“Not that busy.” He typed something. The clicking of keys was the loudest sound in the room.
I crossed the floor and sat at the other end of the sectional, pulling my knees up, the robe falling around me in grey folds.
“You disappeared,” I said. “Before this week. The office didn’t see you for a while.”
“I had things to handle.” His eyes were on the screen. “Business.”
One-word answers. I was getting one-word answers from a man who’d once talked to me until three in the morning about a cult documentary. Something hot prickled behind my ribs.
“And the part where you looked through me like I was invisible? Was that business too?”
His fingers stopped.
The silence held for three heartbeats. Four. Then he closed the laptop—a single, definitive click. He stared at the city through the glass like it owed him something.
“I wasn’t ignoring you,” he said.
“You called me Wells. In your office. While I was standing right in front of you.”
His jaw worked. He didn’t deny it.
“The handover’s already in motion,” he said. And the flatness of his voice—no heat, no edge, just a man reading out the termsof a surrender—made my stomach drop. “California Times is being transferred. Media group from New York. They’ll keep the staff, the editorial direction. Clean deal.”
I blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“Today was my last day.” He said it to the window, not to me. “I won’t be in the building again.” He paused, and the pause was the worst part—heavy, final, like a door being eased shut. “You won’t have to see me again, Pauline. I mean that.”
The words hit me straight in my heart. Not sharp—worse than sharp. A dull, spreading ache, like something vital being slowly pulled loose.
He was leaving.
He was actually, genuinely leaving.
My throat burned. That fierce, terrible heat that came right before tears—my chest seizing, everything inside me rebelling against the calm face I was trying to hold together.
“Why now?” It came out barely above a whisper.
He turned around then. Confusion flickered across his face. Those blue eyes were focused on me now.
“Why are you giving up now?” My voice climbed, and I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t shove it back down where it belonged.
“All this time I’ve been telling you to leave me alone. I’ve pushed you away and slammed every door I could find and you never listened. Not once. You bought my entire company, Jack. You followed me into a building full of men who wanted to hurt me. You ran through a blacked-out building because you saw my car in a parking lot.”
I was breathing too fast. My nails were biting into my palms. “So why is now—when I’ve finally—why is this the moment you decide to stop?”
He was watching me, and I could see it—his hands were locked together so tightly the knuckles had gone white.
“I heard you went on a date.”
Everything in me went quiet.
“I was at Claudette’s.” His voice was stripped bare, his eyes dim with emotions. Like those words had been hitting him alive. “You’re already moving on,” he said. “You’ve finally found someone who made you happy. I no longer have the right to keep—” He stopped. His throat moved. “I decided to let you go.”
The silence rang in my ears. My heart was doing something arrhythmic and painful.
“I did go on a date with Ethan,” I said.
He nodded. One tight motion. Already retreating, already rebuilding, and I could see it happening in real time—the walls going back up, brick by brick?—
