“Take your garbage, Simon. And get out of my house.”
A ragged, pitiful sound tore from his throat, a dry sob that burned his lungs. Simon curled into a tight, fetal ball on the mattress, pressing the heels of his hands brutally against his eye sockets until bursts of static exploded behind his eyelids. He wanted to slip back into the dark, anesthetized void of his drunken sleep. He had driven aimlessly for hours yesterday, a ghost haunting his own city, finally pulling into a neon-lit liquor store to buy a bottle of bourbon he barely remembered swallowing.
He only vaguely recalled the profound, degrading humiliation of knocking on his mother’s front door at midnight. He remembered weeping on her porch, reeking of alcohol and failure, dragging the plastic bags of his life across her threshold like a wounded animal crawling away to die.
He was thirty-six years old. He had built a lucrative career, married a brilliant, beautiful woman, and fathered an incredible child. And he had burned the entire kingdom to ashfor twenty minutes of cheap, destructive validation in a sterile hotel room.
The self-loathing was a living, breathing entity in the room with him. It gnawed at the lining of his stomach, making him violently nauseous. It whispered in his ear that he was a monster. He pushed the heavy floral quilt off his body and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His clothes from yesterday—the tailored charcoal trousers and the wrinkled dress shirt—were practically glued to his skin with a layer of cold, panicked sweat.
He dropped his heavy head into his hands, his fingers tangling in his hair, trying to drag oxygen through the crushing weight pressing down on his chest.
Suddenly, a harsh, mechanical buzzing shattered the quiet of the room.
Simon flinched, the sound sending a fresh spike of agony straight through his skull. His phone was vibrating aggressively against the glass top of the nightstand, inching toward the edge like a dying insect.
He didn't want to look. He wanted to throw the device against the rose-colored wall until the glass shattered into a thousand jagged pieces. But the buzzing was relentless. It was the sound of the outside world, demanding its pound of flesh. He reached out with a trembling, clammy hand and flipped the screen over.
Incoming Call: David.
Simon stared at the glowing name. The catastrophic bomb he had dropped on Lumière Events the day before was still detonating, and the shockwave had finally reached him.
He swiped the green icon and brought the phone to his ear.
"What," Simon croaked. His voice was a ruin, sounding like gravel grinding against rusted metal.
"Where the hell are you?" David’s voice exploded through the tiny speaker, entirely devoid of his usual polished, corporate charm. He sounded frantic, breathless, and wild with fury. "Simon, I have been calling you since six o'clock this morning. The Miller account caterer backed out, the florists are threatening a walkout, and half the junior staff is in an absolute panic because their senior partner just vanished into thin air."
Simon closed his eyes, leaning his heavy head back against the cheap wooden headboard. The ceiling fan above him was still, its blades gathering dust. "I told you yesterday, David. I quit. I'm not coming back."
"You can't just quit!" David roared, the panic bleeding into pure, unadulterated rage. "You have a legally binding contract! You have a non-compete clause that will freeze you out of the industry for two years! You are abandoning a sinking ship two weeks before the biggest gala of the quarter because you made a stupid, cliché mistake with a junior associate?"
"It wasn't a stupid mistake, David," Simon said. The deadness in his own voice surprised him. There was no anger left, only the cold, vast expanse of his own emptiness. "It was a fatal one. My wife threw me out. My marriage is over. I am currently staring at my clothes in garbage bags on my mother's guest room floor. I don't care about the Miller account. I don't care if the gala burns to the ground."
The line went quiet. A long, taut, suspended silence stretched between them. Simon could hear David’s heavy, erratic breathing on the other end of the line.
"Listen to me," David said, his tone dropping an octave, shifting from a panicked boss to a cold, calculating cornered animal. "I am sorry about your marriage. Truly, I am. But youare about to make this infinitely worse for yourself. Emily came into my office this morning."
Simon’s eyes snapped open. The mention of her name sent a fresh, blinding wave of nausea rolling through his gut. The temperature in the room seemed to plummet. "What did she want?"
"She wanted to know why you weren't at the morning briefing," David said, his words clipped, sharp, and precise. "And when I told her you were taking an indefinite leave of absence, she shut the door. She insinuated that if you were being pushed out, she would consider it a hostile work environment. She implied that you, her superior, used your position of power to coerce her into a relationship."
A bitter, humorless laugh scraped out of Simon’s throat.
Coerce. The word hung in the air, dripping with venom. The memory invaded his mind with sickening clarity—Emily dropping her purse, Emily stepping into his space, Emily tearing the foil wrapper of the condom with her teeth, her eyes dark and triumphant. She had hunted him. She had laid the trap, and he had walked willingly into the jaws.
She wasn't just satisfied with destroying his marriage. She was a predator covering her tracks. She was going to ensure she came out of the wreckage looking like the victim, securing her climb up the corporate ladder over his professional grave.
"She sent the photo to my wife, David," Simon said, his voice dropping to a terrifyingly calm, hollow register. The truth was a heavy stone dropping into a bottomless well. "She stalked my personal life, she bypassed my boundaries, and she deliberately detonated my family out of pure spite when I rejected her yesterday in the cooler. If you want to keep a sociopath on your payroll because you're terrified of a lawsuit,that is your cross to bear. But I am not walking back into that building to be her prey."
"Simon, if you walk away now, you forfeit your equity," David warned, a final, desperate threat meant to anchor him to a life he no longer possessed. "You walk away with nothing."
"I already have nothing," Simon whispered.
He didn't wait for David to twist the knife further. He pulled the phone away from his ear and pressed the red icon.
He didn't stop there. With numb, mechanical efficiency, his thumb held down the power button on the side of the device. A prompt appeared on the screen. He swiped to power off. He watched the screen fade to absolute black, severing his final tie to the world he had built.
He tossed the dead, useless piece of glass and metal onto the mattress beside him. The silence rushed back into the dusty rose room, but it offered no peace, no sanctuary. He was utterly, entirely ruined. And the most agonizing part of it all was the absolute, undeniable certainty that he deserved every single second of the pain.
