Because she was gone. Because he'd forgotten.
He, who never missed a date or detail, had completely overlooked that her two-week notice ended yesterday.
It was unlike him to drop the ball. And he didn't like the feeling.
Margo entered then, humming as she walked, far too pleased with herself. She was in a navy sheath dress and pearls, smelling of something expensive, which made him sneeze. Not like clean soap and orange blossoms. Or the smell of cheap coconut shampoo.
She leaned across his desk, letting her perfume fan outward. "I thought we could debrief over lunch," she said, too brightly.
Dorian didn't look up. "Get me the Kyoto file."
She blinked. "You mean the Tokyo-?"
"No," he said coolly. "Kyoto. The one I asked for an hour ago."
Margo flushed, flustered. "I'll... check the drive."
He waited until she left before muttering, "Useless."
She wouldn't do.
Tom, at least, was steady. He was a shadow of Rune, perhaps, but competent.
Across town, Rune was packing the last boxes. The movers would pick them up in an hour. The last box sat on the edge of the bed. This one was light, deceptively so.
Inside it, a thin plastic stick. It had two thin pink lines. She had put it in there about two weeks ago.
She had known for exactly two days, before the pink, before the nausea, before her body had started betraying her like everything else had. She had suspected when Dorian had turned up at her hotel room in the middle of the night more than a month ago and held her tight. Then he had proceeded to make love to her like he never had. He had watched her as she came undone and had not pulled out when he realized he had forgotten to use a condom that last time.
"It will be alright," he murmured sleepily, “You won’t get pregnant."
It wasn't – we will deal with it together if you get pregnant. Or I will take care of you if you get pregnant.
Just a belief that it can never happen. Dorian would never want this child. He feared STDs like it was a plague. He insisted on 6-monthly tests. Condoms. She even had tried an implant, which made her sick, and had to be taken out. Still, this had happened.
She closed the box and moved on to the next one. It was a photograph, one of her most precious possessions. A frame barely held together with tape. The photo was stuck to the glass, and she was terrified that any attempt to change the frame would ruin it. In it, a ten-year-old girl with bright eyes and wind-chapped cheeks smiled at a frail older boy, bald from treatment but still grinning.
Her brother, Owain.
She pressed a finger gently against the glass. Her voice, low and soft, filled the quiet, "I'm coming home, Owie."
Yesterday, she had dreamt of those last days. It came to her in fragments, the way dreams often did – light, too bright, wind too loud, colours sharper than they could ever be in waking life.
Rune was standing at the edge of the sheep field, the grass slick with dew, watching two children chase dogs in a lopsided game of herding. Rome, the lumbering Labrador, ambled along behind them like a sleepy chaperone, while Rain, the wiry sheepdog, darted and spun, all muscle and precision. The boy was laughing, his head tipped back, his hair sticking damp to his forehead.
Eleven years old, she thought. And the girl with the messy dark braid, trying to keep up, nine-year-old maybe.
A voice, small and bright with childhood, called out to him.
"Race you to the gate!" She knew exactly what day this was.
Dream Rune didn't move. She only watched, as though trapped behind glass. The air felt heavy and the horizon was dark like a storm was coming their way. She remembered the weeks that followed so vividly that she could almost taste them. The bruise on Owain's arm, the cough that rattled deep in his chest, her mother's suppressed worry as she tried to carry on working about the large farmhouse whileanxiety ran sharp claws down her spine. And then, she woke up to her phone ringing.
"Rune, are you up yet, love?"
"Yes, mum, I am now," Rune replied, still fuzzy from sleep and cheeks wet with tears. They spoke for a few minutes.
"Pa and I will pick you up from the train station. Just call me, alright?"
