Page 67 of Maid For Each Other
I texted Lauren, but she didn’t respond. Which wasn’t a surprise. She was my very best friend—my only friend aside from co-workers, if I was being honest—but she didn’t have much time for me anymore. She was in love, had found her soulmate, and now he took most of her time.
Which was how it was supposed to be.
She’d found the perfect person for her and they were constantly together.
But it left me feeling lost a lot of the time.
I plopped down on the sofa and tried to see if I could find an episode ofPsych, because I was too tired to write at the moment and I wasn’t in the mood for Stephen King.
But sitting there, looking for something on the TV, kind of illuminated just how stagnant my life was.
Because here I was, in a stunning multimillion-dollar apartment, and I literally had no one to call and freak out about it to. No one but my mom, who arguably didn’t really care where I was or what I was doing if it didn’t affect her. Truth be told, I kind of wanted to order a pizza just so I could show thedriverthat I was doing something exciting.
But I didn’t have money to waste on pizza.
God, I was pathetic.
Lonelinesswas a stupid word, a word that conjured images of moonfaced women crying because they didn’t think anyone loved them, and I wasn’t that.
I wasn’tlonely.
It was more that I was…invisible.Everyone else in the world seemed to have their full and busy lives, and my tiny little existence happened outside their jurisdiction. I exchanged conversation with customers and co-workers, and they seemed to like me, but I was alone in my personal life.
And sometimes it felt like I’d been that way for a very long time.
I was fine with being by myself—good with it, actually—but I hated when the realization that no one in the world knew where I was or cared grabbed onto me at random moments.
“Screw this,” I muttered, and turned off the TV.
It didn’t matter how tired or down I was, I was going to make the most of this staycation. I grabbed my laptop and my notebook and went out on the balcony, forcing myself to write while I still had an inspiring view.
And after a minute, everything else melted away.
Daphne grabbed my attention and it was hers.
I started writing, capturing the way Daphne would see custom cars and luxury airplanes, and it was like the words were pouring out of me. My fingers couldn’t type fast enough. Daphne was so easy to write because she was—in a way—me, or at least her observations belonged to someone with similar experiences to my own.
And there were so many things about Declan and his life that, at a surface level, functioned as amazing characterization. A millionaire who treated cars and jewelry as if they were disposable because he had so much money it’d lost all meaning. A man who was used to people behaving as if he were royalty. There was a lot more to Declan than that in real life, but the same couldn’t be said for Daphne’s love interest, Connor.
Yes, I am using Dexxie’s middle name, I thought with a grin. He would hate that.
I sat out there for hours, a million miles away with Connor and Daphne and her fish-out-of-water experiences, and only came in when I wanted to add a few reminders to my notebook and realized I didn’t have a pencil.
I popped into Dex’s office—I knew he had a drawerful of freshly sharpened pencils from all the times I’d cleaned that room—but as I was opening the drawer, my eyes spotted a piece of paper on top of the desk.
Ineversnooped, but when my eyes happened to see it was a printed email message from Roman to Dex, I couldn’t stop myself.
From: Roman Halder
Date: September 29 at 4:53 PM
Subject: Invest Ops 9/29
To: Declan Powell
Dex-
Strongly recommend the first three, your call on the 4th
