Total pages in book: 161
Estimated words: 154890 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 620(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154890 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 620(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
“She’s tachycardic, looks like VT, we need to defibrillate…”
It’s too late, I think to myself. I’m not on a plane. Did I even get on one? Did I make it to London? Did I get what I was looking for?
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
I put off living, and now it’s too late.
They said my choices were foolish, that I was making a mistake. But I told them—I shouted it from the top of my lungs—there were other ways to die. Fear is the death of choice, and a mental death has to be just as agonizing.
I want to laugh at the irony, at my foolishness, but a mask covers my mouth. I want to laugh and laugh and laugh, but I don’t have it physically in me.
I wanted to live my life on my terms. I refused their fear when I should’ve listened because now it’s too late.
The lights blur bright against a pale-yellow ceiling. Machines beep as my mother wails that I just wouldn’t listen.
I feel fear. I feel anxiety. No, those don’t feel right. Enough. This thing I’m experiencing, it’s something else. Something stronger.
Doom.
The word comes to me with a cloaking of black.
My life is over before I get a chance to really live it.
Something brushes against my fingers, and I physically recoil at the sensation. It all happens so quickly, this sense of a happening from someplace else. Some other time and space. I inhale a life-filled gasp, my body jerking upright as though yanked by a force greater than my own.
Meoowwww.
I press my hand over my heart as I begin to laugh. I can feel it pounding under my skin—it’s still there, it’s working, I’m okay—as I glance down. Aunt Doreen’s ginger cat stares back at me through the gloom.
“Oh, it’s you.” I press one hand to his thick fur without moving the other from my still-racing heart.
Just a dream.
Just regret.
It’s not real.
10
WHIT
“You all right?”
Brin’s voice pulls my attention from my laptop, his long frame visible through the open door. He’s not dressed for the office, or maybe he is. He doesn’t work corporate and can often be found wearing jeans. More interesting than his outfit are the takeaway coffee cups in his hand. Two of them, not three.
“Am I… all right? Is that what you’re asking?” Amelia’s voice sounds hesitant. Meanwhile, I’m irrationally annoyed that I can’t see her, bar the brief flash of her hand, her shoulder, and the flick of her ponytail. How is it I’d never realized Jody’s desk is placed so inconveniently? Maybe because I never spent half the day trying to perve at Jody.
“Yeah,” Brin says with a delighted laugh. “It’s a greeting. Same as hello—how you doing? That sort of thing. I bet you’re ending phone calls wrong as well.”
“How are you supposed to end them? I say bye like everyone else.”
“Everyone else who doesn’t live here, Mimi, love. The standard ending of a conversation in the UK goes a bit like this.” The idiot clears his throat. “Alright, that’s great, thanks very much, cheers, thanks again, bye!”
“You’re weird,” she says with a cute laugh. She’s not wrong, either. About him being weird. He’s also weirdly annoying.
“Says the one defiling British telephone etiquette. I’m surprised there haven’t been complaints.”
“Maybe there has been.” She lowers her voice. “It might be what’s put the monster in a bad mood.”
Brin’s head lifts as he slides a smug smile through the open door. “Is Whit being a twat?” he asks, looking right at me.
Me? I just stare back.
“You say that differently.”
Mimi’s comment brings Brin’s attention sliding back. “Because you lot say it wrong.”
“And you’re just a tease.”
My stomach turns to a lump of fucking concrete. Is she flirting with him?
“Am I?” Brin asks with a chuckle I think I might ram down the back of his throat. With my fist.
“Well, yeah. Unless one of those isn’t for me.”
I try to concentrate on my laptop screen again, but no deal. My attention slides back to Brin and I watch as he glances down to the takeaway cups he seems surprised to find in his hands.
“Sorry.” He passes one over with a shy grin. “This one is for you.”
It’s the Amelia effect. She dazzles everyone. At the investor meeting last week, we had the usual array of sharp brains, straight-talking titans of industry, and the mega- wealthy, yet a number of them sat like starstruck schoolboys, gazing up at her as though she’d offered them the moon, not the standard coffee and pastries. It’s just her way. She has this knack for treating everyone like they’re the sole focus of her attention. She knows everyone’s fucking name, and according to security, she’s been feeding half her lunch to the homeless bloke who’s often camped outside the building. Helena from HR called and asked me what I wanted to do about it. As a company, we do our bit for charity and even sponsor a local homeless shelter, but no financial institution wants a symbol of poverty sitting on their doorstep.