Marvin’s message kept looping in my mind as I stepped into the drizzle crawling over the city—Francis Sinclair has been waiting for this for two years. But I wasn’t ready to think about the future. Not when my present—four years of it—was still scattered across the rooms of Devin’s house and needed to be packed, trashed, or burned.

I took the slow drive up the winding hill to the villa, the rain tapping nervously against the windshield, as if the sky itself was unsure about my return. The tires crunched over wet gravel in a way I used to find comforting. Today, it sounded like someone else’s life.

The front door opened with its old, familiar click. I stepped inside, expecting the cool hush of black marble and steel, the echo of my own footsteps. Instead, I stopped dead.

The entryway was soaked in a warm, artificial orange glow. The walls—once a slick, impersonal gray—were now papered over with what looked like a child’s fever dream: plush bears, rabbits, kittens, hanging from ribbons and hooks, some with glossy new tags, others with heart-shaped noses and impossible smiles. The air smelled different, too—sweet, powdery, like a store that didn’t know what it wanted to sell.

I stood there, umbrella dripping onto the dark tile. Two years ago, I’d begged Devin to let me hang a single, palm-sized bear. One. I’d searched for it for a month, something quietly whimsical to soften the edge of the house. He’d barely looked at it before saying, “We’re not cluttering the entryway. It ruins the aesthetic.”

Now, the entire wall was plush. A carnival of softness.

I didn’t hear him come up behind me. Maybe I used to—maybe I’d spent so long attuned to his weight in a room that I tuned him out on purpose now.

“Melissa likes it this way,” Devin said. His voice was even, but there was a practiced patience underneath, like he was reciting a memo. “She came by yesterday. Saw your things and got upset.”

I didn’t turn. I just stared at a stuffed giraffe with a crooked smile, wondering what it had replaced. My own reflection in the glass behind the toys looked surprisingly blank.

He stepped around me, his shoes barely making a sound. “Come on. I’ll show you where your things are.”

I followed him down the hallway that had once felt like a runway—long, cold, lined with abstract art I’d never liked. The new paint was brighter. Not better. Just bright in the way that makes your eyes ache if you look too long.

The storage room was smaller than I remembered. Or maybe it just felt that way, now that all of my life was crammed into a single, sad corner. Four years of birthdays, holidays, Tuesday nights, and whispered secrets—reduced to two battered boxes and a plastic garment bag. My books, a mug with a lipstick stain, a pair of slippers with the heel worn through. My perfume bottle had leaked, its scent sharp and cloying on the cardboard.

But the worst was the pile on the floor. The things that didn’t fit in boxes, or maybe didn’t matter enough to someone else. The diamond necklace Devin gave me the night I turned twenty-six, bent out of shape, clasp snapped. The pair of mugs we painted together on a rainy Sunday—one was reduced to a handful of porcelain chunks, the other was missing. On top, a glass jar. The lid was shattered, and inside, a sea of tiny, colored paper stars spilled over the tile, scattering like a secret exposed to harsh light.

I’d folded those stars at nineteen. Folded them while waiting for him after meetings, on the subway, at lunch breaks I pretended were longer than they were. 1001 of them, each with a wish I never spoke aloud. He walked past that jar every morning for three years and never once asked what it was.

Devin stepped over a stray star, pausing to look at the mess. His brow creased, faintly annoyed. “None of this is worth much anyway. Just throw it out. I’ll buy you new ones.”

My mouth tasted like metal. “You’re right, Mr. Woodford. Things that aren’t worth anything should be thrown away when they’re dirty or broken.”

He barely reacted, but I saw the flicker—just for a second—in the tightening of his jaw. He started to reach for the necklace, then seemed to think better of it.

I knelt, knees aching, and began sweeping the paper stars back into the ruined jar. The glass bit into my palm, sharp and cold, but I forced myself not to flinch. The mug shards went in next. The warped necklace. The perfume bottle, leaking its last, bitter drops. One by one, I gathered up every piece of the life I’d shared here—every piece that wasn’t worth much—and carried them into the hallway, dropping them, all at once, into the steel garbage can by the door. The sound was loud, final.

