The shower didn’t help.
I stood under the stream, steam fogging the glass, trying to anchor myself in the physicality of the moment. I washed my long, blonde hair. I scrubbed my skin. I forced myself to focus on mundane things: errands, meetings, the grant proposal on my desk.
None of it stuck.
Because behind every thought was the letter.
And behind the letter was an image I couldn’t shake.
Not a face.
Not a name.
Just a silhouette.
A man standing still.
Watching.
Waiting.
The kind of attention that pinned you in place without touching you.
My breath hitched, and my grip tightened on the edge of the tile.
“Enough,” I whispered, but the word came out unsteady.
I turned off the water and stepped out, towel-wrapping myself like armor.
I needed normalcy. Coffee. Clothes. Routine. Anything but the spiraling fantasy crowding the edges of my mind.
By the time I was dressed, the sun was stronger, casting warm rectangles across the hardwood. My phone buzzed again—texts from colleagues. One from a friend asking if I’d be at the fundraiser next week. A reminder from my personal assistant about a lunch with a donor.
I smoothed my palms down the front of my outfit—a fitted ivory turtleneck tucked into high-waisted black trousers, the kind with a pressed front seam sharp enough to cut. A thin gold chain at my throat. Stud earrings. Black ankle boots polished enough to reflect the morning light.
Professional. Controlled. Untouchable.
Exactly the version of me the world expected to see.
All predictable.
All manageable.
All suffocating.
I sat at my kitchen island with my laptop open, a steaming mug beside me, trying to drown in work. My inbox was a battlefield—subject lines full of policy jargon, budget revisions, requests for statements. Normally, I could slip into the rhythm of it, slip into the version of myself everyone expected.
But today, every email felt like a flimsy costume.
Lia Quinn, the professional. Lia Quinn, the strategist. Lia Quinn, the polished advocate.
All while Cecilia Quinn, the woman, lingered inside the quiet halls of her condo, barefoot and restless, imagining a man who wouldn’t wait for permission to cross her threshold.
I typed three words into an email and erased them. Typing another sentence, then erasing that too. My fingers hovered over the keys, restless.
This wasn’t me.
Or maybe it was the truest part of me, the part I’d buried so deep it could only surface in the dark.
