Jax was playing the bagpipes. No tune I recognized. A low note, holding there at the bottom like endurance, and the melody soaring above it, drifting back on the wind. A tune that made you ache, that made you think of sunsets fading into dark, of a bugle playing The Last Post over a field of white crosses. Of the sacrifices the brave made, because that was what they’d been asked to do.
He toa taumata rao, Koro would say. Courage has many resting places. In Jax, it had come to stay.
The horizon was yellow and orange now, the clouds above it lit with pink, then purple, the sky slowly turning to azure as the sun broke over the horizon and I caught up with Jax. He was wearing shorts, moving in rhythm to the music, his bare feet leaving footprints in the wet sand. A real foot, and the other one. The one he’d learned to use, when life had given it to him. The one he was walking on with, because it was what he had.
Jax
I played because the sun was coming up over the water. Because I was a New Zealander in my heart, and a Scot in my blood. Because this was the best country in the world, and the beach was the best place to play the pipes, and I was lucky to be here for all of it. Because I had a house that was exactly what I’d always wanted, and last night, I’d had the woman I loved there with me. I played because there was too much emotion in my chest, and it had to come out in my breath and in the music.
And, probably, because it was better than crying again.
I walked past the mountainous boulders, gleaming wet and rough and round in the dawn light, past tourists who immortalized me on their phones and wondered what my story was and what my scars meant. For once, I didn’t care what they saw, or what they thought. I knew, and that was enough.
The strains of Highland Cathedral drifted back behind me, over the sea, over the beach, taken by the wind, and I took a breath and started in on Scotland the Brave. And Karen came up beside me.
I took my mouth off the blowpipe, and the sound gradually faded away. She said, “Don’t stop. Not unless you want to. It’s beautiful.”
“I’d rather talk to you. It’s my practice session, that’s all. Bagpipes are too loud to play indoors. Sleep well?”
“Yes. I love your house. Tell your dad that if he’s worried about it not impressing women, he can stop worrying.”
I smiled. Somehow, the things she said always did that for me. “Sorry I’m not wearing the kilt.”
She laughed, and I let the pipes rest on their harness, took her hand, and said, “Now I’ve seen everything beautiful this morning.”
“Mm.” She rested her head against my shoulder. “Did I mention that I loved you?”
My heart was already too full. Now, it was going to overflow, and I’d already cried twice in the past twenty-four hours. I said, “You may have done. I don’t mind hearing it again, though. I could tell you that I love you, too, because it’s true.”
She sighed. “Yep. It’s all right here, isn’t it? We’re so lucky. Even though you’re not wearing a kilt. I’m not sure I can stand the kilt. It could be too much. I could explode from too much manly goodness.”
I laughed and turned around. “Coffee, then. Breakfast.”
“Sounds good. All right, I’ve given you lots of recovery time, so I’m just going to ask. Is your dad always a jerk?”
This morning, I could smile when I answered that. “No. He’s good to my mum. Good to my sisters. A pretty good boss, from what I know, though he’s a tough one. He’s disappointed, that’s all. Heather wasn’t interested in the business. Fair enough. Poppy was a possibility, but she wanted to do her own thing, and now, she wants to do it more. I wondered, for a bit there, if he’d take Max on, but that’s not looking like such a good idea.”
“No,” she said. “I can see that. Something’s odd there, I’m guessing. She doesn’t seem—quite happy.”
“You’re right. But there I was, the last chance and the best hope. Not bad at maths, got the diploma and all.”
“Business,” she said. “Like me.”
“Yeh. And then I did the modeling instead of joining him, and that was the biggest disappointment of all.”
“Good money, though. You can’t tell me he doesn’t like money.”
“Rich-lister playboy?”
“But it was your own money.”
“Not entirely. I got the same amount in trust that my sisters did when I turned twenty-one. Don’t tell anyone. You’ll be shocked to hear it, but some girls could be attracted to that. He was afraid Granddad had ruined me, because there I was, year after year, wasting my life. Then the military came along. He hit the roof at that one. So you see—three kids, and too much disappointment. And then there’s being scared that I’ll die, of course.”
