I swallowed, jaw tightening.Compartmentalize.File.Lock it down.
By the time I got to the rideshare pickup zone, I could almost pretend it had been a dream.A strange, reckless detour that had nothing to do with the woman I was here.
The woman with a career and a security clearance level for a job that chewed people up and spit them out daily.The woman who didn’t get to fall apart because she slept with an old ghost and liked it too much.
The driver asked if I was heading home.I gave him my address and stared out the window at the passing gray skyline, the monuments half-hidden behind scaffolding and low clouds.DC always looked like it was under construction.
So was I, I guess.
My phone buzzed in my coat pocket halfway across the bridge.
I didn’t need to look to know.Somehow my instincts told me who it was without looking.But I looked anyway—because I was still me, still curious, still incapable of fully committing to denial.
Unknown number from North Carolina.
My throat tightened.
I stared at the screen until it stopped ringing.
Then I slid the phone back into my pocket like it was nothing.Like I hadn’t just felt my pulse spike at the sight of it.Why he blocked his number, I didn’t know.But for years any time he reached out, the phone number always came up blocked or unknown.
The driver chatted about traffic.About how the city never slept.I nodded at the right times, smiled when appropriate.I did what I always did—performed normalcy like it was muscle memory.
My building came into view.The driver stopped, I exited, grabbed my bags, and began the way up to my place.When I finally stepped into my apartment, the quiet hit hard.
Not the peaceful kind.
The empty kind.
I dropped my bags by the door, kicked off my shoes, and stood there for a long second staring at my living room.Everything exactly where I left it.Clean.Orderly.Controlled.
My life.
I had built it with both hands.Brick by brick after grief had tried to bury me.After people I loved had been taken from this world too soon and I learned the lesson the universe kept drilling into my bones—no one gets to stay.
I went straight to my bedroom and stripped out of travel clothes, tossing them into the hamper.My robe from the hotel was still folded in my suitcase, and the sight of it made my chest twist.I slammed the suitcase shut.I could unpack tomorrow.
Shower.Hot water.Scrub North Carolina off my skin.
Except I couldn’t scrub him off.
My mind betrayed me the second I stepped under the spray, heat warming its way down my shoulders.My body relaxed, and with it came memories like they had been waiting behind a door.
His weight.His mouth.The way he’d looked at me in the morning, like he wanted to say a thousand things and didn’t trust himself not to share too much.
I pressed my palm against the tile wall, eyes squeezed shut.Don’t go there Nita, I told myself.
I wasn’t twenty-five.I wasn’t naive.I wasn’t interested in a romance that ran on chaos and impulse.
One night.One detour.It was done.
When I got out, I checked my phone.Three missed calls.
All North Carolina.
A text from him, this time the number was not concealed.
Dante:You made it?
