Intrigued by her silence, I raise my eyes, smoothly running my gaze over her colorful outfit––an indigo dress paired with a canary scarf around her neck.
Smiling, she hands me a small box wrapped in glossy paper.
“What is this?”
“It came in earlier,” she says.
I tear off the paper, flip the lid off, and fumble through the contents. Balls of soft yarn roll over the floor.
I scoop out the note.
“I don’t do product reviews,” I say dryly. “Please mail it back.”
She takes the box, collects the yarn, puts the lid back on, and ambles across the hallway, heading to her desk.
My eyes go to the glass door.
“Where’s everybody?” I ask, scanning the main room.
She leans back in her chair and throws me a glance from across the corridor.
“Break room,” she says and motions to the back, where a group of men and women sit at a table and eat.
They laugh from time to time.
They’re all younger than Harper and me.
“Do you want something to eat?” she asks, walking back into my office.
She gets busy tidying up the coffee table in the corner before smoothly shifting her focus from there to the vase sitting on my desk, and I get that feeling again that she’s watching over me.
This past year has been one of the worst for me, personally.
Ironically, my business was, and still is, booming.
Part of the reason could be that I moved the business out of my home and started hiring people a couple of weeks after Jaden left.
It was something I never thought I’d do, and I never planned to become a brick-and-mortar business.
It wasn’t something I envisioned for the future, and certainly not something that I liked. I resented the idea of managing employees, but Harper convinced me I wouldn’t need to do that had I set up the firm properly.
She was right for the most part.
Even so, I rejected her idea in the beginning.
I thought I could handle everything myself, but after a few days of doing my old job again, I knew it was time.
My head was no longer there, and it started to have an impact on my work.
Once I moved out, I had to change the business model.
Expanding was never in my plan, but it became necessary, so I had to spend some time figuring things out. Since cash flow had never been a problem, there was minimal risk in making the transition.
In the end, setting up a proper shop turned out to be a great move. It changed my daily routine, my schedule, and in the end, my entire life. It kept my mind away from everything that had happened the weeks before.
There was no way I could pull him out of my head, but at least I was able to muffle the noise and the chatter, the incessant rumination.
I couldn’t find the answers that I needed, so there was no point in wasting time thinking about it.