“You’re tolerant.”
“I can afford to be.” The morning light bathed the boulders and the beach in the kind of glow you couldn’t believe was real, the breeze touched the fringes of hair on Karen’s forehead and the nape of her neck, and the force of the tide pulled the water out from shore and the doubt from my heart. “I’ve got what I want.”
“Yeah?” She tucked her hand through my arm, and I thought that walking through life with her like that wouldn’t be bad at all. “Despite the leg.”
“Despite the leg,” I said. “Despite everything.”
“Then,” she said, “could you play me another song?”
So I did. I played Scotland the Brave. More people recorded us on their phones, and I looked out at the boulders and the sunrise and the sea, walked on my two legs, and didn’t care a bit.
Karen
That afternoon, I did the thing I hadn’t done for two months. I went to the Prairie Plus website.
I was done being numb. I was feeling life again, and wanting to feel it more, but there that lump still was, in my stomach, in my chest, blocking my path. It was time to take the next step and look, because the alternative was to wall the past eight years off like they’d never happened. How was I going to know what to do next if I didn’t make some sense of what had happened before?
To be honest, the walling-off idea was still plenty appealing. I wanted to think about how Jax and I were going to spend the next couple weeks instead, but Jax, at least, had an ending point—or a beginning point, maybe—sitting out there. We weren’t drifting along in a bubble anymore. His road had a fork in it, and he was going to be heading down it.
I’d started to really enjoy the bubble, though. I wanted my beautiful bubble. I didn’t want to think about the fact that I needed a job, and I still didn’t know what that was going to look like. I didn’t want to think about the company I’d worked so hard to build, and what my former coworkers were doing now. I didn’t want to wonder whether Jada was still doing yoga in the aisle, now that she’d moved into the fancy new offices, or whether Byron was still allowed to bring his Italian greyhound, Shazam, to work with him. And I sure didn’t want to think for one tiny second about Josh.
I especially didn’t want to know who had replaced me. But I needed to know all of it.
My colleagues—former colleagues—had texted me, at first, in shock and support. They hadn’t emailed, because my work email wasn’t mine anymore, and I had no access to anything in it. That was maybe the most bizarre thing of all. Dozens of emails a day, people writing to me, talking to me, asking my opinion, asking for my decision, just . . . gone, like they’d never been there at all.
I’d thought I was important. I’d thought I was irreplaceable, in fact, which was probably why I’d made Prairie Plus about ninety percent of my life. I’d thought I was giving my time and my attention and myself to something bigger than me, something that mattered.
Maybe I had been doing that, though, because what we’d done had mattered, surely. We’d made it easy for people to shift the way they ate, at least in one little way, to something better for their bodies and better for the world around them. Plus what Koro had said. I’d helped all those people get jobs and build careers. That was worth something, wasn’t it?
&nbs
p; I hadn’t answered any of those texts, except to say, Thanks for your support. I’ll be fine. Good luck. I’d copied and pasted that over and over, unable to engage more than that, because thinking about the company, talking about what had happened, had felt like ripping chunks of flesh out of my body.
Now, though, I had distance, right? Almost ten thousand miles and almost two months’ worth of distance. I was sitting on a deck on a gorgeous day in New Zealand, looking at the creamy, scalloped crescents of waves washing up gently onto golden sand. I was feeling the touch of a fresh breeze, thinking that in a little while, I was going to take my first run since I’d gotten sick, and I was going to do it on that beach. That tomorrow, I’d go to the gym with Jax, and swimming afterwards, because my arm had healed, and it was time to get back into shape. And that in a week or so, we were going to ride the Alps 2 Ocean cycle trail that ran from Aoraki/Mount Cook all the way to the sea. Training for both of us, and, just maybe, thinking time for me, in the beauty and the quiet of the South Island in late summer.
I mean, we didn’t even have to camp. Where else could you take a week-long bike ride through the mountains and the highlands, have your luggage carted ahead for you, and sleep in a bed and have a shower and a beer every night? Clearly, I was the target customer for this glamping deal.
