Page 21 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper

Oliver

On the subway the next morning, Oliver couldn’t stop thinking about Chloe.

It had been eighteen hours since they had coffee, and she’d been on his mind the whole time.

He’d even dreamed about her and woken up in the middle of the night hot and bothered like a teenage boy.

Oliver had forced himself to go back to sleep without doing anything about it, because he didn’t want to taint the memory of his afternoon with Chloe with something so animalistic.

She was beautiful—even more so now than when they were younger—but she had always meant more to him than just physical attraction.

For a moment, Oliver froze as memories seized him.

His mother, bursting into the house when he was sixteen and yelling at the family that the FBI was onto her, that they had to leave now .

The confusion and fear in his little brother’s eyes.

His father desperate to keep their family together no matter what.

And that awful, wrenching sound Oliver swore he heard as his and Chloe’s souls were separated.

He’d left Kansas without saying goodbye, without an explanation, and never talked to her again.

A decent person wouldn’t have done that to his best friend. To the girl he loved.

But Oliver had.

“Why am I even thinking about her?” Oliver mumbled to himself. “I don’t want her to know who I am. I don’t deserve it, and she doesn’t need to be hurt all over again.”

The commuters crammed next to him in the train car attempted to inch a little bit farther away. It was risky to stand too close to people who talked to themselves on the subway.

Oliver snorted. He had an intimidating frame, but honestly, he was a mathematician. His greatest weapon was boring people to death with equations.

Still, he made a mental note to book the car service for a ride home tonight.

One perk of working at Hawthorne Drake was they had professional town car service on retainer for anyone director-level and above who worked late.

It was really just a trick to incentivize you to stay in the office, like the free dinners they offered.

But Oliver would gladly take the opportunity to avoid public transportation—especially at the height of sweltering summer.

He usually stayed in the office till late anyway.

When the train pulled into his stop, Oliver was first off. He wove through the waiting people on the platform, trying to get to the escalator as quickly as possible while not resorting to elbows.

“Excuse me,” he muttered over and over as he jogged up the escalator, or tried to—why didn’t people understand that you stood on one side and allowed passing on the other?

Oliver didn’t know who was worse, the tourists who blocked the path with their suitcases or the locals who parked themselves in his way while browsing on their phones.

At least tourists had the excuse of being new to the city.

Finally, he made it to the top of the escalator, sweating slightly in his suit. As he emerged from underground, Oliver had to shield his eyes from the onslaught of sunlight.

His phone rang. It was one of the few numbers he had saved on his phone.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Morning, champ. Is it too early to call?”

Oliver softened at the sound of “champ,” which he’d earned from winning math competitions when he was in elementary school.

He was thirty-two now, but even if he was seventy -two, his dad would’ve still called him “champ.” Oliver didn’t mind.

His dad and his brother were all the family he had left.

His mother was still alive—Jennifer was in prison—but as far as Oliver was concerned, she didn’t exist.

“On my way into the office,” he said. “But you know I would answer a call from you even if it were three a.m.”

“Regardless, I’ll try not to take you up on that offer.

” His dad’s voice hitched, and Oliver winced.

Richard tried to hide his constant pain from his sons, but both Oliver and Ben knew the sounds of his pauses, the little intakes of air and the holding of them as he pushed himself through stabs of agony.

His suffering was Jennifer’s fault, of course.

After her Caribbean timeshare scam collapsed and she made the family flee Kansas because the FBI was onto her, they’d flitted around from state to state.

But because they had to keep a low profile, Richard had had to take on temporary gigs where they didn’t ask too many questions and paid in cash under the table.

A lot of those jobs had been ill-supervised mining operations or construction jobs.

Eventually, the family settled in North Carolina, but on his first job there an I beam fell from four stories up.

It crushed Richard’s legs, and he never recovered. He was permanently in a wheelchair now.

“I love hearing from you, Dad, but is there a reason you called?” Oliver strode across the street with a mass of other suited bankers on their way to their offices.

“Yes, it’s… about Ben.”

Oliver stopped in the middle of the crosswalk. The woman behind him swore as she nearly ran into him.

“Is he all right? What’s wrong? I can be on the next plane or train—”

“Shhh, relax, champ. The sky isn’t falling.

It’s just that… taking care of me is a lot.

This year in particular… my body’s breaking down more than before, that’s the truth of it.

And Ben, well, you know Ben. There’s a reason he’s in the restaurant business; service is who he is.

But he’s working himself too hard, pulling eighteen-hour days between me and the new restaurant. ”

Oliver exhaled. Okay. This was a solvable problem. Thank god.

He made it to the other side of the street before the light changed to red.

