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It was good to be back.

She surveyed her domain with satisfaction: the tasteful artwork chosen by a design firm, the waxy green plants watered and replaced as needed by a plant service, the sliver of Manhattan skyline visible through her window. Her private conference room, accessible through glass pocket doors.

Back in charge. Back in control.

Four weeks ago, her brother had called with the devastating news that their mother had been badly injured in a car accident.

Their dad had retired from the Marines twenty years ago, but in a crisis, the Fletchers still functioned as a military family.
Back to back to back.

Despite Franklin Life’s recent acquisition of Parnassus Insurance—making this absolutely the
worst
time for Meg to be away, Derek had pointed out—Meg had dropped everything to rush home to North Carolina. She’d thrown herself into the details of her mother’s care, quizzing doctors, advocating with nurses, spending nights at the hospital so their father could snatch a few hours’ sleep at a nearby motel.

Thank God for Derek. Derek Chapman, the company’s tall, blond, ambitious chief financial officer, had kept Meg in the loop. He wasn’t only a member of the transition team; he was the man Meg loved. She believed him when he told her this acquisition was good for the company and good for them. A larger organization meant more responsibilities, more opportunities, and more money.

But even from six hundred miles away, Meg had felt the tremors of the merger move through the company like aftershocks. From her mother’s hospital room, with its lousy cell phone coverage and crappy internet connection, she’d
done her best to cope with press inquiries and her staff’s jitters.

Now that she was back, it was her job to handle the necessary layoffs as humanely and discreetly as possible, out of view of the media.

Friday afternoon, she thought, docking her laptop. Any announcements of future personnel cuts should go out at the end of the week, the end of the news cycle.

She powered up her Keurig and her laptop at the same time, intending to review the latest joint press release from her counterpart at Parnassus while her coffee brewed. But when she attempted to log on to the company network, an error message popped onscreen. Incorrect password.

Irritation flickered. Her password had worked fine all weekend. And this morning.

Frowning, she tried again. Same result. It just figured that on her first day back the system would go wonky.

She picked up her phone. Dead.

Dammit. She didn’t have time for this crap.

Barefoot, she padded across her office and stuck her head out the door. “Tracy, can you please give IS a call? My computer and my phone are all screwed up.”

“Will do,” her assistant said cheerfully. “And Stan just called. He wants to see you.”

Stanley Parks, the chief operating officer. Meg’s boss. “What time?” she asked.

“As soon as you’re free, he said. He’s in the conference room now. He sounded really stressed out.”

Meg’s adrenaline surged. Another crisis brewing. Another opportunity to shine. This is what she did, what she lived for.

She slipped on her pumps and strode down the hall like a batter approaching the plate, muscles loose, brain focused. It felt good to be back in the game.

F
IRED
.

Meg stared blindly out the cab window at the gray blur of Manhattan rumbling by, her personal possessions in a cardboard box on the seat beside her.

“
Forced to let you go
,” Stan had said, not quite meeting her eyes. The familiar, falsely reassuring phrases thumped into her like stones.

Until an hour ago, when she’d still held the power of hiring and firing, before she’d been escorted to the street and deposited on the curb like so much garbage, she’d been the one to use those same words herself. “
Eliminating redundant positions across the board
,” she’d written in press releases. “
Human Resources will assist you with the transition process,
” she’d said kindly, passing the tissue box across her desk.

She had always prided herself on handling such situations compassionately and professionally. “
I understand you feel that way,
” she had murmured, secure in her job, her record, her stringent standards of performance.

Betrayal seared her throat like bile. She hadn’t understood at all.

The words didn’t matter. The tone didn’t change a thing.

She’d been dumped. Sacked. Axed.

She wanted to throw up.

Tomorrow she would make a list. Make a plan. But now she wanted to crawl off like a wounded animal, to curl into a fetal ball in the closet and suck her kneecaps. Maybe huddled in the dark beside her untouched golf clubs and unused tennis racket, she could begin to sort through the hot mess of her emotions. The ruins of her career.

She had worked for Franklin Insurance since her graduation from Harvard, earning her MBA from Columbia at night, steadily rising through the ranks, every grade, every
performance review, every promotion another rung on her personal ladder of success.
Never look down, never look back.

Until she’d walked into that conference room and saw Judi Green from HR sitting with a stone-faced Stan, Meg had never suspected that her own job could be in jeopardy.

That she could be considered replaceable. Dispensable.

“
This acquisition shook things up for all of us
.” Stan had frowned down at the folder open in front of him. “
Your absence at such a critical time for the organization was…noticed.
”

The unfairness of it hit her like a slap. Heat whipped her face. “
Stan, my mother was in the hospital. I was in touch with you every day. You told me to go. You told me everything would be fine.
”

Derek had told her everything would be fine, too.

Derek.

The smell of the cab assaulted her nostrils. Her stomach churned.

He must not know. He would have stopped this. Despite his position on the transition team, the other officers must have kept it from him. And if Derek wasn’t in the loop…

She moistened her lips, sick at heart, frightened for him. What if Derek had been blindsided, too?

For the past six years, their corporate fortunes had been hitched together. “
We make a good team
,” he’d said the first time he asked her out at a company retreat in Arizona.

She’d been flattered. Derek was perfect for her new life; intelligent, ambitious, career-focused.

