Five years since she’d kissed him goodbye in his apartment doorway. Five years since he had whispered, “I love you too,” against her forehead. Five years of wondering if he’d moved on, if he’d found someone else, if he’d forgiven her for the choice she’d been forced to make.
“Dr. Martinez is here,” Sarah announced quietly as she returned with the coffee.
Reed’s shoulders tensed slightly at the interruption. He said something brief into the phone, then turned around.
The moment their eyes met, time stopped.
Reed’s phone slipped from his nerveless fingers, clattering to the floor as his face went ashen. “Elena,” he breathed, the word barely audible through the glass that separated them.
Elena’s carefully constructed composure crumbled. Tears she’d held back for five years spilled down her cheeks as she took in every detail of his face—the new lines around his eyes, the way his jaw had hardened, the shock and pain and something that might have been hope warring in his expression.
He looked older, more weathered, but underneath the successful businessman’s exterior, she could still see traces of the man who’d held her in his kitchen while she promised to love him forever.
Sarah glanced between them with obvious confusion. “Sir? Shall I?—”
“Close the door,” Reed said, his voice rough with emotion. “Hold all my calls.”
Sarah nodded and quickly retreated, leaving them alone with five years of silence stretching between them.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. Elena clutched her coffee cup like a lifeline while Reed stared at her as if she might vanish if he looked away.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” he said finally, the words falling into the quiet office like stones into still water.
“I know,” Elena whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Reed.”
He took a step toward her, then stopped, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. “Sorry?” The word came out raw, wounded. “Elena, I went to your funeral. I stood beside your grave. Imournedyou.”
The pain in his voice nearly brought her to her knees. “I wanted to tell you?—”
“Tell me what?” Reed’s composure cracked, revealing the anguish he’d carried for five years. “That you were alive? That everything I felt, everything I grieved, was a lie?”
“It wasn’t a lie,” Elena said urgently, setting down her coffee and taking a tentative step toward him. “My feelings for you were never a lie. What we had was real.”
“Was it?” Reed’s blue eyes, once so warm when they looked at her, were now as cold as a winter sky. “Because the woman I loved wouldn’t have let me believe she was dead for five years. The woman I loved would have found a way to tell me the truth.”
Elena flinched as if he’d struck her. “You don’t understand the position I was in. The people who were after me, after the technology—they would have killed you to get to me. They would have destroyed everyone I cared about.”
“So you destroyed me instead,” Reed said quietly, and the broken way he said it shattered something inside Elena’s chest.
“I saved you,” she protested, her voice rising despite her efforts to stay calm. “I saved your life by staying away.”
Reed laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Saved me? Elena, you didn’t save me. You gutted me and left me to bleed out.”
The words hung in the air between them, heavy with pain and accusation. Elena wanted to run to him, to throw her arms around him and somehow make him understand that every day away from him had been its own kind of death. But the distance he was maintaining, both physical and emotional, told her the Reed who had whispered his love against her forehead was gone.
In his place stood a stranger who looked like the man she loved but spoke to her like an enemy.
“Reed,” she began, her voice breaking. “Please. Just let me explain?—”
“Explain what, exactly?” Reed’s voice was dangerously quiet now, a controlled calm that spoke of barely leashed fury. “Why you let me grieve for a ghost? Why you’ve suddenly decided to resurrect yourself now, five years later?”
Elena straightened her spine, drawing on the strength that had kept her alive through years of hiding and running. “Because they found me again. The technology I created is being used to destroy innocent lives, and because I need your help to stop them.”
Reed stared at her for a long moment, something shifting in his expression. “You need my help.”
“Yes.”
“After five years of radio silence, you show up in my office using a fake name because you need something from me.”