Meanwhile, here I was, knowing that I had to get out of my bubble eventually, so it might as well start now. I wasn’t raw hamburger inside anymore. I could text people back now, and I needed to find out which companies were moving and shaking, and where they were doing it. The cobwebs in my brain had been cleared out, surely, which meant that I could shine a light into those dark spaces and start putting something in there. A new plan. A post-breakdown plan. A post-bubble plan.
I needed to know what was going on in the industry, because I needed to present myself to my future employer, whoever that might be, and explain everything I could bring to the table going forward. I wouldn’t be a founder anymore, I’d be a cog, and I needed to make myself look like the biggest, shiniest, most functional cog they’d ever seen, so they’d plug me into the machinery at a pivot point, and I could start making a difference again.
My ego didn’t matter. Doing something important mattered, and doing it smarter next time really mattered. Even if I had to suck it up and take Hemi’s advice.
Of course, there was Jax. Oh, boy, was there ever Jax. How could I leave him behind? How could I leave this behind? I didn’t know, but I was going to have to figure it out.
All of that was why I looked, and possibly why the article on the Press page dropped me like a steer being stunned in the slaughterhouse.
Prairie Plus, Developer of Better Than Beef, Ramps Up Production Under M&P Ownership.
Fine. Even though I was breathing at about twice my normal rate. Ramping up meant more jobs. I didn’t want the company to fail. That was the last thing I wanted. The article was from a month ago. I really hadn’t been looking.
It was the next part that got me.
The company, whose product-development arm is now overseen by Angel Obrigado, hired into the position after the abrupt departure of former VP Karen Sinclair, reported a ten-percent increase in fourth quarter earnings on Friday, surpassing analysts’ expectations.
“We’re pleased by the growth we’ve achieved,” CEO Josh Ranfeld said, “but we’re not standing still. I’m excited to announce that we’re moving forward with our new product line, Sizzle. For the first time, people can eat sausage that’s both delicious and good for them. No scary mystery meat, and no compromises on taste. We’ve had amazing feedback from our focus groups, and we’re refining the products now, planning to bring them to supermarket shelves later this year.”
The article went on to talk about rumblings of competition, particularly from Sunshine Foods, which was reported to be putting together a new division to capitalize on our development of the market, but I only skimmed that. My mind had stayed back there on those first two paragraphs. And if the folds of my brain had started relaxing while I’d been in New Zealand? They’d tightened right back up again, and I got a wave of nausea so strong, I nearly had to dash for the bathroom.
First—Angel Obrigado? My second-in-command in product development, whom I’d fired, five months ago, when I’d found out that she’d shared too much with Sunshine Foods? She’d sworn it was just shop talk, loose lips over wine at a conference, had apologized and made promises, but that wasn’t what I’d heard, or what made sense, when I’d pieced together the clues. Emails that she’d forwarded to her personal address, for example, that would be more than useful to a competitor.
I’d been so mad. I’d hired Angel. I’d trained her and encouraged her and brought her up with me. I hadn’t even minded that she was impossibly good-looking, because I didn’t judge women on their looks, negatively or otherwise, I wasn’t at work to be beautiful, and I wasn’t in competition with my colleagues. We were all in it together. We were a team.
In the end, we’d done a layoff with severance instead of a termination for cause, because investors and analysts didn’t want to hear about internal divisions, but we’d accompanied it with a noncompete agreement that would spike her guns. The same kind of agreement I’d signed when I’d left, the kind that meant I couldn’t go to Sunshine Foods now and make M&P—and Josh—sorry.
A noncompete agreement didn’t apply, though, if your company hired you back.
Josh had shared my indignation over Angel, or I’d thought he had. Apparently not so much.
And then there was the sausage. My beautiful proposal, the laboriously acquired recipes and techniques I’d been putting together into a presentation on that last day, the product of so many late nights and sudden moments of clarity in the shower after freezing runs in the dark, when I’d dashed out from behind the shower curtain, still soaking wet, to make notes on a legal pad beside my bed, the water from my hair dripping on the paper and smudging the ink.
