The door closed. His footsteps faded down the hallway, and then the building was quiet, and then the street was quiet, and then the world was quiet in the way it only gets when someone who’s been filling up every corner of your life walks out and takes the sound with them.
I stood in my living room for a long time. The clock ticked. The coffee went cold on the counter. The Libre tattoo on my ribs ached like a bruise. It always did when I was hurting in ways my body couldn’t articulate.
Then I sat on the couch, his spot, the warm spot, the dent where his body had been five minutes ago, and I pressed my face into the cushion that still smelled like him, and I let the sound come back.
It came back as a sound I’d been holding in for weeks.
I cried until I couldn’t. Then I sat in the quiet.
Alone.
My phone sat on the coffee table. I knew my mother wouldn’t call. She hadn’t called in months, since the beginning, since I’d told her and she’d decided that telling her meant I was choosing it over her, that being with Ellis was a betrayal she couldn’t forgive. And now Ellis was choosing something, too, even if his something was different. Even if his leaving came with the promise of coming back.
I didn’t know if that promise would hold. I didn’t know if the pause would ever end, or if it would just stretch out like my mother’s silence, a pause that became permanent, a maybe that became never.
I picked up my phone. Set it down. The apartment was too quiet. Sierra had texted twice that day. Calliope once. I hadn’t answered any of them. At least there were people still waiting for me to come back.
Chapter twenty-eight
Work didn’t fix heartbreak, but it came close enough that I could pretend.
The Harrington & Associates winter cocktail party was happening in thirty-two days, and I had convinced myself that if I could make it perfect, everything else would stop hurting. This was the logic of a man who had spent three days in the same Henley and two different pairs of boxers, so maybe my thinking wasn’t top-tier at the moment. The lamp on the side table buzzed at a frequency only I could hear.
I was sitting cross-legged on my living room floor, surrounded by cardboard bins, each one labeled in my aggressively neat handwriting: GLASSWARE. LINENS. CENTERPIECE MATERIALS. One bin contained sample napkins in four shades of cream, arranged in order of how much they cost per hundred. The Harringtons were using their office conference room, which had exposed brick and terrible natural light. I had already sourced uplighting. I had already decided on the bar layout. I had already drawn a floor plan that accounted for traffic flow and prevented that one thing that happens at all parties where people cluster in the kitchen likethey were auditioning for a very boring reality show.
Ellis would say…
But Ellis wasn’t here. That was the point. That was why I was here, on my floor, cross-referencing catering menus like I was trying to solve a homicide.
The thing about controlling an event was that everything was solvable. The florist could be replaced. The DJ had backup tracks. If the centerpieces arrived damaged, I had contingencies. Life didn’t work like that. Life shows up three hours after you’ve finally stopped crying, asked for a break, and left you here, on a floor full of napkins, wondering if he was sleeping or staring at the ceiling in that apartment that still had your hoodie somewhere in it.
My phone buzzed. I didn’t check it.
Tuesday. 9:47 AM. The Harrington & Associates office was all floor-to-ceiling windows and a light that made everyone look like they were being interrogated for a crime they didn’t commit. I was here for the final walk-through with Margaret Harrington, the CFO who had the energy of someone who had never once disappointed a deadline.
I was showing her the table configurations when my phone vibrated against my ribs. A text from the florist: “Client emergency, only able to do half the arrangement order for next Saturday. Working on alternatives, but wanted to give you notice.”
Half the arrangements. Margaret Harrington. Three weeks out.
My brain did that thing where it moved too fast, calculated losses, spun scenarios like I was running code. Half the arrangements meant I eitherdoubled down on the ones we were getting (make them bigger, fuller, so visually they looked more present) or pivoted entirely. Fewer, larger installations positioned strategically around the room to create focal points rather than coverage. The second option required new florals, new budget conversations, new approvals from Margaret, who was currently talking about seating charts and making it very clear that execution was my entire job.
“Just one second,” I told her, which was professional except I was already texting back: “Which designs can you execute?” with my hands shaking slightly because this was what happened when you’d given a client a promise and suddenly the person who made the promise possible was backing out.
Margaret was still talking about the board members who needed to be separated from the board members who divorced each other last year. I was standing in her office, in their office, the Harringtons’ kingdom, nodding while my phone buzzed again. The florist: “The lush cascades and the low cylinders. Not the tall arrangements.”
No tall arrangements. The room was already shit for natural light and I specifically chose the tall arrangements to draw the eye upward, to counteract the heaviness of the exposed brick. Without them, the whole visual story shifted. The room got smaller. It started looking like a venue instead of an experience.
“Jett?” Margaret was looking at me. “You’re okay with the seating?”
I had no idea what the seating was. I had no idea what she’d just said. My attention was fragmenting like a phone screen someone had dropped on concrete, and I was still in her office pretending to know what I was doing.
“Yeah, absolutely. Let me get those adjustments to you by tomorrow morning,” I heard myself say, which was a lie because I didn’t have the adjustments yet. I didn’t even have the concept yet. I was making promises in real-time like my job security wasn’t literally hanging on whether I delivered what I promised three weeks ago.
“You seem distracted,” Margaret said, and now her tone had shifted. Concerned. Which was worse than angry because concern meant she was already calculating whether she could trust me with something this important.
“I’m not. I’m good. Full attention.” It was the behavioral equivalent of sprinting while assuring someone you’re walking. “I have the florals update to process, but we’re definitely moving forward with the core concept. This is all going to be stunning.”
She watched me like a code that needed decryption. “This is a significant event for us, Jett. The partners are going to be here. New clients. This is…”
