Free My White Hero by J A Fielding

room. Wouldn’t you rather have them here shooting at imaginary insurgents while their loving mother makes them some guacamole for their chips?” he asked. Desiree shrugged again. She knew Taylor had made a good point.
    “ Well, we will revisit this in a few years,” she said, brushing the topic off.
    “ You mean when you finally have points to make in your favor, huh?” he said smiling. Desiree smiled.
    “ You know me so well, Ericson,” she said as she took another sip of her wine. She looked at Cynthia and Duncan and smiled. She had not seen her cousin happy in a while, and genuinely happy. She always seemed to be far away, deep in thought, but since she came back from her “cleanse” it was as if she decided to just let everything go. She looked at Taylor and smiled. “At least you are a good matchmaker,” she said before looking at Cynthia and Duncan again. Taylor smiled.
    “ She needed to move on because there is almost no chance of her ever seeing Picasso again,” he said. Desiree turned to look at him.
    “ You think so?” she asked. Taylor nodded.
    “ MIAs are usually tortured to death or when they die in enemy territory, no one ever gives a damn about them. So they just…disappear and according to a few of my friends in the service, Picasso’s presumed dead,” he said. Desiree looked at Cynthia. “The sooner she forgets him, the better it will be for her,” he added. Desiree nodded.
    “ I guess you are right. We’ll have to help her every step of the way but you also need to tell her that he is…you know,” she said finding it hard to say the words “presumed dead.” Taylor draped his arm around her and nodded.
    “ Of course but when the time is right,” he said. Desiree nodded. They would have to give Cynthia more time before giving her this new truth. After all, she had just gotten used to the last one.

Chapter 7
    Desiree’s stomach was in knots as she waited outside her manager’s office. She had just been through a two-hour long interview with her immediate supervisors and the regional manager of Pay Less, the store she worked for. She thought that it would be a good thing not to go first, but seeing her colleagues walk out of the office distraught, confused and sometimes even in tears made her rethink the whole assistant managerial position. She rubbed her hands together as she took several deep breaths. She thought that the questions asked in the interview were pretty standard and the fact that she left the interview holding her head higher than she had while going in made her think that maybe she had lost the position.
    “ Maybe being emotional is one of the main requirements,” she thought. She took another deep breath as she watched another one of her workmates practically running out, probably to someplace private where she could cry. There was still one more person to interview and judging by how the day had been so far, she knew that the entire process would not take less than an hour and a half. She grabbed her bag and walked out of the office space. Back in the store, everything was so normal. People were still shopping, workers in uniform were tending to customers and well, there was nothing major going on that was out of the ordinary. She walked out of the store as she dialed Taylor’s number.
    “ Hey there. How is it going?” he asked when he picked up.
    “ Hey,” she said in an exhausted voice.
    “ What’s wrong? You sound exhausted. Did you get the results of the interview already?” he asked in a concerned voice. She took a deep breath and leaned against the wall.
    “ Not yet and that’s just the problem. This suspense is killing me,” she said.
    “ Come on, just hang in there. The mere fact that you got this far should be an encouragement,” Taylor said. Desiree looked around the parking lot.
    ‘ Yeah, I guess you are right but I wish they would just tell me to go and come back,” she said even though she knew that this being the second and last