Page 53 of Saving Mr. Bell

“I can feel empathy!”

Yeah, she was definitely hurt, but I’d come too far to back down just so she could keep her ego intact. “Just not for me, apparently.”

“What are you trying to say, Rudolf?” My father spoke with a carefully measured tone.

I met Jade’s gaze. “You’re fired.”

She blinked a few times and then looked to my father. “Tell him he can’t do that. You hired me, not him.”

My father regarded us both silently for a few seconds. “I hired who I thought were the best people for Rudolf. If he says differently, then that’s his decision. You should have talked to me about this,” he said to me. “I thought you were happy. I thought everything was going well.”

“Not really,” I admitted. “I can’t keep going the way I am, or one day I will have that breakdown. The alcohol, the drugs…” I left sex out of it this time. “They were all about not having to face up to things. If I gave myself time to think, I had to confront how miserable I was.”

“You should have talked to me,” Jade said.

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Really? You never treated me like I was anything but a massive pain in the arse. You wanted arobot with no flaws who didn’t need to sleep and could work a ridiculous amount of hours.”

“I wanted—”

My father cut in, his focus on Jade. “I think you should probably leave now. You’ll receive payment for the notice period specified in your contract.”

“If it helps,” I said to her, “it’s not just you that’s fired. I want a clean slate. New manager. New publicist. New everything. And I’ll be setting my own schedule from now on. A reduced one where I have time to breathe, and time to do other things besides work.”

She shook her head. “This is going to cost you so much money.”

I shrugged. “I don’t care if it leaves me without a single penny to my name.”

My father put his hand gently on Jade’s shoulder and steered her toward the door. “Thank you for your hard work these past few years, Ms. Turner. I’ll make sure you receive an excellent reference.”

I left the office to find Nelson leaning against the wall outside as my father continued with Jade all the way to the front door. With the office door having remained open, Nelson had presumably heard every word. “I know,” he said as my father closed the front door with Jade on the other side of it. “I’m fired.”

Was he? I thought about it for a moment. I’d seen a completely different side to Nelson today now that the blinkers were off. And he’d seemed no fonder of Jade than I was. “Actually… no, you’re not. Not unless you want to be. If you can still stand working for me, your job is safe.”

Nelson smiled. “Anything you say, boss.”

My father had hired a team to come in and decorate the house to its usual high standard for the festive period. The tree was an eight-footer that almost touched the ceiling of the living room, tastefully decorated in white and gold. Yet all I could think about when I looked at it was another tree hundreds of miles away. One I’d chopped down myself that only had a snowman and a reindeer hanging from it.

Would Arlo decorate it in my absence? I doubted it. I pulled my phone out and checked my messages, but he’d sent nothing apart from the one wishing me a safe journey while I’d still been in the car. It had only been that morning, but it seemed like a lifetime ago. It was funny how being in a different country could do that to you. Like miles became days.

My father came to stand next to me and we stood and regarded the tree together in silence for a few moments. “I’m not a big fan of Christmas,” he said, “but I do this for your mother because I know if I didn’t, she’d come back and haunt me.”

I laughed. “Yeah, she would.”

He cleared his throat. “I really thought Jade was the right person to handle your affairs.”

“I know.” I’d known that as soon as he’d taken my side without questioning it. “I have to take a certain amount of responsibility for not speaking up when I should have done. We should have talked more.” Understatement of the day.

“I called you after what happened in Germany. I wanted to check you were okay.”

“You did?”

“You don’t remember speaking to me?”

I racked my brain to recall such a conversation and came up blank. “No.”

“There was a lot of music and you were…”

“Drunk,” I supplied when my father tried too hard to be tactful.

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