Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Gerri woke at 4 a.m.—forty minutes before her alarm and nearly three hours before she even had to set a foot out of her door. She felt restless. Tired. No—exhausted. Drained, emotionally and physically.

It had been four months since Logan’s somewhat unexpected death..40.000 feet above the ground, far away from his children or anyone he actually slightly cared about. He apparently had a brain aneurysm and was dead within minutes…just like Baird. Her children used to say, once that they got older, that Waystar killed their father, she did not once correct them when they said it, maybe she thought so as well..nevertheless, it seemed fitting, Logan Roy, media tycoon, killed by his own media conglomerate. She probably shouldn’t think such morbid thoughts, should let the past rest in the past but she couldn’t, as of now, she couldn’t.
Waystar Royco had been everything to her once upon a time, her security, her job but most of all it had, once, brought her joy. She loved to work, she felt good while being productive and doing something, and she loved the power that’s for sure. Waystar Royco had once dominated her life, but now it felt like nothing to her…since Matsson became head of the company everything changed, and she knew, somewhere deep within her, that soon she’d be replaced as well…Karl had already been fired. Frank might be next and then it’ll ultimately be her. Karolina was still young enough she’d be safe for another few years, but Gerri wasn’t and she knew that, even if she didn’t want to admit it just yet.

Gerri got up then, still not feeling in the slightest rested but she couldn’t stay in bed any longer. She felt even worse just laying there, maybe even scared of the possibility that her thoughts could turn towards Roman and how that, everything they’ve had, everything they’ve built, turned into a disaster and nearly ruined her long-built, hard worked for career.

After a fast shower, she walked into her kitchen and turned on her coffee machine, listening to the steady drumming of the rain outside. She took her time to dry her hair. It was 4.30 am now, still enough time before she had to get dressed and straighten her hair. So she just blow-dried it while waiting for her coffee to be ready. After a few more minutes she heard the faint ringing sound of her coffee machine, telling her that the coffee was finally ready.

She walked to the kitchen, took her mug of hot brewed coffee, and walked towards the floor-long windows of her living room. And only then, while overlooking part of New York, did Gerri allow herself to let her thoughts wander towards that dark corner in her mind, labeled ‘Roman’.

Things ended horribly between them. He fired her not only once but twice…and then told her that she was bad at her job. It felt like a punch in the guts just revisiting these events. He, once, seemed to be the only one who didn’t take her for granted, who valued her for not only what she did but also for who she was.

At the beginning of their working relationship, he seemed so young, so lost but also so eager to learn, so glad and thankful to get attention and help from someone, even someone like her. She couldn’t even remember how it started, or who started it. She guessed she did though, by taking him under her wing, guiding him, seeing the man, the talented business partner behind his facade. Maybe it was her mistake for trying to help him that nearly ruined everything, maybe she shouldn’t have done it. But if she was being honest with herself, she would do it over and over again.

She didn’t know why or how (well she did know how but rather not dwell on it) their platonic relationship turned not so platonic anymore. If she was being very honest with herself though, she guessed it all started with the buttoning of his shirt. Coming to him, stepping into his personal space, and helping him do something so personal as buttoning up his shirt and at the same time giving him business advice. She guessed, in the very beginning, she was the one who took things too far ahead. The stop sign should have been the first one of their conference calls, it should have brought her out of her stubborn mind and she should have seen, should have noticed that she, that the two of them, were crossing over yet another line. One that should have been kept untouched, not crossed. But they did it anyway, her still believing that their relationship was purely professional even then. It did sound horribly stupid now after everything was irreversibly destroyed. But would she change it? If she could go back in time? probably not. She didn’t know why, she knew she should erase that decision if she had the power to do so, but deep within her, she knew that she never would.

Gerri always cared about Roman, even when he was still a child, she somehow always had a soft spot for that boy, even if her goddaughter was Siobhan. She didn’t care half as much about her goddaughter as she cared for the neglected and lost youngest Roy son (and she knew that that sounded horrible in its own way).

When she had her daughters while she was 30 and 34 years old, Baird was 18 years older than her.
She wasn’t a natural mother in the slightest. Of course, she loved her two daughters, Catherine and Paty, she loved them very much. But she never was a good mother. Way too long at work, way too ambitious for her own good. But she tried her best nevertheless. She tried balancing her career and her family, being there and caring for both things equally, even if that meant that more often than not either her husband or the nanny had to look after the children. She still tried to be there, most nights she ate dinner with all of them, hearing their stories about school or kindergarten, she went to every little performance whether it was ballet or theater, she was there.
She still remembered one time when Catherine had her first ballet performance, how excited she felt for her little girl, Baird holding her hand, whispering “Our girl is wonderful” in her ear, while the two of them proudly watched their daughter dance, little two-year-old Paty trying to excitedly follow her sisters’ and the other girls’ performances while sitting on her father’s knee.
Gerri loved her daughters, even if they nowadays didn’t have that much contact. They weren’t estranged but her daughters and she weren’t as close anymore.