Devin’s frown deepened, but before he could speak, I straightened, wiped my hands on my coat, and pulled the resignation letter from my bag. The paper was crisp, uncreased, the ink bold. I offered it to him like a peace treaty or a challenge—I couldn’t tell which.

His phone rang. The sound sliced the space between us. He didn’t look at me as he answered. I recognized Melissa’s voice, syrupy and impatient, echoing through the speaker. “Dev, it’s raining. Come pick me up.”

Whatever emotion had flickered across his face vanished. He didn’t even glance at the letter. He took it, scrawled his name at the bottom—no hesitation, not a single question about what he was signing—and handed it back, eyes already somewhere else.

“Take a taxi home,” he said, his voice cool, mechanical, the way he addressed junior staff. Then he was gone, the front door closing behind him with a dull, expensive thud.

I stood there, the signed letter gripped tightly in my hand. That was the part I wanted to remember—he signed the resignation letter without reading it. Not Melissa’s voice, not the plush wall, not the way my stars had tumbled across the floor. The fact that he signed me away while answering her call about the rain.

I stepped outside. The rain had thickened, the sky pressing down as if it wanted to drown the hill itself. I opened my umbrella, started down the slick driveway, one hand clutching my bag, the other wrapped around the envelope, now my lifeline.

Halfway down, my heel caught on wet gravel. I slipped, hard—my knee scraping open on the rough edge of the curb, pain blooming sharp and hot down my shin. But I curled in on myself, shielding the letter, my bag, anything that mattered. I could taste iron, could feel water seeping into my coat, but I didn’t let go.

A car engine roared from up the drive—a familiar, low growl. Devin’s black Mercedes, speeding down the slope, the headlights harsh and white in the rain. The car hit a wide, muddy puddle. Water and dirt exploded up, drenching me in a cold, gritty wave.

The passenger window rolled down. Melissa’s face, perfect, painted, smiling, appeared. She was leaning across Devin, hand on his shoulder, laughing at something I couldn’t hear. Devin looked at her—a look I hadn’t seen in four years. Something soft. Something that stung worse than the rain and the dirt and the blood running down my leg.

The car disappeared down the curve, taillights smearing red through the storm.

I stood, wet and cold, the resignation letter pressed to my chest, and watched the rain swallow them whole.

Three days.

That's what I kept telling myself on Thursday afternoon as I sat at my desk sorting through four years of files. Three days, and then I'd never have to sit in this particular chair again, never have to listen to the specific hum of these particular fluorescent lights, never have to feel the strange, tight quiet that settles over this floor whenever Devin is in his office and everyone knows it.

Three days.

My phone buzzed. His name on the screen. Not a call—a text.

*Bring in a cup of hot honey water.*

No please. No question mark. The same way he'd been asking for things for four years, in that flat, efficient shorthand that I used to read as intimacy. *He's comfortable with you. He doesn't need formalities with you.* That's what I used to tell myself. Looking at it now, it just looked like a man who had never once considered that the person reading it might have a spine.

I made the honey water. I didn't know why I made it. Habit, maybe. Or maybe I just wanted to see it through—the whole picture, the full stop at the end of a sentence I'd been writing for too long.

The office door was cracked when I arrived. I pushed it open with my shoulder, both hands around the warm mug, and stopped.

Melissa was stretched out on the leather sofa like she'd been there all her life. Her head was in his lap. Not sitting beside him—in his lap, cheek turned upward, one arm curved over her stomach. And Devin's hand was moving in slow circles over her lower abdomen, slow and deliberate, like it was the most natural thing he had ever done.

I stood in the doorway and thought about a Tuesday morning two winters ago. I'd come in holding my side, hunched so far forward that Sandra had stopped me in the hall to ask if I needed to go home. I'd said no. I'd made it to my desk, taken three ibuprofen on an empty stomach, and when I finally got up to refill my water, I ran into Devin in the break room. He'd glanced at me—that same quick, clinical glance—and said, *You look like hell. You're not getting sick, are you? I need you in the Tanaka call at two.* I'd told him it was just cramps. He'd reached past me to the cabinet, taken out the office's generic painkillers, and set them on the counter beside my hand. *Don't let it affect your work.*

His hand kept making its slow, careful circles.

