That’s what it feels like, anyway. Suspended above everything real, sealed off behind money and architecture and soundproofing, watching a city move without me. My apartment is spectacular in the way magazines like to call clean. Sharp lines. Polished stone. Furniture chosen by someone who understands aesthetics but not comfort.
It is cold.
It is empty.
Floor-to-ceiling windows wrap around me, giving me a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of a city I don’t live in. I can see traffic inching along like blood through veins. I can see office lights blinking on and off. I can see people living lives that intersect, collide, and matter.
None of them are here.
I’m still in my running clothes from last night. The shirt clings faintly to my skin, stiff with dried sweat. My shoes are kicked off somewhere near the door, one of them tipped on its side like it fell there, drunk. I didn’t shower. I didn’t change. I didn’t sleep.
I can’t sleep.
I sit on a ten-thousand-dollar sofa that somehow manages to be uncomfortable, the cushions too firm, too perfectly engineered, as if they were designed to look good rather than to hold a human body. I lean forward, elbows on my knees, my phone heavy in my hands.
It won’t stop buzzing.
Emails stack up faster than I can process them. Three hundred, then three hundred and twelve. Ninety voicemails. PR. Legal. Assistants who don’t know what tone to use anymore. Investors just checking in. People who smell blood.
I am trending.
I am a pariah.
And I deserve it.
I keep seeing her face. Not in flashes. Not like a dream. It’s relentless, crystal clear, like my brain refuses to let me blur it out. Her eyes. The exact moment it happened. When she realized. When the trust didn’t just break.
It curdled.
It rotted.
Right in front of me.
There’s a very specific look people get when they understand that something they believed in was never what they thought it was. I’ve seen it before. During hostile takeovers. During betrayals. I justified it then with numbers and projections.
I’ve never been on the receiving end of it.
You’re a vulture.
The word echoes, sharp and deserved.
I am.
You don’t get it.
I didn’t.
Not then.
I do now.
That’s the cruelest part. Understanding always comes too late for people like me, after the damage is done, after the choice is locked in, after the thing we wanted most has already walked out the door.
I finally understand what I actually did. Not the sanitized version I told myself at the bar. Not the version Rex pitched with charts and inevitability baked in.
I stole her agency.
I took her choices.
