I wasn’t special.
I was convenient.
And I walked right into it with my eyes wide open.
That’s how I spend New Year’s Day. Alone in a house that feels too big and too quiet to survive drowning in my guilt. Not even the staff is here. They were sent home for the holiday, probably on his orders. Maybe out of kindness. Maybe because he didn’t want anyone around to see the mess we’d made of things.
The rooms echo with emptiness. The clocks tick too loudly. Every light seems too bright or too dim, like the house can’t decide how to hold itself without him anchoring it. At midnight, I curl up on the sofa with Sienna’s quilt—the one she alwayskept in the living room, the one with mismatched patches she’d collected from every place she loved. I pull it around my shoulders, burying my face in the soft fabric.
It smells like her. Like the warmth she carried everywhere she went. I fall asleep like that—wrapped in someone else’s memories, wishing for someone I have no right to miss.
So when he finally appears on January second, I’m already frayed around the edges.
I’m in the kitchen, eating reheated pasta that tastes like nothing. Just something to chew on so I don’t fall apart. The moment he steps into the room, I know. His footsteps. His scent. That shift in the air like something magnetic just entered the space.
But I don’t look up. Not until I hear it.
“Miss Miller,” he begins.
Hearing him call meMiss Millerfeels like being shoved out of my own skin. Like he took everything intimate between us—the whispers, the heat, the way he said my name against my throat—and wiped it clean with a single, cold title. It’s a reminder that I was never his. That whatever we were wasn’t real, wasn’t lasting, wasn’t meant to matter. It shouldn’t hurt the way it does. But God, it feels like he just slammed a door in my face after pretending it was open.
I look up slowly, even though I already know what I’ll see.
“Back to Miss Miller, huh?” A bitter laugh slips out before I can catch it. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
He’s wearing a suit. Not the tux he left in on New Year’s Eve. No, this one is crisp, immaculate, deliberately chosen to remind everyone who he is.
Who I’m not.
The fabric hugs his shoulders with the kind of tailored authority only a man like him can wear. His tie is crooked, faintly askew, like he didn’t bother to fix it after taking it off orafter someone else pulled on it. And God help me, I wonder ifshewas the one who straightened it this morning.
If he slept in her bed.
If he held her the way he held me.
He looks tired, maybe—shadowed around the eyes, tension stiffening his shoulders. A little frayed at the edges, like the world has pushed in on him from too many angles.
But other than that?
He’s whole.
Untouched.
Exactly the same man he was when he walked out the door and left me behind. And somehow… that hurts more than anything. Because if I mattered there should besomethingdifferent in him. But he’s steady, already rewritten back into the version of himself that doesn’t include me at all.
I force my voice to steady. “When can I go back home?”
His brow lifts, confusion flickering across his face as if the question itself is an insult.
I bark out a sharp, hollow laugh. “Did you really think I’d want to stay here after you chose her?”
His jaw tics. Just once. Small and contained like everything else he does.
“It’s not safe,” he says tightly.
“I don’t care.” My voice cuts clean through the room like a blade. “And you shouldn’t care either.”
And I mean it.
