Laurie smiled back. It had been a long time since she’d taken a day off. And she had accumulated plenty of vacation hours. But, no, she couldn’t. There was too much work to do. There was the Mieger account to go over: the customized software that the manufacturer had ordered had apparently not been satisfactory, and now Mieger was pushing for upgrades that he wanted for free and done yesterday. And she was supposed to chair a meeting on flexible benefits packages at three o’clock.

She couldn’t take off today.

But she could walk to work. She went back inside, checked her hair in the mirror, popped a few vitamin C’s, and picked up her purse and briefcase. Stepping out of the house and locking the door behind her, she waved to Tia, still on the porch, and started off. The day was indeed beautiful, and the sun felt good on her skin, warm and fresh and invigorating. People seemed friendlier on a day like this, and she said more hellos to strangers in the next hour than she had in the past six months.

She was twenty minutes late by the time she reached the office, but no one noticed and no one cared, and she told Mara to hold all of her calls for the next hour while she reviewed the Mieger file.

She didn’t review the file, though. She seemed to be having difficulty concentrating, and after reading and rereading the same memo four or five times, Laurie finally gave it up and walked over to the window, looking between the buildings at the bay.

What was she doing here?

It was a question she asked herself periodically but for which she could not seem to find a satisfactory answer.

There comes a point, she thought, when what you do as a temporary stopgap until you “find” yourself hardens into your actual personality. The person you pretended to be, while waiting to discover who you are, becomes the real you.

Was that what had happened to her?

Yes.

She’d been the responsible one, and she’d tried to take care of Josh after their parents had died, to provide for him, to give him as stable a life as she could under the circumstances. She’d always intended to move on at some point, to abandon this job and this lifestyle once her brother settled down and got himself established, but Josh never had settled down, never had gotten himself established, and she’d been promoted onward and upward and at some point it had just not made sense to think about quitting and doing something else.

So here she was.