Choices

by Mia Malone

  “Yeah,” he said, not interested in discussing Nina with his ex-wife.

  “Okay,” she said and pouted in a way he remembered thinking was cute.

  Now it looked petulant and a little silly.

  “So...” he said and moved an inch backward to indicate that unless she had anything else to add, the conversation was over.

  She smiled suddenly, and he narrowed his eyes.

  What was she angling for now?

  “I was invited to celebrate the Martins’ anniversary.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be a great evening.”

  She blinked a couple of times but kept smiling.

  “Marianne told me you are invited too.”

  Really? She’d stopped by to discuss his social life? The invitations had also been sent out a long time ago, so he was unsure why she brought it up now.

  “Yes.”

  “It’ll be a big thing, she says, and the kids are invited too. I thought it would be nice if we went there together,” she murmured, and added demurely, “As a family.”

  It was his turn to blink in confusion. The four of them hadn’t been a family in a year, so he wondered if his ex-wife lost her friggin’ mind. He knew the twins were invited, and that they were planning to share a car to the event with a couple of friends.

  “Jackie,” he said quietly. “Nina and I are going with Teddy and Layla Winthorpe.”

  “Nina?”

  Yes. She’d lost her goddamned mind.

  “The woman I’m living with?” he said curtly. “The one whose house you are standing outside?” That had come out a bit harsher than he intended, so he made an effort to calm down and added in a softer voice, “I’m sure it’ll be a great party. We’ll see you there?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said and smiled again, although it looked a little tense. “The kids will keep me company, I’m sure.”

  Ah. He recognized that voice. It was a sad and slightly breathy voice with just a hint of whine, and Jackie had used it often to emphasize how she was a victim when he worked late or had gone on business trips.

  She hadn’t used it quite as often while charging shit on her credit card, he thought grimly but kept his face blank.

  “I’m sure Si and Suzie will be happy to go there with you,” he said.

  “Are you remodeling the house?” she asked, and he raised his brows in surprise.

  “Water damage.”

  “Ah,” she said breezily. “I thought you were fixing it up to sell.”

  What the hell?

  “It’s a bit chilly today,” he said instead of telling her that he had, in fact, started thinking about selling the huge house. “If there was something you wanted to discuss, then I need to go and get a shirt. Or...”

  “No, no,” she said quickly. “It was nice seeing you, Matthias.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “See you at the party.”

  “Looking forward to it,” she said cheekily and smiled brightly.

  He nodded and closed the door, thinking that, no. He was not looking forward to seeing her, and he was pretty sure Nina would look forward to it even less.

  ***

  Nina

  I was walking so fast it was nearly a run, but I was late for a meeting.

  “Can’t talk,” I called out to Peggy, who was waving a stack of papers. “Late, late, late.”

  As I rounded the corner and made a beeline toward the stairs no one but me seemed to use, I heard her shouting that I should call her asap after the meeting.

  My time working for Jacob was approaching its end, and I was finalizing my conclusions and recommendations. While I half-ran, my mind was busy trying to figure out if I should create a separate section about purchasing of indirect material, or if it should just go into the part about the general supplier management process.

  Later that afternoon, Peg and I would talk to Matthias, Len, and George about the small suppliers we had found which were compliant with their process but still felt odd. Matthias was away, visiting one of their biggest domestic customers for a couple of days, but he’d participate via phone in the car to the airport. Since we’d concluded that there was a possibility that someone was stealing from the company, I wondered if we shouldn’t have pushed even harder to have that meeting. Or perhaps we could have waited. We weren’t sure, and the amounts weren’t that big, so it might not be –

  Both my feet slipped on something, and I was suddenly airborne. I reached for the handrail and managed to get a firm grip, but as I crashed down, the thing came loose from the wall.

  For a split second that felt like a lifetime, I hung in the air, and then I hit the hard stairs with a loud thud. Everything went black, but I couldn’t determine if I were out for seconds or hours, and suddenly steps were approaching both from above and below.

  Len and Peggy crouched next to me, and they seemed to be talking because their mouths were moving, but I couldn’t make any sense of the sounds surrounding me.

  I also couldn’t suck enough air into my lungs, and everything hurt.

  “Shit!” I suddenly heard Peggy shout. “Why in the hell is there oil on these steps?”

  I closed my eyes and wondered if it wouldn’t be best if I just slept a little while Peg or someone else called the cleaning crew and got the stairs wiped off.

  “Nina.”

  I smiled a little when I heard Len.

  “Nina.”

  I said yes, but not out loud because it seemed too hard to make my mouth move.

  “Nina, for fuck’s sake,” he roared. “Open your goddamned eyes and talk to me.”

  I opened my goddamned eyes and stared straight at him.

  “You should not use the f-bomb in the office, Lenny,” I said, enunciating every word to make sure he understood. “Not appropriate.”

  “What?” he said with a chuckle.

  “You should call Luke because this is the second time someone has tried to stop us from having a meeting that might expose fraudulent behavior,” I whispered.

  “What?” he repeated, slightly louder, and clearly finding this statement a lot less amusing.

  During my semi-nap, a few things had suddenly become crystal clear to me, though.

