He walks away without looking back, and I watch until he reaches the elevator lobby. Maybe he’s right. Maybe if I could just think for a minute there might be a way to keep my job while also keeping Chip out of trouble. I skim my teeth over my bottom lip and reach for my office door, thinking of the lone protein bar at the bottom of my desk drawer. Maybe Chip’s right about my hangry eyes showing. First, I’ll eat; then I’ll strategize.
I push into my office and immediately startle back.
A heart-stopping, electric current stuns all five of my senses at once at the sight of the broad-shouldered man staring out my office window. For the briefest of seconds, every shattered thing in my world pushes to the periphery to make way for a hope that hurts nearly as badly as the heartache it’s desperate to replace. On sheer instinct, my body moves towards him, desiring a reunion I’ve never allowed, a restoration I’ve never believed possible. But as soon as he faces me, it all comes rushing back into focus again. The place and time I yearn for in my restless dreams no longer exists. And yet somehow, the past I fled is standing right in front of me, hundreds of miles off course and a handful of years too late.
For an immeasurable amount of time, neither of us speaks, allowing my brain the space it needs to thrust my last in-person memory of Joel Campbell to the surface. Joel: sitting in the front row of Lighthouse Community Fellowship at Cece’s funeral next to a leggy redhead who fiddles with the yellow marigold pinned to his lapel. Me: sitting two rows behind them in the not-quite-family-but-more-than-friend section. Perhaps the most honest definition of the in-between I straddled as Captain Hal’s daughter and Joel Campbell’s . . . whatever we once were to each other.
Though his stance is as unwavering as it’s always been, I can’t help but note the weariness anchored to his shoulders and the faint brushstrokes of silver interspersed through his thick, cinnamon-brown waves. It’s the same dignified shade of silver his father embraced sometime in his early thirties. And likely what Joel himself will embrace in only a few years’ time. His solid frame is a far cry from the lanky, athletic build of his youth, as if his once-familiar dress code of blue jeans and a logoed work polo is no longer acceptable. This Joel wears slacks and a button-up shirt. Yet it’s the hauntingly empathetic way his gaze fuses with mine that renders me motionless.
“I’m sorry, Ingrid” is all Joel gets out before I’m reaching for something solid. A door, a wall, anything that will keep me upright as my reconstructed world begins to collapse in on itself.
“Is it Wendy? Has something happened to—”
“No, no.” He shakes his head emphatically, as if realizing only then that he chose the same words to start this conversation as he did on the two darkest days of my life. “Aunt Wendy is . . . she’s fine. Everyone back home is fine.” He pauses again, and I wonder if his definition of fine is as fluid as my own has become. A word used only in relativity. “What I meant to say is that I’m sorry to show up unannounced like this, but I didn’t come to report bad news.”
As my adrenaline recedes, my mind races to catch up on what I’ve missed. I eye my open office door, confused at how he—
“I told the receptionist I was here to see you.”
“And she just let you in here?” I’m in too much shock to feel violated by such a careless oversight at the hand of our newest receptionist and too well-versed in the paralyzing appeal of one Joel Campbell to feel indignant.
“I refrained from correcting her when she assumed we had a lunch date.” His pause is only as long as a breath, and yet I’m still holding mine when he adds, “But even if she hadn’t offered to let me wait for you inside your office, I came prepared to wait for however long it took to see you today.”
It takes great effort for me to cut the invisible tether between our gazes, but I’m not sure how much longer my knees will hold me if I continue trying to stand. Before I start toward the sanctuary of my desk, I make the cognizant decision to keep my office door ajar. Sharing such a confined space with Joel is an intimacy I can’t allow myself, not even at the cost of privacy. In true Campbell fashion, he waits for me to take my seat before he claims the chair across from my desk.
“It seems a phone call would have been more efficient than catching a flight,” I say with a candor that seems to surprise us both. “For the record, I do check my voicemail daily.”
“This deserves more than a voicemail.” He shifts in his seat and tugs out a small, slightly crumpled manila envelope from a satchel on the floor, only he doesn’t hand it off to me right away. Instead, he holds it hostage near his chest in a protective manner that hastens my pulse. “Do you remember Marshall Evans? He graduated a couple of years ahead of me, and he’s the attorney who took over Cece’s estate dealings after his grandfather’s stroke last fall.”
“Lloyd Evans.” The name of the Campbell’s former family attorney sails off my tongue easily. A kind man in his late seventies with a broom mustache and a small-town demeanor. Lloyd had phoned me regarding Cece’s initial wishes soon after her service, but it was Marshall who followed up with me a couple months later, after Lloyd’s stroke left him nonverbal. For his own records, I’d repeated the same conclusion I’d come to with his grandfather, and we hadn’t had a reason to speak since.
“Marshall’s spent the better part of this year transitioning Lloyd’s clients and accounts to his own practice, which took some effort, seeing as his grandfather’s organizational system was mostly kept up here.” Joel points to his temple. “Marshall had every reason to believe Lloyd kept all his notes regarding Cece’s estate in the same filing location.” He pauses. “But he called me in to his office yesterday after he found something odd tucked away in an old cabinet. Something that was supposed to be delivered to us three months after Cece passed.” He holds out the envelope so it hovers in the gap between us. “This.”
My voice is as thin as my breath. “What is that?”
But the instant I reach for it, I see the red confidential logo stamped on the back and pull my hand away. Despite Cece’s wishes for Joel and me to hold the rights to her intellectual property together, I declined the title of trustee. I’m not a Campbell. I will never be a Campbell. Whatever business decisions are required, Joel is more than capable of handling them on his own.
“I’ve already told Marshall that I don’t wish to review any documents or reports regarding her estate or—”
“Open it.”
I eye him warily. “I’m sorry you wasted a flight out here for this, but like I said—”
“Just open it, Indy. Please.”
The use of my nickname kicks through a deadbolt inside my chest, and despite my resolve, I take the envelope from him and turn it over in my hands. I lift the gold brad at the back, which reveals a second envelope tucked inside. Yellow. This envelope doesn’t have the attorney’s confidential logo stamped across the back. Instead, there’s a note paperclipped to the front, written in a script I’d know as well as my own: In the event of my death, please follow my previously stated instructions and deliver this letter to Joel Campbell and Ingrid Erikson.
Panic sloshes up my esophagus as I contemplate the cruelty of such a terrible, terrible prank. “Tell me what this is, Joel. Stop playing games with me and just tell me what this is all about.”