"Then you're dismissed. I'll keep you updated on the investigation's progress."
We stood, walked out of the office, and made it halfway down the hallway before either of us spoke.
"The roof," Cassian said quietly. "We need to talk."
I followed him. It was the same place we'd stood together after the hotel, watching the sunrise, trying to make sense of everything that was happening between us.
It felt like a lifetime ago.
The morning air was cold, biting through my white coat, but I barely noticed. My mind was racing, cycling through the meeting and the accusations if us having sexual relations.
"Who would do this?" I asked.
Cassian leaned against the railing, his back to the city below. His face was a mess of exhaustion and guilt, and when he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper.
"Maya."
I stared at him. "What?"
"She left last night." He rubbed a hand over his face, the gesture heavy with fatigue. "She saw the text you sent. The one about being friends and still loving me."
My stomach dropped. "Cassian?—"
"She asked me questions. About you. About us. About what happened at the hotel." He met my eyes, and I saw the weight he was carrying there. The guilt. The grief. The confusion of a man whose life had just imploded. "I told her the truth. That youconfessed to me and that we shared a room. That we woke up..." He trailed off.
"Woke up how?"
"Together. Tangled up in each other." His jaw worked. "I told her it wasn't intentional, that nothing happened, but she didn't believe me. Or maybe she did believe me and it didn't matter. Either way, she left."
I didn't know what to say. Part of me wanted to feel vindicated, to see Maya's departure as the removal of an obstacle between us. But I couldn't. Not when Cassian looked like this.
I could see how much her leaving had cost him.
"You think she filed the ethics complaint," I said.
"I don't know. Maybe. She was angry and hurt." He shook his head. "I can't blame her. I lied to her for weeks. Not directly, but by omission. I let her believe everything was fine when it wasn't."
"That doesn't give her the right to accuse us of something we didn't do."
"No. It doesn't." He turned to face the city, his hands gripping the railing. "But she's not the one who destroyed our relationship. I did that all on my own."
We stood there in the cold morning air, both of us processing, both of us trying to figure out what came next.
"What does this mean?" I finally asked.
Cassian was quiet for a long moment. "I don't know."
"You don't know what this means? Or you don't know what you want?"
"Both." He turned to look at me, and his green eyes were full of something I couldn't read. "Maya left less than twenty-four hours ago. I'm under investigation for something I didn't do. My entire life is in chaos right now, and I don't trust myself to make any decisions about anything."
I wanted to push and demand answers, to know where I stood, to finally have the clarity I'd been craving since I'd walked back into his life six weeks ago.
But I could see how close to the edge he was. Pushing him now would only break something that might not be fixable.
"Okay," I said, the word tasted like defeat.
"Calla." He reached for my hand, then stopped himself, his fingers curling into a fist at his side. "I'm not saying no. I'm just saying not now. Can you understand that?"
