“You said you knew Wyatt would be a perfect fit when you offered him the position,” Mia repeated Herbert’s words. “What did you mean?”
“Oh.” Herbert cleared his throat, his jolly demeanor gone in an instant. “Well, the division was insisting on bringing in someone with a big name, they gave me a deadline to appoint someone myself or they would do it for me.”
“Why?”
“They felt this sort of undertaking required someone with better ability to raise funds, ‘a new endeavor that would be a hard sell’, were their exact words,” Herbert said, tapping his scone against the matching plate in front of him. “I wasn’t happy about it.”
“But you let them bully you into it?” Mia asked, finally resting her cup back on its saucer before it shattered in her hands.
“It’s how things work, Mia, I’ve told you this before.” Herbert sighed, sounding almost exasperated with her. “This is academic politics. We may not like it, but it is what it is. I made the best of the situation.”
“I didn’t want you to make the best of the situation!” Herbert startled at the sudden rise in Mia’s voice, but something inside her had snapped. “I’ve spent the past few months thinking I somehow failed you by being skipped for the positionyouhavebeen telling me Ihave toget.”
“Mia…” Herbert’s gaze was full of pity when he said her name, but Mia didn’t want his pity or his sympathy. He had been hiding the truth from her, pushing her to play a game when all she was for him was a pawn in his own game.
“I thought you fought for me and lost because I was inadequate, because something was wrong with me.”
“I did fight for you, as long and as hard as I could,” Herbert said, his gaze hardened and his tone turned scolding. “And I was smart enough to know when I had to change my strategy. Any person the division would have chosen would have treated you like an inferior, if not fired you immediately. Wyatt gave you a chance to preserve your position, your hard work and achievements, the man was an admirer before he even met you. What else would you have me do, Mia?”
“Fight for me,” Mia answered quietly, defeated and deflated, a wave of pain rising in her chest and reaching her eyes. “I would have rather losteverythingprofessionally but have you stick with me until the end.” She slid her phone into her purse and looked up at Herbert, at the pain in his wary eyes. “I just neededyouto make me feel as if I were enough.”
Mia knew she was asking more than he could give her, that he wasn’t the person she needed these things from. The man who needed to hear these words had been dead for a long time, long enough for Mia to pretend her scars had faded into near nothing rather than still being bleeding wounds.
It was pointless to deny now. Mia had merely substituted the attention she had sought from her father with the attention she received from Herbert. She knew, at some basic level, but she never fully acknowledged the depths of it.
As she hailed a taxi and gave him her address, she realized Wyatt was there, waiting for her, and the knowledge of how far she was willing to go to prove herself worthy, how much she had hurt Wyatt for the sake of fighting windmills, flooded her with a sense of grief.
She wasn’t worthy. It was a fact that had been thrown in her face time and time again, that something was so fundamentally wrong with her she was deemed unlovable by any man she ever cared about.
Wyatt was no exception.
The Word
Wyatt
Wyatt was staringat the two full plates in front of him.
It had been over an hour since he sent Mia a message that dinner would be ready soon, that he was waiting, and she had yet to answer him. It wasn’t the first time, either.
She’d been steadily pulling away since her meeting with Professor Flinch, and no matter how much Wyatt tried to understand what had happened, he couldn’t get a straight answer from her. In his desperation he even went to Flinch, only to find him on an extended vacation forpersonal reasons.
Of course, Flinch may not have been the cause behind Mia’s sudden shift in attitude. Wyatt had overheard Mia speaking with her mother at all hours of the day over the past few weeks, and none of the conversations sounded pleasant or warm.
From the bits and pieces of information he managed to collect before Mia noticed him and abruptly hung up, Mia’s mother was trying to persuade her to come to Paris for some sort of party, an event Mia didn’t seem keen to attend.
Either way, nothing between Wyatt and Mia felt right.
On the surface, everything seemed fine. They were still working alongside one another at the hub with the same professional courtesy and collaboration, but Mia lacked her usual spark and pushback. She’d also been finding excuses not to come over to his apartment or why he couldn’t spend weekends at hers.
Wyatt was trying to be patient, considerate of whatever it was Mia was going through, but over two weeks of being blatantly shut out and ignored were slowly weighing down on Wyatt’s psyche.
The worst part was that he was certain Mia had been starting to see them as more. Up to the point she left to meet Flinch, Mia appeared to be opening up to him, carving out space for him in her life. The cold turkey change in her attitude was baffling and sent Wyatt into a tailspin of filling in the blanks with his worst fears.
Wyatt decided to clear the table. He’d lost his appetite and the heavy feeling in his chest was nearing the point of nausea. Just as he placed the plates in the sink, there was a knock on the door. It was soft and slow as if the person on the other side was hesitant.
The weight in Wyatt’s chest grew another pound heavier.
“I didn’t think you’d come,” Wyatt said when he opened the door.