“I’m not your mother. I’m not your friend. I’m not going to tell you what to do. I’m not going to call HR. I’m not going to call him. I’m telling you what I know because somebody told me when I was twenty-five, and I’m paying it forward, and you can do with it whatever you want.”
“I understand.”
She held my gaze. “I’ll tell you one more thing, and then I’ll let you go.”
I nodded.
“He’s not paying for this, Joss. You are. And I think you already know that, but I want to say it out loud so you can’t unhear it. Decide if you can afford it.”
The room got very quiet.
Mira looked at me one more second. Then she put her glasses back on and turned to her monitors, and the meeting was over.
I stood up. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“For all of it.”
She didn’t look up from her monitor. She nodded once. I walked out of her office and closed the door behind me, and I crossed the floor back to my desk on legs that didn’t feel entirely connected to the rest of me.
The afternoon was a fog.
I got through it the same way I’d gotten through Tuesday morning—by typing things I had no recollection of typing. I closed a ticket. I attended a meeting in which I said one sentence I couldn’t reconstruct an hour later. I sent the Outfit Builder follow-up to the head of engineering. I drank water and I drank coffee and I did not eat lunch.
At 3:45, I saw him.
He was in the large conference room on the far side of the floor, standing at the head of a table with about a dozen people in chairs around him. His suit was on. His sleeves were down. He was talking, and the room was listening, and his face had the same composed neutrality expected of a CEO.
He looked exactly the way he’d looked on Monday morning when I’d seen him through the same glass walls.
He looked exactly the way he’d looked in every all-hands video I’d ever sat through, every press photo I’d ever scrolled past, every glimpse I’d ever caught of him crossing the lobby in the fourteen months before last Friday—when he had been a name on my offer letter and a face on a screen and nothing else.
He looked completely fine.
I stood at my desk with my hand on the back of my chair and I watched him for maybe five seconds. He didn’t look up. He didn’t turn his head. He didn’t know I was watching him,because the meeting had his full attention, and the meeting was getting from him the same Sutton Randall the meeting had always gotten—composed, certain, in command of a room of senior people who were taking notes on whatever he was saying.
He’d been inside me less than twenty-four hours ago. And he looked fine.
I sat down. I worked. Or I pretended to work. I made it to 5:30. I made it to six. At 6:15, I logged off, picked up my bag, walked out of the building, and didn’t look back at the glass-walled conference room on the way out. I made it out the front doors of the Myrror building and onto the sidewalk before I let myself breathe properly.
The ride home was thirteen minutes. The car was a rideshare this time, because I didn’t have a CEO calling a private driver for me on a Thursday evening at 6:15. I sat in the back seat with my forehead against the warm window and watched the city go by and felt Mira’s words repeating behind my eyes.
He’s not paying for this. You are. Decide if you can afford it.
The apartment was empty when I got home. Hadley’s note from the night before was still on the counter.Staying at Beckett’s. Eat something.I read it again. I still didn’t eat anything.
I sat on the couch in the living room with my phone in my hand and the June dusk coming through the windows, and I stared at our text thread. He hadn’t texted all day. Neither had I. Both of us had been careful, and both of us had known we were being careful.
I scrolled up to his last message.
I’m at the front entrance.
I scrolled down to my last message.
I’m on my way.
I sat with the phone in my hand for what was probably an hour. The sky outside my window went from blue to gold topink to dark. I didn’t turn on a light. I didn’t text him. I didn’t call him. I sat in the dusk with Mira’s sentence sitting in my chest and the smell of warm city night coming through the open window, and I knew what I was going to do.