“Ben needs help,” Oliver said.

“I wouldn’t ask if—”

“No, Dad, I should have thought of it sooner.” Oliver clenched his jaw and shook his head. “I should have hired a home nurse as soon as Ben decided to open his own restaurant. I should’ve known how much more time he’d be spending away from you.”

“Home nursing is very expensive.”

Oliver wished he could live closer to his dad to help. But New York and Virginia were too far apart to make it work.

“I’ll look into private nurses as soon as I’m finished with this next meeting,” Oliver said. “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll take care of all of you.”

Oliver had hardly set down his briefcase under his desk when his boss glided into his office.

Puja Nagaswaran was an elegant woman in her fifties who carried herself with the confidence of knowing she’d broken through a thick glass ceiling that had historically kept people like her out.

Flawless as usual in a tailored pantsuit, she helped herself to the chair across from him.

“Good morning, Puja.”

“Happy Friday, Oliver. Do you have plans for the weekend?”

“I’ll be here. Same as always.”

“You don’t have to work every second, you know,” Puja said. “You’re allowed to have a life.”

Not with Zac breathing down my neck, Oliver thought. But to Puja, he just shrugged.

She smiled and pointed at his window. “Maybe that will counsel you otherwise.”

Oliver had no idea what she was talking about. He turned to look out the window behind him but only saw other buildings. “I’m sorry?”

“The yellow paper rose on the windowsill,” Puja said.

He saw it now and frowned. “How did that get there? And what is it? Wait… I’ve seen one before—a waiter at a Greek restaurant had one.”

“It’s some kind of feel-good trend, I think.

I’ve seen a bunch of people around the city with them, too.

Each origami flower has a message inside.

I got one this morning in Central Park from a couple of sweet white-haired ladies.

Mine said Dreams don’t require permission slips.

” Puja nodded to herself. “Maybe that’s encouragement to propose the new quant spin-off division I’ve been contemplating but was afraid would get shot down.

If you don’t dream it, you can’t achieve it, right? ”

But Oliver was hardly listening. He caught the word “quant,” because the mathematics of Hawthorne Drake’s ventures was the reason he was here, but otherwise, he was scrutinizing the paper rose.

He approached it with the tips of two fingers, as if it might be contaminated. He’d grown up with a mother who trafficked in false hopes, and he’d spent years after the cratering of their life hoping that it could all go back to the way it’d been.

Hoping didn’t do a damn thing.

Puja laughed behind him. “It doesn’t contain anthrax, Oliver.”

“No, worse,” he said. “It’s foolishness, masquerading as something that matters.”

“Ouch,” Zac said.

Oliver whipped around, leaving the paper rose on the windowsill. In the minute or so that he’d been turned the other direction, Zac had appeared at his door, resting against the frame in that infuriating way like he owned the place and had the right to be everywhere.

“Personally,” Zac said, “I think the paper roses are darling. It’s a small but nice gesture, you know? Spreading good cheer, et cetera, et cetera.”

Zac was likely saying that because he’d overheard Puja talking about her own origami flower. A small growl unfurled in the back of Oliver’s throat. He seemed to be doing that a lot lately, but only around one particularly insufferable British colleague.

“Anyway,” Zac said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your conversation; I know we have a big meeting with the whole quant team later this morning. But I just popped in because I heard Puja’s voice and thought you might like this piece of chocolate pound cake?” He held it out to Puja.

“ I’d like a piece of chocolate cake,” Oliver said.

Zac ignored him. “The fellow at the coffee shop gave me the wrong order—I’m a savory breakfast type, myself—but he couldn’t take the sweet one back after he’d given it to me. Something about food safety laws. Anyway, I seem to recall you like cake?”

Oliver rolled his eyes. Surely Puja would see right through this.

But she smiled and said, “I do have a weakness for cake. Thank you, Zac.”

“Anytime. You’re doing me a favor, really, by taking it off my hands. I would have hated to see it go to waste.”

Puja got up from her chair, and she and Zac left Oliver’s office together.

Today’s score: Zac, 1. Oliver, 0.

Left alone with the origami flower, Oliver directed his irritation in its direction.

It was made with yellow paper striped with gold foil.

He yanked at the corners of the petals and splayed the rose open, revealing a message and a minuscule drawing of a heart-shaped rosebud, like an artist’s signature:

Sometimes wishing can make a dream come true.

Oliver grabbed a pen and wrote, I guarantee it ABSOLUTELY does not. He underlined it twice.

Then he sighed. What was he doing, getting pissed at a piece of paper?

He crumpled it up and threw it in the trash.

“Get your shit together, Oliver,” he muttered. “Dad and Ben need you.”