What's Yours is Mine by Talia Quinn

path toward the beach.  
    He picked her phone up. “Hello?”
    Silence.  
    “Hello? Is anyone there?”
    “Is this Darcy Jennings’s phone?” The male voice sounded familiar, but he was having trouble placing it.  
    “Yes, who should I say is calling?”
    A longer pause. “Never mind. I’ll call back later.”  
    And the man hung up.  
    Will contemplated the device in his hand. That voice. He should have placed it immediately, but it had, after all, been four years.  
    Without thinking, he thumbed through until he found the recent calls, then hit Send.
    “Hello?”
    “Stan Golden, right?” He could hear the anger in his voice, tried dampening it.
    “Who is this?” Stan’s voice quivered. He was lying. Will knew it with absolute certainty.
    “You know who it is. And you know why I’m calling.”
    “No, I really don’t.” Stan’s voice was flat.
    “You said you’d fire her. Darcy. It was the only justice in that whole mess, that she’d be gone too.”
    “I never said any such thing, William, my boy. I never would. She’s like my own kin. No matter what she did or—” Stan paused. “What you think she did.” He sounded so gentle, so understanding, so condescending, Will wanted to punch the phone in the jaw. “And now I think we should say good-bye. I showed tremendous restraint when I let you walk away from the company and not right into jail. I’d hate to have to change my mind.”  
    The world was wavering, out of focus, pulsing in time with the angry throbbing in his skull. “Bullshit. I don’t know if you don’t remember or if you’re covering for her, but I’ll leave it alone. Under one condition.”
    Stan sighed but said nothing.  
    Will gripped the countertop like it was going to give way. “You get her out of my condo by tomorrow, and I’ll consider us done.”
    He hung up and threw the phone on the floor, an ugly welling of red-tinted rage threatening to overwhelm him. He slammed his fist into the kitchen counter. It hurt. Good. He slammed it again. And again, relishing the sting.  
    Heat suffused him, roiling his stomach, closing his throat, narrowing the world down to the latex-encased glass-fronted phone lying there so innocently on the kitchen tile, with the raw sharpness of pain in his knuckles echoing the raw memory of Mathias coming into the shared design and packaging office on a sunny, chilly day in February. The huge magnolia outside the window had been in full bloom, its white flowers surreal and sexual. Mathias’s face was tight, his expression even more dour than usual. “We’re shutting down the Slippery Elm account, effective immediately,” he’d said. “You need to be gone by the end of the month.”  
    Will had frowned, baffled. “Me? But it’s not my only account. I’m working on—” He’d swept his hand across his desk, indicating the half-dozen projects in various stages of completion.  
    Mathias shook his head. “It’s not just you. Stan said we have to slash our operating budget. Shutting things down mid-production screws up our numbers big-time.”
    “Did he say why he’s shutting it down?” But he knew why.
    Darcy. It was true. She’d adulterated the lotion.  
    Darcy. Everything she’d said to him, her vulnerability, her honesty, her softness, all an act.  
    DARCY. He’d nearly given his heart to someone who didn’t even exist, except in his febrile imagination.  
    He should have known better.  
    When Darcy’s number showed up on Will’s cell a week later, he’d thrown his phone in the ocean. He couldn’t bear to hear her lies, her justifications. Couldn’t bear to hear her voice at all.  
    Now he stared down at Darcy’s phone. It was unharmed by its fall. Just like her. Untouchable. In all the commotion today, he’d started treating this condo battle almost like a game. He’d nearly forgotten that moment in his office, that feeling of utter sick disbelief. Even though he’d been the one to point to the possible