Page 155 of Say My Name

Now he sees what I’ve done with every empty hour.

“You’re paid to manage my schedule,” I remind him.

“I’m managing it.”

“By canceling half of it?”

“By refusing to help you work through another weekend when nothing on your desk requires it.”

He looks around the office, taking in the reports stacked beside my laptop and the coffee that went cold before seven.

“You’re going home Friday at a reasonable hour,” he says.

“I decide what’s reasonable.”

“The cleaning crew shouldn’t have to ask you to lift your feet so they can vacuum.”

A laugh almost gets out, a sharp, unfamiliar thing. It feels like it would tear something on the way up, so I swallow it down.

Evan’s impatience gives way to something quieter. He doesn’t ask what happened. He hasn’t asked once in the past two weeks, even after the appointments vanished from my calendar and Elena stopped coming through my private office door.

He lifts the report. “You have an acquisition strategy meeting in twenty minutes. This can wait.”

He walks out with it.

I should call him back. Instead, I open the preliminary acquisition packet on my laptop.

The numbers are familiar. I understand what the data is asking from me, and with enough attention, I can produce an answer. I wish anything else worked that way.

For two weeks, Elena and I have occupied the same building without being alone together once.

She remains exact in every meeting. She challenges weak assumptions, finds problems before anyone else sees them, and refuses to let personal pain touch her work. No one watching us would know she was in my bed the night before this distance began.

No one would know I told her I loved her.

I’ve kept every promise I made when I left. I don’t call her. I don’t touch her when we pass each other in a crowded room. I don’t send a message unless her role requires it, and I haven’t invented professional reasons to see her.

Every email gives her precisely what she needs.

Dominic: Revised forecast approved. Proceed with the updated assumptions.

Dominic: Legal has cleared the vendor change.

Dominic: Please attend Monday’s acquisition strategy meeting.

Her answers are brief and professional.

Elena: Understood.

Elena: Thank you.

Elena: I’ll be there.

She never signs her name. She knows she doesn’t need to.

I know when she arrives because I recognize her footsteps in the corridor. I notice when she leaves because some part of me tracks her even while the rest of me is discussing quarterly targets or reviewing a financing proposal.

She doesn’t pause after meetings anymore. There are no quiet comments once everyone else leaves, no look held across the table because we’re remembering something that happened outside the office.