Breaking the Ice

Chapter 1

1

“Hello… Bec?”

“Hey babe.”

Samantha Evans wiped her nose on a tissue, inordinately pleased her sister was home at the exact time her life had decided to fall apart.

“Are you crying? What’s wrong? You never cry. Hang on for a sec ? —”

Hot tears welled in Sam’s eyes again as Bec yelled at her girls to turn the television down. General protesting could be heard but Bec overruled it all with threats to cancel their much-coveted summer camp plans and the background noise dulled.

“Okay. Tell me what happened. And who do I need to beat up?”

Samantha could barely raise a smile at Bec’s don’t-mess-with-my-sister act. “I ran into Gary at a company function last night.”

“What was God-awful Gary doing at a high-flyers event? That’s a bit energetic for him.”

“He was there with a woman from a rival firm. They’re getting married. She’s pregnant.”

“I thought Gary didn’t believe in marriage and kids?”

“So did I.”

There was a moment of sisterly silence. “Okay… but Gary’s a rat who dumped you twelve months ago in the middle of the tax season and gave you lousy sex and we hatesss him… remember? Why are you crying over that loser now?”

“Because something strange happened last night. I suddenly realized I’m Sally.”

Bec’s sigh was loud in Sam’s ear. “Babe, you really gotta stop watching that movie. You are Sam. And it is just a movie.”

“No, see, Sally had a point.” Samantha’s voice wobbled. “It wasn’t that Gary didn’t want to get married and have kids, he just didn’t want to do it with me.”

“Okay, I don’t know who this is, but you better put me on to my sister right now,” Bec joked. “You know the single-minded, career girl hell-bent on a corner office?”

Samantha didn’t say anything, too depressed by her sister’s summation of her life.

“Since when is marriage and children part of your equation?”

“It’s not. They’re not,” she denied. “But then last night…” A hard ball of emotion lodged in Sam’s throat. “Why didn’t he want to marry me? What’s the matter with me, Bec?”

“Nothing’s the matter with you. You’ve just been a little too focused on your career to notice your appalling taste in men.”

“You’re right. I’m too career orientated. I get up, I go to work, I come home late, I feed Godzilla, I go to bed. God…” She groaned. “I’m so boring.”

“No, you work hard. Of course you’re tired at the end of the day. You’re… sensible.”

“I’m staid.”

“You’re reliable.”

Sam groaned inwardly. “Oh, God. I sound like a Volvo. I suck.”

“No, babe. Your life sucks. That’s different.”

Samantha could always count on Bec to tell it like it was and she sniffed at the truth in her sister’s words. Being a good girl all her life, studying hard, working frenetically, climbing the ladder, hadn’t left her much time for a life. For goodness’ sake, her two closest relationships were with an octogenarian bookshop owner and an obese fish!

Sure, she’d almost reached the pinnacle of her career, was financially secure and living the life of a young, urban, modern woman. Supposedly. She was exactly where she wanted to be… so why did it suddenly feel so lonely?

“Sounds to me like running into Gary tripped your clock. Your eggs have decided it’s time to fulfill their biological purpose.”

“My… eggs?”

“Sure. If you listen closely, I bet you’ll hear them cheeping.”

Cheeping? Crap. That was all she needed – noisy eggs. “I don’t have time in my life for cheeping eggs, Bec. How do I make it go away?”

“Find a man and have some babies.”

“Impossible. I’m overseeing the Adams account until 2029.”

Bec laughed. “They can be demanding critters. Might be hard to sleep over the noise.”

Samantha could hear her nieces laughing in the background and was hit by a sudden desire to hug them close and kiss their sweet faces. They’d grown up so much, but she could still remember holding them as newborns, marveling at their fingers and perfect bow mouths.

“I suppose I could rejig my schedule. Get Adams done earlier, say, 2027.”

“Cheeping eggs wait for no man,” Bec insisted. “Not even Mr. Adams. And you can’t slot love and babies around a career that consumes your every waking moment.”

“Why not?” If she must be afflicted with mutinous eggs, why couldn’t she have both? “Plenty of women hold down jobs and have babies. I’ve worked too hard to sacrifice my career because my eggs have taken temporary leave of their senses. I mean, I’m organized and efficient. I regularly juggle multi-million-dollar accounts. It can’t be harder than that, surely?”

Bec snorted. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Babies don’t fit in well with work schedules. In fact, they throw up over your Donna Karan suit just before you leave the house.”

“I’ll get a nanny.”

“Babe, you’re a perfectionist who sucks at delegation. You won’t want a nanny.”

Sam heard the conviction in her sister’s voice and knew she was right – she hated delegating because no one could do her job like she could. “Why didn’t you tell me being thirty was this hard?”

“I thought you were fine with turning the big three zero.”

“I am. I just didn’t know my ovaries were going to revolt. This wasn’t in my plan.”

“Maybe it’s time for a new plan?”

Samantha blew her nose. “I like the old one.”

“Well… life has a way of throwing egg in your face when we least suspect it.”

Sam groaned at her sister’s bad pun. “Is it too late to become vegan?”

The second blow came a week later. Birdie died. Samantha stood outside the bookshop in total disbelief. This morning when she’d passed by, it was business as usual and Birdie had waved at her. This afternoon an ambulance, a police car and a coroner’s van had greeted her as she’d rounded the corner. And Birdie was gone.

“What happened?” Samantha asked Dulcie Reardon, her arm automatically going around the stooped old shoulders of another of Birdie’s faithful customers.

“Heart attack,” Dulcie whispered.

