She didn’t say anything. Her eyes held mine for a long moment, and then she turned back to the skyline.
The dismissal was clear.
I returned to my office.
The cube was there. I picked it up. Started turning it. The colors blurred. My hands were shaking.
I fell for a woman who was kind to me. That’s what happened. That’s all it was. She was kind because that’s who she is. Not because she wanted me. Not because she felt what I felt.
She did all of those things because she was decent.
I misunderstood her decency as love. I took a woman doing her job and built it into something it never was.
And now she was crying on a balcony because of me.
You’re my boss. Nothing more.The words came back again. Her voice was calm while mine was falling apart.
The cube slipped from my hands. Hit the desk. Rolled onto the floor. I didn’t pick it up.
My chest clenched. Slowly. The air was going thin.
I couldn't breathe. The office was full of air and none of it was reaching my lungs.
I pushed back from the desk. Stood.
My skin was crawling and I needed the cube but it was on the floor and bending down felt impossible because if I went down I wasn’t sure I’d come back up.
My hands went to the desk drawer. Top right. The orange prescription bottle that I kept there for emergencies.
My hands were shaking so badly that the cap took three tries to open. I shook one pill into my palm, then stared at it. Small. White. The chemical promise that in ten minutes my pulse would slow and my breathing would even out.
But the pill wouldn’t fix the part that was actually broken.
I swallowed it anyway. Sat back in my chair. Closed my eyes. Tried to count the way she’d taught me.
In. One. Two. Three. Four.
It didn’t work the same without her voice. Without her presence, her smell. Without the small warm hand on my face.
CHAPTER 15
Anna
His office stayed closed the next morning.
I noticed at ten a.m. Priya told me he never came in.
He didn’t come in the next day either.
Miles was in and out, handling the press fallout with a level of calmness that told me this wasn’t his first crisis. The PR team was working overtime. The tabloid photos were being challenged, buried, scrubbed from sites through legal threats and NDAs. Every time I refreshed a gossip page, there were fewer copies of that picture. Miles’s team was efficient. But you can’t fully erase something the internet has already swallowed.
The office functioned without Jace because he had designed it to. It was either a sign of excellent leadership, or the architecture of someone who assumed he would not always be present.
I kept his schedule running. Fielded calls. Answered emails with the same clipped, professional tone he used, which I’d absorbed without meaning to. Developers came to me with questions I forwarded to Miles. The narrative team sent another Meridian revision and I filed it in the folder marked for his review and the folder grew thicker every day he didn’t come in to open it.
Days blurred. I’d catch myself reaching for my phone to text him about a schedule change and then remember there was nobody to text. His office stayed locked and I walked past it every morning and every evening and the emptiness of it sat in my chest like a stone.
I ate lunch at my desk now. I used to go to the break room, but the break room had a view of the corridor, and I couldn’t deal with the stares from co-workers. So I stopped going. I ate a sandwich at my desk and stared at my screen.