After Baird’s sudden death at the age of 60, leaving her a widow and a single mother at the age of 42, her relationship with her daughters changed, and not for the better. Baird was always a great father, a natural. But she wasn’t. And especially after Baird’s death she practically threw herself into her job, letting her career become her everything just that she didn’t have to deal with the hurt and the pain of having lost the potential love of her life. She still tried to be home at dinner to eat with her then 12 and 8-year-old daughters, but after a few years, even this did not happen regularly anymore.

She felt sorry for her children, for not being able to offer better support emotionally. Sure they had everything they could wish for money-wise. They went to the best schools, got the best education a child could get, and studied at the best universities but not even that could make up for the loss of a father and more often than not an absent mother.

Sometimes Gerri detested herself especially when she thought about how she handled the situation after Baird’s death, but even there, once again, she wouldn’t change a thing. If it wasn’t for how hard she worked and fought for that job, she wouldn’t be where she is today.
With that last thought Gerri finished her coffee, brought the mug back into the kitchen, and cleaned it after that she walked straight to her walk-in dressing room where she finally started her usual morning routine (minus the shower, the brushing of the teeth, and all the products she put in her face after the shower). First, she straightened her hair, giving extra attention to every little curl so that, in the very end, no one would ever suspect her hair to be naturally curly at all. After the straightening, she put on one of her Armani blouses, a matching skirt, and her nylon stockings before putting her hair up into her signature French twist and then finally sat down at her vanity and applied her make-up. When she was finished with all of these little steps of her morning routine it was around 6:40 am, ten minutes before the car would come to pick her up, not enough time to eat a proper breakfast just yet, she might have to fetch one of her assistants to get her some later.

These ten minutes before the car would come, she spent somehow walking around in her apartment, trying to clean and sort stuff, that didn’t even need cleaning or sorting. She just didn’t want to deal with her mind going to these places again..the regrets…Roman…these were things that should’ve been kept locked in that dark corner of her mind, once opened it was like having opened Pandora's box.

Luckily, before her mind could wander any longer and dwell on things that were ultimately irreversible, her car finally appeared. So she put on her heels and her favorite MaxMara coat, took her handbag and her laptop, before finally closing the door, feeling ready for another day at ‘Matsson’s Waystar‘.

In the car she kept answering emails, ignoring the faint headache that started to build up due to her not sleeping enough for months. She was the general counsel of a huge media conglomerate after all, so there obviously wasn’t much time to rest, especially with Matsson as her new boss who had some sort of talent to miraculously start fights and cancellations on Twitter by quoting his sexist opinions one too many times.

Her day at work went surprisingly well, a rare thing these days. She only had to put out a small number of fires that either Matsson or some other of these new Swedish people that he hired, who ultimately had a very different work style and approach on things than the usual American had.
She stayed longer than she had to though, replying to emails and still trying to keep her mind focused on the situation at hand and not the ones that should have been long forgotten.

A small tap on her glass door startled her though, and she warily replied with a short, “Come in”
the door opened and Karolina, a tall, brown-haired woman entered, holding a few takeaway cups in her hand while simultaneously taking the seat across from Gerri before she spoke, “Hey, I saw that you’re still working and thought about bringing something to eat so we can eat and catch up a bit” and then placed the two cups of food on the table.

Gerri looked up from her computer screen then, rewarding Karolina with a soft smile before replying “Thank you, I’m gonna finish that email and then we can eat and talk” with a soft voice, far too tired to muster up the energy to sound somewhat like her usual self. But Karolina knew about Roman, knew what happened, and why she felt the way she did. So Gerri was allowed to take down the mask and let her true self get through for once.

“Yeah sure, take your time Gerri,” answered Karolina while trying not to watch Gerri too closely. One could see how tired and drained she probably felt, but only if you knew her good enough, if one could see more than the Stone cold killer bitch that she played to be.

After Gerri finished the last email, she closed the tab and finally looked up to where Karolina was sitting. Karolina gave her a short smile which she generously returned. “So, what do you have in there, dear? I’m indeed somewhat hungry,” Gerri said, letting the soft smile that threatened to escape free. “Only some noodles and that Indian rice with chicken that you like so much,” Karolina answered as she watched her friend’s eyes sparkle a bit at that new piece of information.
“Thank you very much, Karolina,” Gerri replied gratefully.
“No problem, Ger,” Karolina said, trying to get Gerri out of her sad mood, “Should we finally eat then? You sure as hell look hungry Ger” Karolina said with a laugh which prompted one from Gerri as well. “Yeah, let’s start,” Gerri replied with a smile on her face.

The two ladies sat in silence for a few minutes, enjoying the meal that they had before them. The silence that stretched was comfortable, like a warm blanket lying on top of them, warming them before the storm came rushing through. After another few minutes, Karolina finally spoke again, the inevitable questions lying on top of her tongue.

