The One Who Got Away is Back

Present 12 ♡ Not Enough

I made it to work the next Monday like I was a zombie and someone had eaten my brain.

It was early and most people hadn't arrived yet, so I sat at my work bench and prayed as I drank my coffee that it could help me clear my mind from the exhausting weekend.

My father and I had reached something of a truce, which I'd never have thought possible under different circumstances. He admitted as much. But there we were, with a shaky and weak relationship that was going to die soon with him and I didn't know how to handle that.

But work was my passion, and although the pain and discomfort where there in the back of my mind, I let creativity take over and direct my thoughts. I sketched concepts that could be combined, trying to look at clothes as though they were LEGO pieces beyond just combining different fabrics and prints. I started easy, using some skirts as reference. But as I moved on to bottoms and tops, I figured the actual key wasn't going to be in the patterns but in the sewing techniques. It could get complex to do this by hand and quickly enough to serve an oversaturated market by fast retail. But if we could do this with robots, programed to reproduce a certain set of combinations, then maybe we had a viable idea.

And by having a limited set of combinations, just wide enough that customers felt like they had good options and had fun coming up with their own designs, we could also minimize the issue of having so many variants that the volumes would be low, which would drive the costs up. Robots would be the one big investment we had to do to make this, but maybe there was some sort of government incentive with keeping production local.

I thought it was a worth pursuing, so I stood up from my work bench and looked around to see if Miguel was already in his office. He was on the phone, with his back turned to me and I wasn't going to interrupt a conversation that looked intense.

That was when I noticed it was later than I'd thought, somewhere mid morning. The office was already full of people, and every eye was on me.

"What?" I asked.

"Um," Marisol rolled her stool closer to me and said. "You may want to sit down."

I frowned but did so, wondering what was going on. She turned the screen of her iPad over to me and I started reading the email.

To: TROPICANA ALL

From: Jean Paul Mercier

Subject: Illicit Office Relationship

Hi all,

I'm writing to inform you that I have proof that Adele Holt and our new CFO are engaged in an unsanctioned relationship. This is extremely concerning, seeing as how this can be considered to give Miss Holt an unfair advantage over those of us whose performance is based solely on their own merit. I have added our HR team on CC to address this most unfortunate circumstance, and I present said proof in attachment.

The purpose of this email is to inform the Tropicana team that these kinds of things will not be tolerated by management. Therefore, Miss Holt is no longer part of this organization effective immediately.

Best,

JPM

With trembling fingers I opened the attachments. First there was a picture of me crying my eyes out in Miguel's arms in the stairs, which I recognized from last Friday after getting Schmitt's call. Second and even worse, was a picture of Miguel and I coming out of his apartment building hand in hand, and the third one was of us getting into my Jeep to drive up to my father's hospice.

I set down Marisol's iPad with much more calm than I felt. Furious didn't begin to describe what I was feeling. I felt violated. I felt like an idiot for letting this happen and worse of all, I felt humiliated at having such a difficult moment exposed like that in front of all my colleagues.