“Same difference.”
Another pause followed.
“Your father never forgave you for breaking that engagement,” Elias said.
“He’ll survive.”
“He nearly didn’t.”
The reminder carried more weight than he intended. Still, the truth remained unchanged.
“You know what the worst part is?” I said quietly.
Elias didn’t answer immediately.
“What?”
“I might already be too late.”
Silence settled between us again.
“She changed her name,” I continued slowly. “She built a life here. A career. Everything.”
“And?”
“And I have no fucking idea whether there’s someone else standing beside her in it.”
Elias exhaled.
“You’re not exactly known for giving up easily.”
“No,” I said, my jaw tightening. “I’m fucking not.”
“That’s what worries me.”
After the call ended, I leaned back in the chair and stared at the ceiling while the weight of five lost years settled over me. The truth was simple, and that made it cruel. If she had built a life without me, I had walked back into it anyway, and I wasn’t sure either of us would survive what came next.
Edwina
Monday arrived too quickly. The weekend had passed in a strange mix of comfort and unease, with pancakes in the morning, Helena’s laughter filling the apartment as she showed Gwen and Aster the drawings she had made at kindergarten, and my friends’ voices drifting through the screen during our video call. For a few hours, I let myself stay inside that small circle of normalcy. Gwen talked about wedding venues while Zayn appeared in the background with his usual sarcastic comments, and Aster rolled her eyes as she insisted she still had not met a man worth all the patience she had wasted waiting for one.
They were my anchor to the life I had once known.
And yet even during those moments of laughter, a restlessness lingered at the edges of my mind. Because Hayden was now part of my present again.
By the time Monday morning arrived, the tension I had tried to ignore throughout the weekend returned with full force the moment I stepped through the gates of the university.
The campus looked exactly the same as it always did at the beginning of a new week. Students moved between buildings with the familiar mixture of energy and exhaustion that came with early lectures, coffee cups appeared in almost every hand, and the low murmur of conversation filled the courtyard as though nothing unusual had happened at all.
Only I knew how different everything had become. I had hoped—perhaps foolishly—that the distance between the Foreign Languages Department and the dean’s office would allow a certain level of professional separation.
That hope lasted less than two hours. The first message arrived shortly after my morning lecture ended, an administrative request from the dean’s office asking me to stop by about exam schedule changes. I stared at the email longer than I should have, my fingers resting against the keyboard as I considered the chance that it might be genuine, then remembered who had sent it. Hayden Stone had never done anything without a reason. Refusing would have drawn more attention than going, so I went, and the meeting lasted less than ten minutes.
He sat behind his desk as if the position had always belonged to him, asking questions about course structures and departmental responsibilities that could have been handled through email. His tone stayed polite and professional, which made the way his gaze lingered on my face after every answer feel even more inappropriate. I noticed the faint smell of smoke on him when he leaned back, subtle in a way I might have missed if I had not once known him too well, and it unsettled me because Hayden had never smoked before. I did not know when he had started, or what had driven him to it, and I hated that part of me wanted to ask. I left the office the moment the conversation ended.
The second request arrived shortly before noon. This time it concerned a research grant application that required clarification regarding one of my previous publications.
Again, it was technically a reasonable question. Again, it required my presence in his office.