“Gerri, don’t take this the wrong way, please. I know how you feel about people questioning you about your life and your feelings but let me just say that you look like shit, quite frankly. You look tired like you didn’t sleep for weeks. I usually wouldn’t bring it up like that, you know me, you know that I wouldn’t. That I would only do it if the situation looked as terrible as it seems to be at this exact moment…” Karolina paused for a moment, looking directly at Gerri, searching for her expression, searching for the sign to stop. Karolina continued, “Gerri, just please tell me what is going on. I’ve known you for over twenty years now, I’ve seen you go through Baird’s death, and not even then did you look as miserable as you do right now. Ger..just please talk to me.” Karolina was practically begging, it would’ve annoyed Gerri if it hadn’t been for the fact that Karolina was right.

For a brief, terrifying moment, Gerri felt her brain grind almost completely to a halt. In those twenty years that Gerri knew Karolina, Karolina had never been that straightforward except for now, and it did, somehow, scare the shit out of Gerri to admit, if not everything, but even a bit of the truth to what she felt.

Emotions and feelings were a scary concept really. A concept so foreign to Gerri sometimes that she didn’t always know what to do with them. All her life she’d been the cold, ambitious girl or woman, never did she let feelings get into her way of work, never did she let her anxiety control her life, never..until now. Until Roman if she was being honest with herself.

Roman had shown her to accept that part of her being. Roman had more or less brought it back to life..only because of him and their strange and way too complicated relationship did she allow herself to feel more than just neutrality.

She used to be good at hiding her emotions, she used to be stone cold, she had to be. Working for Logan Roy had changed her, and taught her that feelings aren’t accepted in a place like that, and even more so when you were a woman.

For a long while Gerri didn’t respond, her mind working overtime as to what to say and what not to say. It wasn’t like she wanted to actively lie while talking to a close friend of hers, but some things were better off left unsaid. So she gathered her thoughts and finally replied, trying to keep her voice from trembling;

“Karolina, you’re right. I didn’t sleep properly for weeks now. Every waking moment I’m wrecked with guilt. Guilt for so many things, but particularly for leaving him. Leaving him in Italy, all broken, sobbing before my feet, begging for my help. I keep reliving this situation, keep trying to find the loophole that showed me how it served my interest, because I knew, even then at that moment, that he couldn’t find the words to answer that question…I left him, I left him broken.” Gerri tried to hold back the sob that threatened to escape her before continuing, never would she have thought of herself as being such a wreck only because of that stupid manchild. That spoiled brat who apparently also stole her heart. “And after Logan’s death, I knew that he needed comfort, that he might have needed me but I was too hurt, too trapped in my own mind to give him what he needed, and then when he came to me for help, I just couldn’t give it to him. I wanted to, so bad. But I couldn’t. I was hurt. I had the right to be so but I still feel so incredibly guilty for not helping him, for not being there when I knew he needed me. And the last thing, the funeral…I wanted to comfort him when he broke down while giving the eulogy, I wanted to lay a hand on his shoulder or give him a handkerchief to somehow show my support, even though I was still so hurt, so hurt for being fired twice and then, for nearly losing everything that I build over my whole life. But I didn’t do any of these things even if I wanted to..because my mind overpowered me. Told me to keep playing safe, to keep being the stone-cold woman that everyone sees. But I wanted to help him, to comfort him, but now, now everything’s lost. Look at me, a woman in her sixties crying after a man in his early forties. It’s embarrassing. I’m embarrassed,” Gerri said, her eyes wet from the tears that threatened to escape, her throat dry and tight from the emotions she just confessed.

Karolina took a moment laying a hand over Gerri’s, trying to give her friend somewhat of some comfort, before replying “Gerri, with all due respect, you are not embarrassing, not at all, not even in the slightest. I only know a bit about the depths of your and Roman’s relationship, only a few things that you told me after it ended and the bit that one could see while the two of you worked closely together, but let me tell you. It’s okay to feel sad and to feel guilt. It’s okay to be in pain, you are allowed to show it, and no one should have to go through something like this alone. Gerri, you are so incredibly strong. And I, for one, can understand why you made certain decisions. You had to save yourself as well, there was a lot at stake, and you chose the safest option. The one everyone who is in their right mind would have taken. I can also understand that you wanted to comfort him, but couldn't due to the hurt you, yourself, were feeling. You’re only human after all, no matter how often you might tell yourself that you are stone-cold. But maybe you could text him or even call him, there are so many things left unspoken between the two of you, you don’t have to, of course. It is just an idea.” Karolina said, hoping to have been able to somewhat comfort her friend while also planting that seed, that idea, of talking to him again, in her friend’s head.

For a moment Gerri didn’t say anything, letting the thoughts in her head sort themselves out before finally answering Karolina, “Thank you, Karolina, really” she said, a small smile forming on her lips as she looked at her friend, her worry and guilt under control for now.

“God, who would have thought that my life could get so complicated in my sixties?” she added then, laughing for the first time in weeks.

The two women ate their meals then, small talk and nice chatter filling the minutes that passed. And Gerri felt comfortable, her head didn’t hurt so much anymore..her whole being felt a little bit lighter after that conversation the two women just had. It felt good, feeling a bit lighter like a bit of weight got lifted off of her shoulders, like it was easier to breathe for a bit.

