NEW CHAPTER AWAITS

ANNABELLE

She woke up to her own face in the bathroom mirror and immediately looked away.

That was a mistake. The sudden movement informed her, with great urgency, that her head was a raging storm with loud clashing waves. 

She made it to the bed and sat on the edge of it and conducted a slow, careful assessment of her situation.

Facts, in order of importance:

One. She was alive.

Two. She had cried enough last night to personally solve a drought.

Three. She looked like she had me run over by a car, her puffy eyes never looked this big before. She pressed her hands over her face.

On the bright side, she thought, at least she hadn't texted her situationship from 2019. 

She almost laughed at herself. Then her head reminded her that laughing had consequences and she subsided.

Her phone was on the nightstand, screen down, she heard it vibrate turned it rather slowing, not ready to face the world just yet. Six missed calls from Jack. She hissed.

She was about to put the phone back down when the notification banner caught her eye. An email. London sender. Subject line, she didn't immediately process because her brain was still buffering.

She sat up too fast. Winced. Sat up anyway.

Enoch.

The realization hit her the way cold water hits. She remembered calling, his voice when he wanted to fix her problem. 

When she opened the email, she found a formal employment letter on company letterhead with her name on it and a compensation package that made her read the salary figure three times because surely there was a decimal point she was missing.

Head of Brand Communications. Full benefits. Signing bonus. Monthly performance incentive. A role that was exactly the shape of everything she had been doing for five years without the title or the credit or apparently the salary she had been told didn't exist because of a financial crisis that also didn't exist.

She sat with the phone in her lap for a long moment, her mouth widened with shock.

She could not remember telling Enoch she needed a job. She was fairly certain she hadn't, as of last night she hadn't known what she needed, she had only known what she'd lost. And yet here was an employment letter with her name on it drafted before five in the morning.

She didn't finish the thought because someone aggressively knocked on her door. She went to the peephole.

Jack was standing in her hallway with his arms folded and a frown that suggested the morning had not been going well for him either. Good, said a small part of her. The part that had driven home alone last night while he stood in a restaurant not following.

She watched him through the fish-eye lens. The peephole did something interesting to faces. It elongated them, bent the proportions slightly. On Jack, specifically, the effect was extraordinary. How had she not noticed this earlier. Indeed, love really was blind.

She pressed her hand over her mouth. Maybe it’s the offer Enoch made that left her light spirited, or Jake really looked funny. She could barely hold in her laugh.

"I know you're in there, Annabelle." He said in a measured tone of voice. Also he had used her full name. Jack never used her full name. He said it was too long, that he preferred names that got to the point. Short names for short attention spans, apparently, and Mia clocked in at three letters so that tracked.

She bit down on the laugh.

"Please." He added it after a pause, like an afterthought, like please was a word he'd remembered existed and wasn't sure of the correct placement for.

She lost the battle with laughter.

It came out of her suddenly and completely, the laugh she had been sitting on since she'd looked through the peephole standing in a hallway being distorted by a fish-eye lens into something that looked like a man shaped by bad consequences. She laughed until her eyes watered, which was fine because her eyes were already swollen, a little more water wasn't going to change the situation and head would punish her later but it was worth it.

"Annabelle." His voice had sharpened. He could hear her. "This is not funny."

She laughed harder.

"Open the door."

She did not open the door. She stayed at the peephole because the peephole was providing content she had not anticipated needing today and she was not walking away from it.

He knocked again. She heard him sigh. He had come to talk about work, he said, she was too smart to let one bad night ruin what they had built.

She thought about what they had built, felt the laugh die down into something quieter. He waited for a response. She didn't give him one.

His voice dropped half a register and he told her that no one in their industry would touch her without his reference. That she had no contract, no documented contributions, no professional standing that didn't run through him. That she should think very carefully before she made a decision she couldn't undo.

She listened to him say it and she wondered what she ever saw in him. She had given him five years. She had given him her talent and her time and her complete blind faith that he was who she had decided he was. She had held everything else back and he had spent those five years accepting what she offered and quietly, methodically making sure she couldn't leave.

Jack turned to leave, he walked away down the corridor and she watched him go and felt the recognition of an absence she had not yet finished grieving. Her stupid heart still ache for him.

Annabelle let him go.

She went back to the bed and sat down and looked at the email still open on her phone. Then she looked at the salary figure on the employment letter one more time just to confirm it was real.

A second email arrived.

Flight details. Her name. First class, direct, London Heathrow. Enoch was very thorough.

She accepted the offer before she could think better of it.

Then she put her phone on her chest and stared at the ceiling and did something she had not done since she was a child waiting for Christmas morning. She kicked her feet up. A few quick kicks of pure uncomplicated giddiness, because she was going back home.

She was going home and she had a job and the job had a salary that made her current salary look like a rounding error. Jack thought she had nowhere to go but she had a firstclass ticket leaving in three days.

She sat up. Started a mental list of what to ship and what to leave and her eyes caught the wine bottles on the kitchen counter and she thought about last night and jack walking away from her door. Tears pulled at the bottom of her eyes. She couldn’t understand why jake chose to throw away what they had, and maybe she never will.

She sat with it for a moment. The version of the future she had been building in her head, the kids she had decided on, the home, the ordinary life. None of it was real and all of it had mattered anymore. She felt so hollow.

Anabelle wiped her face with the back of her hand and stood up.

She went to make coffee and started a packing list on her phone. She focused on her new beginning as much as she could, it gave her the strength she needed.

New chapter, a new title on a very good employment letter.