He blinks. He expected tears, or at the very least a crack, but he has gotten a locked door, and the adjustment takes him half a second he can’t quite hide. “I needed to see you.”
“I’m working.”
His jaw tightens fractionally. “Can we please just talk?”
“I’m too busy to talk about this now.”
“This?” His laugh is quiet and wounded, as if he rehearsed it somewhere between the lobby and the elevator. “You left without a word, Skylar. You left a key on the counter like I was a landlord. The least you could have done was talk to me.”
I look at him steadily. “You were on a date with another woman.”
“It was a business dinner.”
“Then go talk to the woman in the red dress about how you were out with her while your girlfriend was at home wondering where the hell you were.”
Frustrated that I am not giving him an inch, he takes a deep breath.
“Skylar.”
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
“No.”
“Because I know what a man looks like when he is leaning across a table, trying to get laid, Damien.”
His mouth flattens into a thin line. “You’re making this ugly.”
“No,” I say. “You did that yourself. I am simply refusing to make it pretty for you.”
For a moment, he says nothing.
The office moves around us.
A caseworker walks by with two coffees. Someone’s phone rings at the far end of the floor. The front-desk printer jams and starts beeping. I hate that we are doing this here, in this space, in front of people who know me as someone who has her shit together, but I’m at the end of whatever patience I have left to manage his comfort at the expense of my own.
Damien lowers his voice. “This isn’t you.”
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. It’s loud enough that the receptionist glances up from her keyboard.
“That’s the funniest thing you have ever said to me,” I tell him. “Because you never actually met me. You met the version of me still bleeding from someone else, having sewn herself up just enough to look functional. You got the stitches, Damien. You never got the wound. And the sad thing is, you never once noticed the difference or thought to ask.”
His eyes narrow. “Cassie is poisoning you against me.”
“Cassie,” I say quietly, “reminded me that I had a pulse. That the life I was living in that apartment was not a life at all. It was just a very expensive cage. There is a difference. You just never cared enough to notice.”
I walk away before he can answer. Before he can see my hands shaking. Standing up for yourself is not always clean or triumphant. Sometimes it just feels like stepping off a roof and praying the ground remembers your name on the way down.
Every time I leave the apartment now, I expect to see him. On the sidewalk outside the building. In the parking lot at work. In the margins of an ordinary moment, standing there, waiting.
Four days. That’s all it takes for my life to feel more like mine than it has in years. That is the part I keep turning over quietly.
On the sixth day, I leave work a little later than usual. A court report needed one more pass. A phone call I had been putting off turned into forty minutes of careful, exhausting listening. By the time I close the file, my eyes are burning.
My phone sits on the desk beside me, face-down.
Three missed calls from Damien and two messages, which I have totally ignored.
I grab my phone and pick up my bag.
