She was leaving me.
For good.
The phone felt heavy in my hand, heavier with every unanswered call. My chest was tight, my breath sharp, my heart pounding so violently I thought it might crack a rib. The silenceon her end wasn’t silence, it was rejection. Finality. A door slammed that I couldn’t pry open.
I raked my hands through my hair, pacing the length of the darkened hallway outside her apartment, my thoughts unraveling, breaking apart into jagged pieces I couldn’t hold onto.
Don’t. Don’t you fucking dare do this, Edwina. Don’t you dare leave me.
I tried again, thumb pressing the screen so hard it hurt. My voice broke against the empty air. “Answer me, damn it. Don’t do this. Don’t leave me like this.”
And then—the line connected.
“Edwina?” My voice came out sharp, frantic.
For a moment, there was only silence, and then I heard her breathe, fragile, trembling on the edge of breaking. The sound cut straight into me, but what gutted me more was the noise behind her, the faint crackle of an announcement, the rolling of suitcases, the muffled voices calling across a terminal.
The airport.
My pulse roared in my ears. Rage and terror collided until I couldn’t tell them apart. “You’re at the fucking airport?” My voice dropped into a snarl, shaking with fury. “You’re leaving? You’re really going to walk away from me like this?”
On the other end, she said nothing at first, and I could hear it, the way she swallowed, the way her silence became a knife between us. Finally, her voice came soft, broken, so quiet I almost missed it beneath the noise around her.
“I can’t stay, Hayden.”
“Like hell you can’t,” I snapped, my fist slamming against the wall. “After everything, after what you’ve said, after what we’ve done, you think you can just vanish? You think you can erase this? You think you can erase me?”
Her breath quivered, and it sounded as though she was crying, but her voice stayed controlled, each word cutting clean through me. “I can’t live in a lie. You have a fiancée, Hayden. A life that doesn’t include me. Go back to her.”
The sound tore through me, sharp and merciless, cutting into me with the force of shrapnel. My grip on the phone tightened until my knuckles ached, until I thought the plastic might shatter in my hand. Go back to her? Back to Alessia? Back to the hollow, suffocating world I had clawed myself free from?
No. She couldn’t mean it. She couldn’t believe it. Not when she had looked at me the way she had. Not when her body had broken beneath mine, not when she had told me she loved me.
But she did believe it. Because her silence was final.
“I want you. Do you hear me, Edwina? I want you. Only you. Don’t you fucking dare walk away.”
There was silence, stretched thin, the longest second of my life.
“Goodbye, Professor.”
The line went dead.
I stood there, the phone still pressed to my ear, her voice echoing through me like a gunshot. For the first time in years, I didn’t know if I would survive what she had just taken from me.
And then I felt it, the wetness. At first, I thought it was the remnants of rain sliding down my face. But the storm had ended. The hallway was dry. No, it wasn’t rain.
It was me.
My vision blurred, my throat tightened, and I realized with a hollow, brutal shock that I was crying. The tears came hot, silent, unstoppable, carving down my face as the phone slipped slowly from my hand. My body shook with the weight of it, with the truth I could no longer fight.
She was gone.
And with her, she had taken every part of me that still believed I could ever be whole.
Edwina
The airport swallowed me whole.