After they returned to the city, it had become routine for them to spend Wednesday and Saturday nights together. With Derek, she never had to make excuses for working late or explain why she was too tired for sex. Soon she had a toothbrush at his place, closet space, a drawer. She had measured the progress of their relationship the same way she’d tracked the rise of her career. In increments.

Two years after Derek had been named chief financial
officer, three months after Meg’s promotion to vice president of marketing, Derek had suggested they buy the condo together.

What would they do now, if they both lost their jobs?

She needed to know that he was all right. That
they
were all right. Instinctively, she reached for her BlackBerry.

It was gone.

She stared at the empty pocket, a pit opening in the center of her chest. Her electronic lifeline had been stripped from her along with her company laptop and corporate credit card, her ID badge and office key. She clenched her empty hand into a fist.

“Fifteen dollars and seventy cents,” the taxi driver said.

She looked up. The cab was double-parked outside the discreet limestone façade of her Central Park West address.

She fumbled for a bill—a twenty—and thrust it through the glass divider. Almost a thirty percent tip. Now that she was unemployed, she ought to curtail her expenses, she thought with the part of her brain that continued to function. Set a budget. Live within her means.

She climbed out of the cab, dragging the box across the seat. All the years of working, of scraping, of getting by, rose like a bad smell from the gutter to haunt her.

She took a deep breath, willing her stomach to settle.

She was hardly destitute. Her severance package included a year’s salary and health insurance. But the down payment on the condo—an investment in her future with Derek, she’d told herself at the time—had taken most of her savings. She could be out of a job for months.

The doorman sprang forward to take the cardboard carton from her arms.

Meg clutched the box tighter, all she had left of twelve years with the company; her two framed diplomas and a photograph of her family, her makeup bag, an extra pair of shoes.

No pictures of Derek. Their relationship didn’t violate
company protocol. She reported to Stan, not Derek. But even though they were generally acknowledged as a couple, Derek didn’t feel it was appropriate to advertise their liaison at the office.

“I’ve got it. Thanks, Luis.”

The doorman frowned, a solid, graying man in his sixties, round in the middle like a whiskey barrel. Luis had been at the building longer than she had. He might have to put up with rain and rude residents, but at least he had job security. “Let me give you a hand to your apartment.”

She forced her numb lips to curve into a smile. “No, no, I’m okay.”

His warm brown eyes narrowed in concern. “You sure? No offense, but you don’t look so good.”

A remark like that to another tenant could have gotten him in trouble. But Luis knew Meg, knew she had worked her way through college waiting tables and scrubbing toilets.

“
You don’t need to share all the details of your personal life with the doorman, darling
,” Derek had chided.

But Luis had a grandson, Meg had a brother, in Afghanistan. It made a bond.

She opened her mouth and felt, to her horror, tears clog her throat.

“You sick?” Luis asked. “That why you came home early?”

“Yes.” Shame flushed her face like a fever. But what else could she say? Oh, God, what would she tell her family? “Yes, I had to…leave work.”

“I’ll get the elevator for you,” Luis said.

She was too exhausted to argue. She followed him down the hall to the elevators.

The third-floor, two-bedroom apartment she shared with Derek didn’t provide the Central Park view he had wanted. But the space had still cost more than Meg could comfortably afford. Despite Derek’s larger salary, she had insisted on their splitting expenses right down the middle.

Her parents had not approved of the condo or, she sometimes thought, of Derek. They could not understand why, after six years together, she and Derek didn’t simply get married.

Meg had dismissed her family’s concerns. She didn’t need a ring to establish her worth or validate her relationship. The joint investment in the condo was another step, another sign that her life and career were proceeding according to plan.

She swallowed hard. Or they had been until an hour ago.

She let herself into the empty apartment. Leaning back against the closed door, she closed her eyes. The living room had the chilled hush of a funeral parlor. The surrounding units were quiet, everyone at work. No scraping furniture penetrated into the apartment, no footsteps, no chattering TVs, only the muted sounds of traffic drifting from the street.

What was she supposed to do with herself in the middle of the day? What was she going to do?

She took off her shoes, her jacket, her earrings, divesting herself of her corporate armor piece by piece. Without it she felt naked. Vulnerable.

She wandered through the apartment like a sleepwalker, her limbs weighted by lethargy, her body infected by an odd, internal restlessness.

She couldn’t eat. Couldn’t text or call or go online. They’d never bothered to pay for a landline or personal computer. Why should they? The company provided everything. Now, even if she’d had her BlackBerry, her phone and email contacts, her personal network, were all wiped out when IS had disabled her account.

No wonder her password had failed that morning.

She stopped at the window, staring down at people flowing by like twigs pushed along by a current: envoys from office buildings moving purposefully along the sidewalks, mothers pushing strollers on their way to the park, tourists wandering arm-in-arm, stopping to point or to kiss. Everyone
had somewhere to go, someone to be with, while she stood alone, apart, removed from all of them.

Where was Derek?

He didn’t come at lunchtime. She was relieved. As long as he was at the office, he still had a job.

But he wasn’t home at five o’clock.

Or at six.

Or at seven.

She understood why he didn’t call. She didn’t have a phone. She didn’t want to leave the apartment to buy one. What if Derek showed up while she was out? She didn’t know any of their neighbors well enough to go knocking on doors. What could she say? “
Hi, I’ve lost my job and I can’t reach my boyfriend, may I use your phone?
” She shuddered. That would be a hell of an introduction.