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“Hey, Thalia,” she greets me warmly. “Come in, have a seat.”

I nod, forcing a polite smile, and take the only empty chair left. She looks composed, but her tone feels heavier than usual.

I glance around the table, curiosity stirring in my chest. The last time an urgent meeting happened, she told us we’d landed a major wedding event—high-profile, high-stress, and top-secret. Maybe this is another one of those. Hopefully without another nightmare bride like the last one. I don’t think I could survive that again.

Erika clasps her hands in front of her and gives us that calm, reassuring smile she always wears before dropping a bomb.

“You all know I like to be straightforward,” she begins, her voice firm yet kind. “No suspense, no long introductions.”

That alone makes me straighten in my chair.

“You probably remember when I had to take some time off a while back,” she continues, her gaze moving from one of us to the next. “At the time, I managed to take care of things at home, but only temporarily. And after a lot of thought, I’ve realized that the best decision for me now is to move back.”

I blink, taken aback. Move back? That would mean hours of commuting each day. How would she even manage that?

“I know this comes suddenly,” she adds quickly, “but please believe me when I say I’ve turned this decision over a hundred times before making it. This is the best option for everyone.”

Her smile falters, and I feel my chest spasm in response, like my body already understands what my mind hasn’t caught up to yet.

“I’ll be leaving starting next week,” she announces. “And the company will be taken over by…” she pauses, just long enough to make my stomach twist. “Ethan Hardy, under the Hartho umbrella.”

For a heartbeat, the words don’t register. They hover somewhere in the air, distant, meaningless, like they were said in another language.

Ethan Hardy.

My pulse stutters, then slams back hard, too fast, too loud, echoing in my ears.

The same Ethan Hardy whose name was plastered all over the internet this morning. The same man who kissed me like he owned me last night, who touched me like I mattered, and then—apparently—announced his relationship with another woman.

Now he’s going to be my boss.

The air leaves my lungs all at once, like they just collapsed. Around me, people start reacting—murmurs, inhales, confused voices—but they blur into nothing, fading into the background like static. I can’t focus on any of it.

Of course. Of course life would find a way to make this worse.

“What do you mean you’re leaving?”

“What do you mean Hartho is taking over the firm? What happens to us?”

“Wait… did you sell the company?”

The questions overlap, filling the room, the tension rising with every second, but their words feel distant, distorted, like I’m hearing them through water.

I can’t say a word. I don’t even try. My throat closes, my hands turn cold, and all I can think about is how desperately I want the ground to open beneath me and swallow me whole.

Or maybe I’ll just wake up. Maybe this is a nightmare, and I’ll laugh about it later.

But deep down, I already know the truth.

This is real. Terribly, painfully real.

My personal life has always been chaos. That’s nothing new. I’ve been living with it for as long as I can remember, and at twenty-eight, I stopped expecting it to get any better.

But my job?

My job was the one thing that made sense. My escape. My safe place. The only corner of my world where everything was calm, where I could finally breathe without feeling like something was about to break.

Every morning, I’d walk through those glass doors and leave my problems behind. For a few hours, it was just me and the work—and that was enough. That was everything.