  Peggy had gotten a cabinet slammed into her just before the last time we tried to discuss the odd invoices. Everyone knew she kicked the thing shut, and she was the one most likely to put papers in it.

  Security had investigated and shared that the screws securing the big thing to the wall had been loose, but they didn’t know why.

  And I was almost the only one using the stairs, which apparently had been prepped with oil. The handrail should not have fallen off, and if the screws were loose also this time, it was too much of a coincidence for my liking.

  I tried to sit up, but my whole body hurt, and I couldn’t hold back a small whimper. It was still a struggle to breathe, and there was a strange whizzing sound in my ears.

  “Len?” I said again.

  “Yeah?” he said and moved his phone away from his ear.

  “Can you call Matthias?”

  “Have him on the phone right now,” Len said and stretched out his hand toward me. “Do you want to talk to him?”

  “I’m going to pass out,” I said clearly. “Can you ask him to come home?”

  Then everything went black again.

  ***

  I was on my couch looking at a lot of people who were watching me warily as if I’d faint again, which I hadn’t done in the past several hours.

  There had apparently been a bit of a commotion when I passed out. Peggy told me Matthias roared so loudly on the phone that the people who had come running stopped, and some even took a small step back. Their CEO wasn’t known to shout often, but when he did, everyone ran for cover, Peg said with a grin.

  Way before the ambulance arrived, I was awake again and sat on the stairs, arguing with Len about getting up and walking down to the garage so he could drive me to the ER for the checkup he felt was needed.

 
; Being rolled through the company on a stretcher was probably one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life, and it didn’t help that Len poked me and asked me loudly to hang in there every time I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the people staring at me.

  I got that they were worried, but I’d mostly gotten the wind knocked out of me, so except for the pain in my back and side, I felt fine. Or, yeah. I’d twisted my hand, so that hurt a little too, and something burned like fire on my calf. But I had not hit my head and kept telling everyone that I was just bruised.

  A gazillion x-rays and tests later, an elderly gentleman in a white coat walked up to the bed I’d been placed in while we waited. Len had apparently raised such a stink they’d let both him and Peggy wait at my side.

  “Ms. Petrie,” the doctor said jovially. “I have reviewed the test results and the x-rays, and it all looks fine. You are just bruised.”

  “I know,” I said and aimed a pretty satisfied smirk toward Len. “Can I go home now?”

  “Absolutely. Take it easy for a while. In case you start having other symptoms, you should call your own doctor, and –”

  “What other symptoms?” Len asked brusquely.

  “Len –”

  “Matty is going to ask me, and I do not want to tell him I don’t know. Do you feel like telling him you don’t know?” he snapped.

  I turned toward the doctor and asked meekly, “What other symptoms?”

  “Nausea,” he said with a smile.

  I waited, but that was apparently it, so I nodded, and then we checked me out of the hospital. Len drove me home where I got to lay on my couch under the watchful eyes of Len, Peggy, Layla, Teddy, Luke, Tony, and one of his sisters, my elderly neighbor, and for unknown reasons my electrician, Bobby Sunshine.

  The door was thrown open, and both Matthias’ kids walked in, so I moved to get up, which made half the crowd growl.

  “I’m at her place now,” Simon said into his phone. “She looks fine.”

  He guessed that he was talking to one of his parents, and since I didn’t think it was Jackie-the-jackal, I waved at him to hand me the phone.

  “Hey, baby,” I said softly.

  “Hello to you, too,” Jacob said with a chuckle.

  “Oh,” I said, and added, “I thought it was Matty.”

  “He’s on his way back,” Jacob said. “I talked to him a while ago, he should be at your place about the same time I get there.”

  “Are you on your way?” I asked. “Jacob, I’m fine. You’re all overreacting.” A thought struck me, and I winced. “Is there any way you can refrain from telling my father what happened?”

  “None,” Jacob said happily. “They’re in the car with me.”

  Dear Lord.

  My father was not good with injuries. I’d broken my arm as a stupid teenager, skiing out of bounds in the northern parts of Sweden, and he had wailed louder than I did. Luckily, Swedish nurses are made of stern stuff, and a sturdy woman called Gerd had told him to put a sock in it. Since she held one out toward him, we’d assumed she meant it quite literally, and that had shut my father up.

  “Okay,” I said weakly. “How is he?”

  “Crying like a baby,” Jacob said, again in that weirdly jovial voice. “Are you really okay?” he asked, and his voice had changed into his usual calm, comforting rumble.

  “Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “Everyone is overreacting. I slipped and fell on the stairs. Have a bruise the size of Canada on my ribs, and my wrist is lightly sprained, but that’s it.”

  “Good,” he said. “We’ll be at your place within an hour. Here’s Josie now.”

  I smiled then because if they’d be there in an hour, then so would Matthias.

  When I’d talked to Mom, I looked around the room and wondered if a little crow control wouldn’t be in order but realized that there wasn’t anyone I wanted to ask to leave, so I just smiled and turned to Matthias’ daughter Susannah.

  “Could you organize food for everyone, sweetie?”

  “I could, but I don’t want to,” she said with a grin. “Si will do it, and I’ll call your daughters.”

