“Text me later,” I said. “Please.”
He nodded. I left. Walked to the elevator, pressed the button, stepped in without looking back because if I turned around I’d see his face, I’d stay, he told me to go, and I was trying to respect that even though every part of me was screaming that leaving him alone right now was wrong.
He didn’t text that night.
I lay in bed with my phone on the pillow, the screen bright in the dark room, waiting for a buzz that never came. I checked it every twenty minutes until one in the morning, then put it face down and stared at the ceiling until I fell asleep sometime around three. I texted him first thing:how is she? how are you? call me.He didn’t respond. I called after lunch. Voicemail, his recorded greeting, professional and clipped, nothing like the voice I was used to hearing against my ear in the dark. Called again before dinner. Voicemail again. I went to work the next day. His office was dark, empty, his chair pushed back from the desk like he’d left in a hurry days ago. I sat at my desk staring at the glass wall with my stomach in knots.
Three days. Three days of silence, of voicemails he didn’t return, of texts marked read and unanswered. I was sick with worry, literally sick, throwing up every morning before I could eat, my stomach rolling and cramping. I told myself it was the stress, the anxiety, the not sleeping, the constant churning fear that something had broken between us in that hospital hallway. Something I couldn’t fix because he wouldn’t let me close enough to try.
On the third night I sat on my bathroom floor with my forehead against the cool tile and my stomach empty and my phone dark on the counter above me. No texts, no calls, no voicemails, nothing. Just silence from the man who promised he’d tell me if something was wrong.
I pressed my palms flat against the floor, breathed, waited. I didn’t know what I was waiting for anymore.
24
— • —
Andrea
I stepped off the elevator onto our floor on the fourth morning running on caffeine, three hours of sleep, and a speech I’d been rehearsing since 5 am. The floor was quiet. His office was dark through the glass, chair empty, computer off. Same as yesterday, same as the day before. My chest tightened the way it had every morning this week when I walked onto this floor and found it empty.
I put my bag down, sat at my desk, stared at the dark office. He had to. He couldn’t just disappear forever. People don’t just vanish from their own company without a word.
The elevator dinged behind me.
I spun around so fast my chair rolled, and the relief that flooded through me when I saw him was so sharp it almost hurt. He was here, he was alive, he was walking onto the floor. I was alreadystanding, already opening my mouth to say something, I didn’t even know what, when I registered the rest of the picture.
He wasn’t alone.
Lorraine was beside him. Her arm looped through his, red hair perfect against a black dress, walking in step with him like they’d arrived together. Like they’d been together this whole time. Like the three days of silence had been spent with her instead of in a hospital room.
My mouth closed. The words I’d been about to say died somewhere in my throat.
They walked toward my desk together, close, his jaw locked, eyes forward, not looking at me. She was looking right at me, and she was smiling, and the smile was wrong, too wide, too warm, bright in a way I’d never seen from her before.
“Andrea!” She sounded delighted. Like we were friends, like she was thrilled to see me. “We really wanted you to be one of the first to hear the great news.”
She reached into her bag, pulled out a magazine, held it out to me with both hands like she was presenting a gift.
I looked down. Opened to the page she’d marked.
The headline punched the air out of me.
Finneas Kingsley and Lorraine Ashtor announce their engagement.
I stared at it. Professional photos, glossy, both of them polished and posed side by side. Spring ceremony. A lifelong friendshipblossoming into love. His face beside hers and they were both smiling at the camera and I was holding the magazine with hands that had started shaking so hard the pages rattled.
This wasn’t real. This couldn’t be real. I’d been in this man’s bed. I’d read to him in his library, fallen asleep in his garden, told him I was falling for him in a bathtub while he was inside me. This wasn’t fucking real.
Lorraine leaned into him, her palm going flat on his chest, right over his heart, right where I’d put my hand a hundred times, and she pressed her lips against his cheek. Slow. Lingering. Taking her time so I could see every second of it.
I couldn’t move. I stood there holding the magazine with my hands shaking, watching another woman kiss the man I loved three feet from my desk, and my body wouldn’t respond. My brain was screaming at me to throw the magazine, to scream, to do something, but I was frozen, my feet rooted to the carpet, the glossy pages rattling between my fingers.
She pulled back and smoothed his lapel with her fingers like she’d done it a thousand times. “Well then, I should let you two get to work. So much to do with the wedding planning, you have no idea.” She squeezed his arm, looked at me one more time with that bright wrong smile that had victory underneath it like a blade under silk. “Goodbye, darling. I’ll call you later about the venue.”
She walked to the elevator, pressed the button, stepped in without looking back. The doors closed behind her and the floor went silent.
My hands were still shaking. The magazine was still open. I could feel my pulse everywhere, in my fingers, my neck, the place behind my eyes where the pressure was building into something that was going to crack me open if I didn’t let it out.
