she could scrape up the rent), the perfect job (if someone would just hire her already), and still be her. Given the current state of Carly’s life—a complete and utter mess—she felt compelled to listen to every single episode, sometimes taking notes, while Baxter dozed beside her.
Yep, they’d had the perfect working relationship, and Baxter had never once branched out of his territory and onto a couch, much less taken up pillow eating. Which made him much more desirable than this imposter.
“Maybe I’m being punked,” Carly mused, and quickly rifled through her mental catalogue of friends in search of the jokester who would pull a stunt like this. But her close friends—Karma, who had just gotten married and was in the honeymoon phase and was never free, and Lydia, an ER nurse working night shifts and never awake—didn’t have the comedic chops to pull this off. No disrespect to her friends.
Was she in the wrong house? She’d been in desperate need of a bathroom, and a lot of the houses around here looked sort of the same. She’d rushed in without really looking at anything but the dark hole of her tote bag where her keys were swimming. She did a quick scan of the room, her eyes flicking over the built-in bookcases that framed the fireplace, the hand-scraped wide-plank pine floors, the pale blue rug, the cream-colored couch, and the floral armchairs.
Definitely the right house. Definitely the wrong dog.
Speaking of which, the dog apparently grew bored of waiting for her to figure it out. It stood up on its stumpy legs on the couch, paused for a good and long downward dog, then slid off, landing with a thud, before confidently trotting over to sniff her legs and lick her shoe.
“Listen, I don’t know who you are or how you got here but I want Baxter back.” She leaned down to scratch him behind his long ears.
The dog allowed it and sat to give her a moment to reconsider, its tail swishing hard against the floor and knocking around the balls of synthetic white stuffing that had previously occupied her throw pillow.
“You’re super cute, but I’m not keeping you. I want you to go home. Who are you? Why aren’t you wearing tags?”
The dog’s tail wagged harder. It slid down to the floor, rolled onto its back, presenting for a belly rub. That’s when Carly had visual confirmation that this most certainly was not Baxter. This dog was female.
“Okay, we’ve got to get this situation fixed,” she said, making a circular motion at the dog’s head, “before wrong bassets start showing up at regular intervals around here.” But she did reach down and rub the dog’s belly to demonstrate she could be hospitable, even in the face of disaster.
From the bowels of her overstuffed tote bag, still on its side in the entry, the contents partially disgorged, her phone sounded a cheery little notice of a text. “Stay,” she said to the dog.
Of course the dog didn’t stay. She hopped up and trotted into the kitchen like she lived here and helped herself to big, loud laps of water from Baxter’s bowl.
The text was from Phil, the photographer Carly had coerced into doing a shoot for her. It said simply, Meet me at five.
Meet him at five? First of all, five was the worst possible time to meet anyone anywhere. And second, their shoot was tomorrow. Tuesday. Wait a minute . . . Carly looked at her watch. Shit. Today was Tuesday.
Don’t be late, he added.
“I’m already late! I’m like a day late!” she shouted at her phone.
Carly and Phil had worked together at the big advertising firm of Dalworth, Bartle and Simmons. Phil had been an art creator at DBS and had been made redundant in the reorganization, too. With his photography skills and his contacts, he’d quickly transitioned into a professional photography career specializing in headshots and weddings. Carly knew this because she and Phil, and some of the others who’d been laid off, met occasionally for drinks and to complain about the unfairness of it all. (Megan would not approve. Time spent complaining or feeling sorry for yourself is time you could have spent creating your new reality. But as Carly was still struggling to create her new reality, she was up for a little whining from time to time.)
Carly’s new reality was a tiny little one-woman marketing and public relations shop with a grand total of two clients. Temporary clients, just until she got a