Now, my proposal, my techniques, my recipes, my research, and all the rest of the fruits of my dreams belonged to Prairie Plus and M&P, like every other bit of my work product. Like the management and the innovation that had resulted in that fourth-quarter earnings number, from a time when I’d made a whole lot of that happen.
Nobody cries over sausage, I told myself when my throat started to close up and the pit of my stomach went icy-cold. This is done, and it’s nothing new. What difference does it make if it’s Angel or somebody else? It’s the past. What would you want, for the company to go into bankruptcy, just because you don’t get to play anymore? I didn’t want that, at least in my head I didn’t. My heart wasn’t so sure. My heart felt one thing. Betrayal.
Part of me wanted to curl up on the bathroom floor again, but it got taken over pretty fast by something else. By the red-hot ball of rage that settled into my chest and had me wanting to pace. Wanting to run. Actually, wanting to hit something, but unfortunately, that wasn’t an option.
It was too bad that you’d go to jail for, say, throwing a chair through a conference-room window, because I was really wishing I could go back in time and do it. Imagining it wasn’t doing nearly enough for me. All I had was the running thing.
“Screw that,” I said aloud when I was doing just that, when I’d put on my shoes and had run off the first, worst flames of rage. I was past the boulders now, and all the tourists taking pictures of them, too, and had moved on to the part of the beach that was empty, where nobody came. Nothing but the birds to hear me, and I was going to yell if I wanted to. Which I did. “Screw all of them,” I told the birds. “I’m going to do better. I’m going to do more. Screw all of you.”
A voice at my ear. “Hope you don’t mean me.”
I jumped a mile, and then I laughed, even though the emotion was still roiling around inside me. I kept running, and Jax ran with me. Easily, just like that day on the beach with the kids, even though I could tell from the wet patches on his gray T-shirt that he’d already done plenty during his gym visit.
“Well, yeah.”
I explained, and got mad all over again doing it, and he said, “So you went running. You do realize that’s why you’ll come out on top, right? You realize this is why you’ll win?”
“No, but I’d sure love to hear it. That’s not exactly at the forefront of my mind right now.”
“Sure it is.” His footsteps matched mine. In sync. “You have to know it. You’re not crying on the bed, you’re running on the beach and making vows out loud.”
“I cried on the bed at the beginning,” I confessed. “Actually, I cried on the floor. Well, I didn’t cry. I sort of . . . collapsed on the floor, though. That’s why I’m here, in New Zealand, because Hope and Hemi found me that way, and Hope worries. I’m always skinny, but I’m not usually this skinny.”
“Mm,” he said. “I see.”
“You were so sure yesterday,” I said. The thing that had kept bothering me, nagging at me like pulling on a loose thread. “You’ve moved all the way past the anger, all the way to certainty. And I’m still just so mad. I’m still so stuck.”
“Because it’s been five months for me, that’s why. How long for you?”
“Almost two months.”
Ahead of us, a flock of little water birds on stiltlike legs took off, settling farther up the beach, where we’d disturb them again, and they’d take off again, too, as many times as it took. “At two months in,” Jax said, “they fitted me for my leg. It hurt like hell, and I was so weak anyway, I felt like I was dragging it. My skin blistered, and the place where my foot had been burned every night. I couldn’t sleep, and I was afraid to take the drugs to help me do it. Afraid to reach for too much comfort, that I’d run away from the pain and the fear and into addiction. The scars on my chest were still lumpy and barely healed—because they’d got infected—and they didn’t feel any better than the leg. And I thought—I’m going to be sitting behind a desk, looking at spreadsheets, because I won’t be able to do anything else. Anything I know how to do, or anything I want to do. I’m going to be working for my dad. I’m going to be stuck. You can call that panic, if you like. That was how it felt at two months, but I turned out to be tougher than that, in the end. Just like you.”
Kiwi Rules (New Zealand Ever After Book 1) Page 36