After both women had finished eating and had thrown away the takeout cups, Karolina and Gerri stood opposite each other, both women having soft smiles on their faces as Karolina hugged Gerri goodbye, no more words needed to be said. The room felt lighter too, the sun long set, the moon shining brightly on the sky instead, illuminating everything in its glow.
Both women left their offices together then, filling the minutes until they reached their cars with comfortable small talk and laughter.

When the two of them got to their respective cars, they exchanged a last glance, Karolina looking at Gerri as if to tell her “It’s gonna be okay” and Gerri smiling lightly, almost believing it herself.

As Gerri got into her apartment then, she was met by darkness, pitch black and soundless darkness.
She turned on the lights, a warm yellow tone stretching all over her apartment, making it all look a bit less sad, less dark. She got rid of her handbag, coat, and shoes then, neatly packed all of them to their respective places before she entered the living room and made herself a martini, turned on PGN on her TV, and sat down on her couch, a blanket thrown over her lap as she slowly drank her Martini, watched the news and let the day come to an end.

It wasn’t until she had half drunk her Martini and relaxed some more, the broadcast of the news beginning to faint in the background and her thoughts coming to the front, that she thought about the fact that it had been a normal and exhausting day like this one, as she sat on the couch with her martini in hand and PGN playing in the background as Roman had called her and as she crossed yet another line and made him come on the phone.

She still remembered how shocked yet excited she felt as she realized that Roman actually jerked off to her berating him. How she indulged in it all, how she called him names, how he became her slime puppy. And, how a bit later, he became the rockstar and she the molewoman. She still didn’t know why she even indulged in it all, why she didn’t just hang up. She might as well have. No one had forced her to do it. But she still did it, she liked it even, she supposed. She liked the feelings it gave her, she liked the power too. She knew if she could turn back time, she would do it all over again.

And then Gerri remembered what Karolina had told her. As that thought crossed her mind to maybe write Roman. To see what happens if she would, to see if maybe it wasn’t all wrong. To see how he was doing. And yes, to feel better too.

So she got her phone, drowned the rest of her Martini, and began to type…

Chapter Text

Third of December…

It was snowing, thick white flocks of snow that covered everything. The streets were all white, it was nearly undistinguishable where the roads or sidewalks were. Everything was white. In the turn of a few hours, New York City was covered in a heavy white layer.
It looked nice, untouched…only the streetlights from outside showing some sort of light.
It was unusual for a mega city like New York to be nearly dark. It felt strange when one was used to car noises and lights from everywhere even in the middle of the night.
It was the reason Roman insisted on an apartment with blinds and extra bought curtains too, so that everything would be dark whenever he wanted it to be.
Though today was different though, today, the darkness outside was natural.
Calming in a way…but also quietly terrifying

He stood near his foot tall windows and watched the city looking stranger than he had ever seen it before.

His dad was dead 4 months now…four months without his dad and it still seemed surreal to Roman sometimes. He tried to compensate for the death of his father with work at first. Tried to just somehow keep going and well that backfired. The funeral, the horrible eulogy, the protesters he launched himself at…firing Gerri before all of that. It was a whole mess. And he kept coming back to those events. Kept reliving them. It was in random thoughts during the day or dreams - rather nightmares - that it all came back to him.

He had spent his days watching time blur—days turning into weeks, weeks into months… he hadn’t slept and had not eaten much. Had isolated himself from everything after his first attempt to just work failed and his siblings lost the company to Matsson.

He was the one destroying it all. He was the one who hurt the person he loved most and cared about most. He did the destroying. It felt like his heart was broken, ripped into two and it was his fault.

Most of his days now were an endless circle of waking up, crying, trying to get out of bed, crying some more and keeping himself isolated from the world while everything around him didn’t stop like he did. It all kept turning and turning while he was lost in that self created loop.

Roman thought a lot about Gerri, about her…what he told her, about everything that happened.

He was the one who had told her she was bad at her job, he wanted to hurt her purposefully. He felt so much pain at that moment, he had lost his father…he felt so much that he lashed out at the person he loved most.

And he regretted it all. He still remembered that day, the day he fired her, the quiver in her voice, the wobble of her lips when she heard and realized what he had told her. He still remembered how he knew, deep down, even in that moment, that those words had hurt her the most. And then he saw it in her eyes too..that pain. And maybe for a moment, for a millisecond, he felt like his father, felt like he was doing the right thing maybe, executing his father’s wish but at the same time, he knew he was making the biggest mistake of his life. He knew then too that it was a mistake but he didn’t care then.
“You’re not good at your job” that’s what he said, what came out of his mouth and what he knew wasn’t a true statement because Gerri was the most competent person he knew, the smartest human to ever exist in this world.

Those words kept running through his head late at night and he kept asking himself why did he say it?

It all came crashing down minutes later after he left after he was left alone with all of these thoughts rushing through his head and practically screaming to go back to her, to right his wrong. But he didn’t because he felt too much egoism and shame that he didn’t go back. Put one foot in front of the other. He just let her go.