  Before I could protest, she walked away with Layla, and I turned to Simon.

  “Uh,” I wheezed out.

  “I’ll sort it out,” Tony cut in. “My aunt is on her way so she can stop by one of the restaurants and put in an order.”

  Mrs. Moretti was coming too?

  I turned to stare at Luke, who stopped scowling at his phone and grinned at me.

  “Do you really think Mom would stay away from something like this,” he said and waved a hand to indicate the gathering.

  I did not think that, actually, so I settled back into the pillows and exhaled. The painkillers they’d given me had kicked in, so I didn’t feel too bad, but it felt good to be taken care of. It was usually me taking care of everyone else.

  When Matthias walked in, I was sitting up and had a plate of food on my lap. Our eyes met, and he ignored everyone else as he crouched in front of me.

  “Baby,” he said softly and moved the plate away. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “Am now.”

  Then I leaned forward, put my forehead on his shoulder, and breathed deeply. I didn’t want to have a meltdown in front of everyone, but he seemed to understand and simply stroked my back as he murmured something softly into my hair.

  “Scared me,” I said when I’d straightened again.

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “Scared me too.” We looked at each other in silence, but then he smiled crookedly. “Not sure freaking out on my way out of a meeting with our biggest customer was a good sales strategy, babe.”

  “What?”

  He was about to explain when I heard a loud wail from the door and closed my eyes briefly.

  My parents had arrived.

  ***

  About the same time as we’d finished all the food, people seemed to have understood that I was doing just fine and started leaving. My ribs hurt, but I kept a smile on my face and let them hug me as they promised to check in on me.

  Dad had been alternating between demanding answers from the universe to how this could happen and crying on the shoulder of anyone standing close enough, but a large whiskey and a phone call from my daughters seemed to calm him down.

  Luke was on his way out the door when he assured my father that they were investigating my accident, which immediately started another round of tears. It was pretty hilarious to see the appalled look on the large detective's face when Dad leaned his forehead on his shoulder and sobbed, but Mom pulled the hysterical artiste away and nudged him down on the couch next to me.

  “Cornelius, you are such an old fool,” Mom said with an affectionate grin. “Stop bawling.”

  I turned slowly and stared at her. My mind was racing, and I swallowed a few times because things I’d heard and seen in the past months made the pieces of what had happened suddenly fit.

  “Luca,” I said hoarsely. “Can you stay a...” I blinked a few times and looked around the room. “Peggy, can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “Okay.”

  She got up, and so did I, and I moved my hand to indicate the stairs.

  “Nina,” Matthias said calmly. “What?”

  “I need to talk to Peg,” I said, hoping that he could be uncharacteristically patient for just a little while. “We’ll go upstairs for a few minutes.”

  “You’ll go outside to the patio for a few minutes,” he countered. “We’ll do the stairs together later.”

  Okay. As compromises went, that was a good one, so I nodded and walked outside.

  “What is it, Nina?” Peggy asked.

  “George has pretty ugly clothes,” I said. “Has he always dressed like that?”

  She raised her brows, but answered, “God, no. He has such a mid-life crisis. I bet he thinks he looks younger or something.”

  I sighed because that was what I’d thought.

  “When did it start?”
r />   “Almost a ye...” she trailed off, and her eyes widened. “A year ago.”

  Around the time when the suppliers had started to show up in the system.

  “There’s no fool like an old fool,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “What if he’s seeing someone in the accounting department?” I asked.

  “The accounting department?” she echoed.

  “Yes. It has to be there because they are setting up the suppliers in the system. I put that in my report the other day. I said it has to be changed since it’s in direct violation of common segregation of duties, and you have gotten notes from the external auditors on it as well.”

  Her face hardened, and she nodded curtly.

  “Seeing?” she asked, but I could tell that she knew what I meant.

  “I could be wrong, but if he was, um... dating one of the ladies in accounting, then they could quite easily set up the suppliers, create the invoices, and get them into the system. You have dual signatures on purchases, and it has all been signed by Len, Matthias, or one of the directors. But all of them have been co-signed by George.”

  “He signs a lot of things.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I wasn’t planning on putting it in my report, but I’ve seen how they sign things without looking too much on them, saying that George has signed, so it should be fine.” I winced, and added, “It’s not uncommon at all, Peggy. I saw the same thing in my old job, you know. They even said it straight to my face.” I faked a deep man-rumble, “As long as you’ve signed it, Nina, then I will sign too.”

  “I can’t believe it,” she murmured. “He has a good salary, so why...”

  “I don’t know, and I could be wrong. But if he’s involved with someone and he buys her things? Perhaps they go on trips, or I don’t know? Vegas?”

  Her face hardened, and her lips were suddenly a thin line.

  “Sharon,” she said. “Jesus, she’s thirty-six.”

  I couldn’t connect the name with any of the women, so I frowned.

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “It fits,” Peggy murmured, staring out at my half-finished garden. “She works in the purchase to pay-team, and she hasn’t been in Vegas lately, but a few of us had lunch the other day, and she talked a lot about her weekend...” She sighed and added, “In Atlantic City.”