At Any Turn

I hadn’t yet devised a plan of how to proceed. It all kept coming down to “wait until she quits in January, then move on.” She wanted her freedom, clearly, for whatever reason. But I was slowly beginning to accept that whatever it was that Emilia wanted, it wasn’t me.

No, that wasn’t quite true. She did want me. But she was scared.

Instead of doing an about-face to avoid the interns, I waited around the corner for the giggle-horde to dissipate. The one who looked like Snow White had just walked out of the bathroom. “Whoever’s in there is puking again! Like every other day this week.”

“Shh, we were waiting to see who it is,” said the blonde with all the hair. “She’s got to be pregnant or something.”

“Maybe she just binges on breakfast and now she’s purging,” said Snow White.

“Does anyone know who it is?” said a third intern I didn’t know. Who the hell hired all these interns, anyway? Why were they swarming around my complex gossiping about coworkers?

I moved into full view of them and stopped short, taking them all in. I decided to be a dick about it. “What’s going on here?” I said in a loud voice.

They turned as a unit and all jumped when they saw me; the blonde had a huge smile on her face. “Good morning, Adam! How—”

I didn’t let her get it out. Instead I made an obvious show of glancing at my watch and raised my eyebrows. “I don’t believe I’m paying you to stand around and gossip.”

Snow White sucked in a breath and she exchanged a long glance with the blonde. “Oh yeah, sorry. We were just—Yeah, let’s go.” She turned and followed the rest of the pack, all of them hightailing it out of the corridor as quickly as they could move.

I watched them go for a moment before continuing down the hallway. I was just passing the ladies’ bathroom when the door opened. I shouldn’t have looked, but when I saw that brilliant white hair out of the corner of my eye, I did a double take. Emilia came out of the bathroom with a face that was paler than the wall. She halted when she locked gazes with me, looking almost guilty.

I tried everything I could to keep the shock I was feeling from my face. Then she faked a smile and shrugged, muttered something that sounded like, “Back to work!” and turned and left me standing there, rooted to my spot. I watched her go and in my mind I replayed the conversation of the little mean-girl interns.

She’d been puking for a week, every morning? The mean girls had come to a conclusion I hadn’t yet considered—an eating disorder. But she’d eaten normally whenever I had a meal with her. And while eating dinner at my house, she had shown a lighter-than-normal appetite, but nothing anorexic. She had lost a little weight, but nothing drastic. But then—then when we’d met for dinner at the café and at Christmas, she’d shown little to no appetite.

I went back to my office and did some cursory reading on eating disorders by surfing the Internet. Bulimia? Maybe…

Or maybe the erratic behavior and appearance change heralded a mental disorder, like anxiety or depression. I added those to my catalog of possible problems she might be suffering from.

It certainly wasn’t pregnancy. She was on birth control so it ruled that out. But something about that conclusion bugged me and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Hours later, in the middle of working through a stack of papers I had to sign, my pen froze when I realized what it was. I’d rummaged through her sack pretty thoroughly the night she’d fallen asleep over at my place. I’d found the sharps container, the syringes, and I’d freaked. After that, I’d ransacked everything, looked in her makeup case and everywhere else. And the one thing I hadn’t seen?

Birth control pills. They came in a special box. I’d seen them before, of course, when she’d lived with me and when we’d traveled together. The type she used came in a little green square that opened like a compact when you pressed the little silver button—and they were stored in a grid that was labeled by day of the week.

She never forgot those, carried them with her everywhere when we traveled, of course. But they had not been in the bag of her things when she’d come home from Vegas.

And in Vegas, we’d…

I counted back the days since the Con. Almost four weeks. I fought for a breath after that realization. I paced for a half hour in front of my window. Most of my officers, including Jordan, were out of town still from the holiday. I thought up a long errand to send Maggie on to get her away from her desk and then I went to the drugstore on my lunch break.