And that hurt the most, the letting go of someone he loved so much who showed and taught him so much. Someone he admired, someone he cared about, someone who was very well alive and he had let her slip through his fingers. He had hurt her in the one way he knew hurt her most. He wanted to give her pain because he was in pain and all he knew to do then, to deal with it, was giving the people around him pain too and he hated himself for it. Hated himself so much for it. And he regretted it all but didn’t know what to do.

It had felt like a breakup even though he and Gerri weren’t even together, she didn’t even love him, and she said it was all a professional matter..but why did it feel like it was far more than that? why did she act like she did when everything was said “professional” that was what he asked himself too, late at night when he was alone in bed and thought after thought and regret after regret came rushing through his head…sooner or later they would eat him alive.

She had Martyn at that time..she was dating someone else so she didn’t love him, she didn’t, he knew it even if he wished she did.

He had tried writing her, had tried formulating letters, text messages but he never came up with the right words to express how sorry he was, he never was able to express it all..he didn’t find the words to tell her, he wanted to tell her all…wanted to apologize for it all, wanted to tell her that he loved her even if she didn’t love him back.

And so he spent his days isolating himself in his own apartment, barely answering his siblings - mostly Connors and Shiv - text messages or phone calls. A few check-ins every now and again just to let them know he’s alive and breathing more or less.

Most times he didn’t even know the correct day, more less the weekday and close to never if it’s day or night. He just somewhat lived his life day in and day out. Waiting for the day this heartache, this storm, this sorrow, and regret left or, more likely, took him apart. It was like cancer he felt, spreading through his body, attacking every living cell…leaving the shell of a man back who barely functioned anymore.

It felt deadly even though he knew he was still alive but barely holding on. He kept looking out of the window, analyzing these snow covered streets of New York City when a sudden, rather faint notification sound of his phone drew his attention away, his phone was in the nearby bed room, he turned his head then, waited if his phone did another “beep” sound..it didn’t though and for a few moments he silently stood there, waiting, though nothing more happened.

After a while, anticipation got the better of him and he walked towards the bedroom, he didn’t know why but somehow he had a feeling this was somewhat important, still he cursed himself for being so easily distracted by a single “beep” of his phone.

He came to the bedroom then and ignored the unmade bed and few piles of clothes to snatch his phone when he looked at it then it first blended him, too bright for his eyes in that moment but then he saw and his heart both raced in panic and leapt in joy. He was shocked, shell shocked, his pulse skyrocketing like he’d run a marathon, his hands shaky as he held the phone tighter in his hands, staring at the screen, blinking, thinking that maybe in the next second it would be gone and only some stupid hallucination but…it wasn’t. There on his phone, was a message from Gerri. His Gerri. His Gerr-bear. The woman who, still to this day, owned the key to his heart.

His legs felt shaky, all the adrenaline built up in his body making it hard to stand still. He had to sit down then, his leg bouncing up and down as he held the phone in a steel grip. Not daring to open the message yet, he just stared, at her picture, at her name, unable to realize what was going on.

After what felt like forever, he opened his phone, clicked on the message and read it, at first skimming through it, trying to find words that caught his attention, but in the end reading it from beginning to end, slowly, carefully.

She wrote...

Chapter Text

It was close to midnight, the city dulled to a low electric hum that somehow still felt intrusive compared to the silence wrapped around Gerri’s apartment like insulation. It wasn’t the calming quiet of a space at rest, but the kind that reminded her too acutely of its cause. Gerri’s apartment, her home, was quiet in that stubborn, obstinate way only spaces in New York could be. She’d never thought of the space as particularly warm - high ceilings, austere furniture, walls painted a shade too cool - still it had always been her sanctuary. But lately, it had started to feel like a bunker. A well-curated one, sure. But a bunker nonetheless.

She sat curled into the corner of her leather couch, shoulders tense, legs tucked beneath her, a blanket draped over her knees, laptop balanced carefully on her thighs, her posture more habitual than intentional. The screen in front of her was dark for now, the cursor blinking on an empty email draft like a metronome counting out the rhythm of her indecision. She hadn’t meant to be up this late. Or have drowned her drink this fast. But the Martini—with Nolet’s Dry Gin, a gift from a client three years ago—had made its case compellingly. Just one drink to ease the ache in her temples. Then two. And now the bottle of gin and the bottle of Vermouth de Chambéry glinted in the lamplight like two conspirators.
She hadn't intended to open her email tonight. She’d only meant to watch PGN or maybe doomscroll Twitter until her eyelids grew heavy. But something - probably Karolina’s words - tugged her toward the unread messages section - toward the one name she’d been avoiding and watching for in equal measure.

Roman Roy.

There was nothing from him. Of course there wasn’t. Still, she hovered.
The ache in her chest was duller now, less immediate than it had been after Logan’s death and her starting to work under Matsson’s command, but the residue lingered. The betrayal, the humiliation, and beneath all that - the guilt. Not just over what she had done or hadn’t done, but over how much she still thought of him. How he lingered in her mind even months later…

She closed the inbox tab. Opened a blank email instead.