I walked to the desk. Set the mug down without a word. The ceramic made a soft sound against the glass surface—barely anything. I turned to go.

"You're—"

The voice came from the sofa. Melissa had sat up. She was looking at me with an expression I couldn't immediately read, something between recognition and calculation, her head tilted slightly to one side. Her eyes moved over my face the way you look at a word you think you might have seen before.

"You're... Marvin Huckabee's sister?"

The slap landed before I finished processing the question.

It wasn't hard, exactly. It was fast. Her palm caught me across the left cheek, and for a single suspended second there was nothing—just white—and then the ringing started. My cheek went hot immediately, the kind of heat that builds from the inside out, and I realized I had taken a step back without deciding to.

I didn't raise a hand. I didn't say anything. I just stood there while the ringing faded and the burn set in.

Melissa's eyes were wet. Her finger pointed at me like an accusation, her voice climbing.

"She's from the Huckabee family in Jurnell!" The words came out fast, almost breathless with outrage. "She could've lived like a princess. She had everything—she didn't need any of this. But she came to you as an *assistant*. And you're telling me she doesn't like you? You're telling me that's nothing?"

I watched the tears spill over. I watched Devin's gaze move to my face—a half second, no more—and then slide away.

He stood. He crossed the room to where Melissa stood with her shaking finger still pointed at me, and he folded her into his arms the way you'd fold something fragile, something that needed protecting. His hand moved to her hair. His voice came out soft, quieter than I'd heard it in months.

"Even if she does like me," he said, "it's all one-sided." His chin rested on the top of her head. "Because in my heart, there's only room for you."

I didn't move. My fingers were doing something at my side—curling in, slow, then releasing. Curling in again. I was watching from somewhere slightly above myself, the way you watch a scene you've been rehearsing for so long that the actual performance doesn't touch you anymore.

*He didn't look at my face.* That was the thought that kept arriving, simple and clean. *He looked at her tears. That's how I know it's over. Not because he chose her—I already knew that. But because my pain didn't register on his radar at all. Not the slap. Not the ringing in my ear. Not the heat climbing up my cheekbone. Nothing.*

Last night had been three in the morning. I knew this precisely because I had looked at the clock, the way I always did when I couldn't sleep—3:04 AM, the numbers red in the dark. He had pulled me toward him by the shoulder. His mouth had been warm against my skin. He had said my name the way he used to, the other way, the one that had nothing to do with conference rooms. *Jennifer.* Like it was something he needed.

Seventeen hours ago.

The slap didn't hurt as much as I thought it would. Maybe because something inside me had already been hit harder, earlier, and this was just the echo. The original wound had been made in small, patient increments—a cramp I weathered alone, a box of painkillers set on a counter, a name said in the dark that meant nothing in the daylight. The slap was just the last note of a song that had already ended.

My cheek throbbed. I kept my hands at my sides.

Then Melissa made a sound—sharp, sudden, high enough to cut—and I turned just in time to see her hand close around the mug.

The honey water hit my arm.

It was still hot—properly hot, the way I'd made it—and my skin registered it before my brain did. A bright, terrible bloom of heat from my wrist to my elbow, the fabric of my sleeve going wet and clinging, the skin underneath already tightening, already beginning to rise.

"*Ah*—" Melissa recoiled, cradling her own hand to her chest. "Dev, it's hot!"

I stood with the water dripping from my arm onto the floor. I did not look down at the skin. I did not touch it. I watched Devin's eyes move—past me, over me—to the red flush creeping across Melissa's fingers where the mug's heat had caught her.

Something shifted in his face. Not concern. Not exactly. But something colder than that, something that had always been there and that I had spent four years deciding not to see.

His eyes came to mine at last.

"Jennifer." His voice was ice. Clean, quiet, absolute. "You've been with me for four years. And you can't even handle something this simple?"