic at your job.

“Not fun”? Whatever. Fun was overrated.

But a “bad kisser”?

That was the kind of insult that would haunt me to my grave.

Unacceptable.

Just like the state of my entire life.

My mother died. Then I got grounded from my job. Then the longest relationship of my life ended with the most insulting insult in the world. And there was nothing I could do about any of it. My mother stayed dead, my ex-boyfriend and my best friend left for three weeks on my assignment to Madrid, and I stayed home. In Houston. With nothing to do and no one to do it with.

It’s a blur how I even survived.

Mostly, I did anything at all to keep busy. I reorganized the file room at the office. I did local mini assignments. I repainted my bathroom tangerine orange without asking my landlord. I cleaned out my mother’s place and listed it for sale. I took six-mile runs after work in hopes of tuckering myself out. I counted the purgatory-like seconds until I could get the hell out of town.

Oh, and I slept every night on the floor of my closet.

Those four weeks took a thousand years. And in all that time, I can only remember one truly good thing that happened.

Going through my mother’s jewelry box, I found something I thought was lost—something that would have seemed like junk to anybody else. Buried under a tangled necklace, I found a little silver beaded safety pin that I’d made at school on my eighth birthday.

The colors were just like I remembered: red, orange, yellow, pale green, baby blue, violet, white.

Beaded friendship pins had been big at school that year—we all made them and pinned them to our shoelaces—and so on the day our teacher brought in pins and beads, we were ecstatic. She let us spend recess making them, and I’d saved my favorite to give to my mom. I loved the idea of surprising her on a day she’d be giving me presents with a present of my own for her. But I never got to give it to her in the end.

Somehow, before the next morning, it was gone.

In the wake of that day, I’d looked for it for weeks. Checking and double-checking the floor of my closet, the pockets of my backpack, under the hallway rug. It had been one of those long, unsolved mysteries in my life—a question I’d carried for so long: How had I lost something so important?

But fast-forward twenty years and there it was, safely stashed in my mom’s jewelry box, waiting for me like a long-hidden answer. Like she’d been keeping it safe for me the whole time.

Like maybe I’d underestimated her a little bit.

And myself, too.

Right then and there, I’d looked through her necklaces to find a sturdy gold chain, then I’d clipped the beaded pin to it like a pendant.

And then I wore it. Every day after that. Like a talisman. I even slept in it.

I found myself touching it all the time, spinning the smooth beads under my fingertips to feel their cheery little rattle. Something about it was comforting. It made me feel like maybe things were never quite as lost as they seemed.

On the morning when Robby and Taylor were coming back from Madrid—a morning when we were having a meeting in the conference room where Glenn had promised to give me a new assignment, at last—I touched that pin so much I wondered if I might wear it out.

The point was: I was about to get an assignment. I was about to escape. It didn’t matter where I was going. Even just the idea of leaving turned my heart into a rippling field of relief.

Now I would disappear from here.

And then, for the first time in so long, I would feel okay.

All I had to do was survive seeing Robby again.