Her fingers hovered over the keys, slightly shaking like a tremor she couldn’t stop

What are you doing, Gerri?

She’d asked herself that same question the night after the eulogy, and the time in Italy after Shiv had maneuvered them all into another loop of Matsson’s games and Kendall had disappeared into whatever half-baked scheme he was cooking up next. Roman had sat stiff and begged for her help, broken, dejected, his eyes so huge with so much pleading in them, they burned her. And she had rejected him, had saved herself instead.

And after the eulogy, she hadn’t approached him even though he broke down. She didn’t know how to anymore.

But she’d watched him leave.

Gerri reached for her martini again, shaking fingers gripping the glass as she drowned the little rest of it in the glass, and set it down with a clink that echoed too loud in the room.

Then, deliberately, she began to type.

"Roman."

The name looked too naked on the screen. No ‘Hi,’ no ‘Dear,’ just that - Roman. As though she could
summon him with a single word. She stared at it until her eyes began to sting before continuing.

“I’ve gone back and forth on whether to write. It’s not something I usually do—looking back like this. But I couldn’t ignore the instinct tonight.”

She paused, fingers hovering over the keys. What was her intention with this message to him? A peace offering? A confession? A self-indulgent splatter of guilt and nostalgia? She wasn’t sure anymore.

She glanced to the side, where a framed photograph sat on the bookshelf. Baird. He’d been gone so long now, and the photo had stayed in the same spot, untouched, like a relic. A reminder. When she’d married him, she thought she was sealing herself into a kind of adult permanence, she loved him deeply, he was the love of her life after all. And when he died, something had unsealed in her. Loosened. Shifted. She thought of him often these days, and how he used to stand beside her in moments where she craved some kind of guidance. He’d rest a hand on her shoulder, quiet but steady. She wondered what he’d make of all this - of her. She wondered what he’d say about Roman.

A ghost of a smile tugged at her mouth then. He’d call him a walking disaster. Then he’d add, in this gentle tone of his that she still so desperately missed, "But you like fixing things.”

The warmth in her chest dissolved into an ache again. She looked away and out into the night of New York, the city seemed dead for the first time in decades, usually it was lit like it never slept, but today, all seemed dark except for the gentle snow falling. Up here, it felt like another world, far away from the usual busy city and her mind wandered once again to Roman.
Working more closely with Roman hadn’t felt like a shift at first. More like a game. A power exercise. Banter sharp enough to draw blood. But over time, something about his deep brown eyes had unmoored her. He’d look at her like she was both terrifying and sacred. Like she had the power to crush him and he was daring her to do it.

And then she had. Not in the way he expected. Not in the way she had feared.

She kept typing.

“You’ve been on my mind lately. That’s probably not helpful. Or wanted for that matter. But I have. Not in some overly dramatic way, just…in the gasps. The quiet parts of the day. At night, mostly.”

She leaned back in her chair, stretching out her legs under the desk. The carpet was soft beneath her feet, a small indulgence she’d insisted on when decorating. That and the original Rothko in the hallway, borrowed indefinitely from a collector who owed her a favor.

The email still felt too honest. Too vulnerable.

But what would he respond to, if anything? Certainly not vague platitudes. Certainly not an apology without shape.
Did she even want him to respond? Would she want to open up that door again after she, more or less, slammed it in his face by threatening him to go public with his pictures if he were to undermine her..

She wrote more.

“You said things that hurt. I heard them, and I carried them. I won’t pretend otherwise. Maybe you think I deserved it. Maybe part of me thinks that, too. But it doesn’t make the sting fade. However, I also know what grief does to people. I’ve seen it twist the best of us into something unrecognizable. I’m not writing to reopen anything. I don’t need apologies or explanations. I’m not even sure what I expect from this. I just wanted you to know that I’ve thought about you. More often than I’d like to admit.”
She deleted the last two sentences. She shouldn’t repeat herself and besides, it still felt too raw, too vulnerable to even admit to herself..
"But even now, I don’t regret knowing you. Or working with you. Or…whatever happened between us."

That was probably a lie. Or half a lie more likely. She regretted some of it. The timing. The fallout. The naiveté. But not him. Not the way he made her feel.

She got up then, restless, her hands still slightly shaking, and moved to the kitchen. The Martini was gone now. She considered making another, then decided against it. The edge had dulled. What she needed now was clarity, not sedation.

She poured herself water instead, cool and metallic from the tap. The glass trembled slightly in her hand. She hated how her body betrayed her in moments like these when she needed and wished for her calm exterior but no, instead she was left with her shaking and anxious self, it was truly a wonder she didn’t start picking her nails yet.

Back in the living room, water glass in her shaky hand, she sat down at her couch, she reread what she’d written.

Then added:

"I don’t expect a reply. This isn’t a test. I just wanted you to know I’m still here. Because silence feels like a kind of lie, too."