Dulcie, no spring chicken herself, leaned heavily into Samantha, her hand over her mouth, and they stood and watched as two official-looking men pushed a trolley loaded with a black body bag and slid it into the back of the waiting vehicle. Samantha’s regulation cup of hot chocolate from Starbucks grew cold, completely forgotten.

Just like that, in a flash, life could be over.

What was she going to do without Birdie? Every morning, every afternoon, every weekend for five years, the old lady had been a part of her life. But more than that, Eddie Hawke – Birdie to her friends – had been an institution around the Glassworks area of Tetworth for over fifty years.

The Glassworks – so called after the old glass factories that had once sprawled and thrived here – was one of the older, more socio-economically flatlined areas of the city. But the residents didn’t seem to mind. Many had never lived anywhere else, harking back to an era where entire neighborhoods were employed by the one company.

Today the once grand aesthetics had faded, the boulevards now pockmarked and the buildings erected to support a flourishing industry were now scruffy around the edges. But the people remained the same – resilient and pragmatic.

Like Birdie. Who had operated her beloved second-hand romance bookshop from the corner of the now shabby arcade that occupied the ground level of the apartment building both Birdie and Samantha called home.

How many Sundays had she spent in Birdie’s combing the shelves for her favorite romance novels? Who else but Birdie knew or even cared about her passion for Rita Summers books and her pirate heroes? Who else but Birdie would keep them aside especially for her as customers traded them in?

How many times had Birdie cooked her a hot dinner? Dished up the most divine food along with her bumper-sticker advice? Birdie had dispensed her homespun wisdom as easily as the mints she had kept near the cash register, and Samantha had loved her for it.

Sure, Bec was good at it too, but she was a busy mum with four kids who lived a thousand miles away in Denver . Birdie had been just downstairs and had always made time.

But not anymore.

It didn’t seem right the next morning to come out of the sliding doors and see Birdie’s shop all shut up. Samantha stopped in front of the pristine, highly polished glass, still feeling the loss. Birdie had been up with the sparrows every day of her life and it didn’t seem to matter how early Samantha left for work, the shop was always open.

But there were no lights, no movement, no little wave to start her day on the right foot, just her somber reflection. She eyed herself critically as she always did because decades of diet culture and internalized fat shaming were damn hard to shake.

Some days she was better at it – today was not one of those days.

A Chanel-business-suit-clad plain Jane stared back at her. Plain brown hair which she twisted back every morning into a knot at her nape. Average height. Way too hippy with some chunk in those thighs. Zero gap.

Samantha had battled her body image since her junior high gym teacher had questioned whether she wanted to eat a second piece of funnel cake and not even her four-inch, patent jade sling-back Choos were enough to beat it this morning.

Or maybe that was just her eggs talking. Murmuring their disapproval at the very image of an independent, career focused woman.

For once the majestic, heritage oak trees she passed on her way to the bus stop didn’t register. Even the sight of the PE Finance building coming into view fifteen minutes later, its reflective glass panels dazzling like a mirror ball in the sunshine, failed to rouse her flagging spirits. In fact, the buzz she normally felt at just being in the city, didn’t materialize at all.

Stepping off the bus, Samantha rounded the corner, the gentle river breeze lacking its usual ability to give her a lift. The building’s exclusive river plaza address had been a badge of honor only a week ago. But today, as she entered the ornate foyer, it felt as empty and as cold as the slabs of Italian marble clicking beneath her designer heels.

She spent the morning in meetings with two of the firm’s most high-powered clients. As the youngest senior accounts executive on staff, she had done well for herself, something she tried to reflect on as she stood at the window of her eleventh-floor office, taking in the other buildings nearby.

It was unusual for a city the size of Tetworth – population 80,000 – to have a half dozen high rises dotting the CBD landscape. But its proximity to both LA and San Francisco, made it popular with corporations looking for a happy medium between commuting distances and skyrocketing building rental.

Not that PE Finance need worry about that given it was one of the planet’s most prestigious investment agencies. Despite having offices in multiple countries, its global HQ was in Tetworth because that’s where Percival Ettinghauser originally founded the company 120 years ago and tradition meant something to the still family run firm.

A twinkle of sunshine on the river caught Samantha’s eye and her gray gaze tracked a river ferry speeding its ant-like passengers to the other side.

This was what she’d wanted. This was what she’d worked so hard to achieve.

Yes, the incident with Gary had thrown her and Birdie’s death had whammied her but there was no need to let them knock her off track. She had arrived, damn it! More than arrived. She was one step away from a coveted corner office on the twelfth floor and there was no way she was going to let recalcitrant eggs derail her – there was only one thing that could do that.

“Sam, can I talk to you about something?”

And his name was Ray.

Reluctantly, she dragged her gaze away from the view, turning to see the bane of her life, the boss’s moronic nephew – of distant Ettinghauser stock – standing in her doorway looking as clueless as ever. Today of all days she wanted to say, Ray, you are a fuckwit. Go away .

But she didn’t.

Instead, she sighed and nodded at the man who had been nothing but a complete pain in the ass since he’d wheedled his way into his uncle’s favor a year ago. He’d been incompetent from the get-go. She’d been picking up his slack and fixing his stuff-ups for long enough now to know that nepotism was the only way he was ever going to be employable.

And he had made no secret of the fact that he wanted her job. It was almost laughable to think Ray could even covet a job that was as complex and responsible as hers but the old man did have a blind spot where he was concerned.

He wandered in, his gaze glued – as always – to her breasts, and Sam turned back to the window to see tiny passengers disembarking from the ferry and for the first time since she’d come to work here almost a decade ago, she wished she was down there, with the little people.

Instead of in her office, with the stupid people.