And after a long pause and a long and shaky inhale:

"I’m not promising anything more than that. Just Presence. Take care of yourself, though I imagine you are not.

— Gerri."

She stared at the screen until the words blurred, it was too short. Too vague. It said too much and too little. It opened a door and braced it closed at the same time. But maybe that was fitting.

Then she clicked Save Draft. Not Send. Not yet. She needed to sleep on it, needed to think it through. She closed the laptop then, stood and walked slowly through her apartment, abandoning the untouched glass with water as she passed the hallway where her coat still hung from earlier. The fireplace she never lit. The empty guest bedroom with its untouched duvet.

She stopped at her bedroom doorway and slightly learned against the frame. The bed was made, crisp, cold, white sheets. She hadn’t shared it in years. Sure, there had been flings - short, sterile things with men she’d vetted like staff hires - but nothing that had touched her nerve the way Roman did…still did. And he hadn’t ever even touched her, even if he might have wanted to, she would’ve never allowed it to happen, it would’ve blurred a line too many. Though, how many lines had they already blurred and not cared about when they had worked together ?

He had texted once after Logan’s funeral. A short, awkward line: “Hope you’re okay.” She’d stared at it for over an hour and never responded. And yet, here she was, months later, crafting an emotional lifeline herself and not sure if she even wanted it to be found.

She turned off the lights one by one, the apartment falling into darkness, that she so desperately craved and feared all at the same time, and crawled into bed.

Sleep wouldn’t come quickly. It never did.

But the draft waited. And for now, that was enough.

---------

Gerri woke the next morning to the early sunlight slicing across the room like a scalpel . The headache came with it - dull but pounding and insistent. She blinked at the ceiling, the quiet hum of the city growing louder louder now, making it indefinitely more real.

She turned her head to the side, checking the time; 5 a.m on a Saturday. No office today, she didn't know if she should feel happy or sad about it, she supposed a bit of both, trying not to overanalyse which exact emotion held more leverage over the other.

Meanwhile, the email draft sat unopened on her laptop.

Gerri padded into the bathroom did her usual morning routine and then into the kitchen, the floorboards cold under her feet, and made herself a coffee. Her ritual, more or less her routine was grounding. Grind. Brew. Pour. Sip. Breathe. Repeat the last two steps.

She carried the mug to her window and sat cross-legged in the armchair, the one Baird used to claim. It still had the indentation of his form, or maybe that was just her memory tricking her.
She sipped slowly, eyes scanning the skyline. The snow was still falling, much lighter now though then last night, white, untouched flakes falling from the sky and turning the whole city into a big winter wonderland. Scanning the city reminded her of Roman, again. She wanted to groan with how he kept entering her thoughts, how he kept interrupting her day to day life without even being there in person.

Roman would probably delete the email though. Or maybe mock it. Maybe send a screencap to Shiv or Kendall.

But then again, maybe not. There had always been a part of him that wanted - no, needed - authenticity. To be seen.

She finished the coffee and went to her office, grabbed her laptop, sat down on the desk and opened the draft. She re-read it. Once. Twice. On the third time, she moved the cursor to the subject line and decided to leave it empty. It was a risk, but one she was worth taking.

This time, she clicked Send.

The screen went white for a moment. Message sent.

Gerri closed the laptop and leaned back against her office chair. The silence was back again despite the city being already much more awake. But now it felt different. Not comforting. Not giving clarity. No relief. But something else.

It felt anticlimactic. Just the small whoosh of a digital transmission. Maybe it was hope. Or just noise waiting to turn into sound.

She closed the laptop and stood, her posture still straight. Still composed. Still her.

But something inside her—small and silent—had shifted.

And that was enough for now.

Chapter Text

December 4th, morning

It was December 4th, and Roman Roy was already awake before the sky had decided whether to commit to light. He hadn’t really slept, not in the way that counted. There’d been hours where his eyes had been closed, sure, but his mind hadn’t given in to the softness of unconsciousness. It had paced. Rewound. Gnawed at its own edges.

So when the buzz of his phone vibrated against the nightstand, he didn’t flinch. He reached for it blindly, still lying flat on his back. His thumb flicked across the screen like muscle memory. Notifications. Pointless ones. Except one.

Gerri.

Just her name in the sender line. No subject. No emojis. No warning. Like it had slipped through a tear in reality.
He stared at it.

The name on the screen tightened something in his chest so fast and so sharp it felt like a punch.

From: Gerri Kellman
Subject: (no subject)

He didn’t open it. Not immediately. He stared at it for a full minute, thumb hovering. The little preview didn’t give anything away. He read the preview again. Then again. His thumb hovered, ghosting the screen. Just: Roman, and then the rest blurred into ellipsis. Then he locked the phone, tossed it to the far side of the bed, and sat up.

Of course she would open with “ Roman.” It was clean. Efficient. Civilized. It said nothing and everything.

His penthouse was cold, even though the thermostat read 73. It was the kind of cold that started inside, bone-deep, emotional. Fake warmth couldn’t fix it. The snow outside had crusted the city in white, the windows framing it like a postcard—like a joke. Besides, it was too quiet too, his penthouse was one of those overpriced, under-furnished Manhattan high-rises that looked like it belonged to a man who either died inside or hadn’t started living yet. Roman wasn’t sure which one he was anymore.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, hands hanging uselessly between them. Gerri. Gerri had written to him. After everything. After months of silence. After the funeral. After the public dragging. After he’d said things he couldn’t unsay.

He stood up and paced. One loop around the bed. Two. He should read it. Of course he should read it. Why wouldn’t he read it? Unless it was a trap. Or a goodbye. Or a professional courtesy. Or worse—something personal.

—
It took three hours for him to open it.

In the time between waking and reading, he’d sat on the edge of the bed, blinking at the wall like it was a very boring TV. He’d walked to the kitchen and realized he hadn’t bought coffee in weeks. Opened the fridge. Half a lemon, one expired Chobani, and a bottle of white wine that probably didn’t even belong to him. Closed the fridge. Wandered back to the bedroom. Stared at the phone again.

Then, finally, without drama or announcement, his thumb tapped the email.

It was short.

Measured.

Gerri.

God.

The words landed like feathers, like bricks. All at once, too gentle and too much. He read slowly. Then all at once. Then again.

By the time he finished, his face felt tight. He didn't cry. Not really, which felt offensive somehow, like the least he could do was offer a couple fucking tears in exchange for how it winded him. But no. Just sat there. Spine curved like a shrimp. Breathing weird.

But something behind his eyes ached like it wanted to. She had said his name. Just that—"Roman." And it already had too much weight.

He dropped the phone in his lap and sat back against the pillows.
"Jesus Christ, Gerri," he whispered to no one.

The email wasn’t even that emotional. It was composed but underlined with something raw and aching, like a thread running just beneath her polished words. Of course it was. Classic Gerri: say 60% of what she means, let you do the math, and then judge you silently if you miscalculate.

He read it twice, then three times.

The silence around him thickened.

But there were things in it. Ghosts. Unsaid things. She acknowledged the pain, the distance between them. She was thinking of him. She’d said so. And more than that: she’d thought of him often. Roman closed his eyes.

The thing about grief — real grief, not the theatrical kind people parade around funerals — is that it flattens everything. Makes time and sense and memory curl in on themselves like burned paper. It had been months since Waystar. Months since Logan. Since Italy. Since her. But here he was, again, raw and blinking like it had just happened.
He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling again.

The room around him faded until only the sound of his own breathing remained—shallow, uneven, like a fragile animal caught in a trap. The email sat on the screen, a small glowing rectangle carrying the weight of all the words he’d never spoken, all the things he’d buried beneath sarcasm and deflection.
His mind raced, darting through every memory that came flooding back with Gerri’s voice, her presence, her absence.

He didn’t know what he felt. Something sharp. Something cracked. She’d written like it mattered. Like he mattered. She said she wasn’t asking for anything. That she didn’t need apologies. That she was just there. Presence. The word rattled around in his head like a marble in an empty glass.

He thought of that night in Italy.

Tuscany, Italy. The Villa.

It had been hot.

Not the romantic kind of hot, either. Not “sweaty sex in a stone villa” hot. Just...oppressive. The kind of heat that makes you feel guilty for simply existing in it.
The air had smelled like lemons, salt, and faint rot from somewhere in the trees. The kind of rot you could ignore until you were alone with it.

He remembered standing in the hallway. Marble tiles. High ceilings. Gerri’s heels had clicked so softly on the stone floor it shouldn’t have mattered, but he had heard them like a countdown. And then she walked past him. Not around him, not toward him, not even glancing at him. Just—past. Like a fucking ghost. No eye contact. No hesitation. Just pure executive composure, like he wasn’t standing there with his hands still metaphorically outstretched from when he’d asked her, quietly and in front of no one else, “Can you help me?”

And something in him — something stupid and soft — had curled up and died.

He hadn’t meant to follow her out there. Hadn’t meant to watch her go, hands clasped in front of her like she was bracing against gravity. But he did. Like a ghost haunting his own life. He’d been shaking even though he didn’t mean to, he’d tried to seem like he hadn’t needed her. But he had, he had needed her.

And she’d walked past. Not cruelly. Just…not there. Like she had folded herself into something hard and unreachable. Like he was something she had to survive.
He remembered the smell of the place — lavender and stone and something metallic, similar to old coins.

He remembered the way her back was impossibly straight like her spine might snap any second.

He remembered not saying her name.

He should’ve. But what would it have changed? One more Roman fuck-up on the record.

She had looked like she wanted to disappear. And honestly? He’d wanted that too.

He remembered blinking really fast, swallowing hard, trying to act like it didn’t matter. Then doing that thing where he stuck his tongue in his cheek and nodded like sure, yeah, whatever, cool, love that.

But inside?

Inside he’d collapsed like scaffolding. Quietly. Efficiently.

He didn’t cry. Not then. That had come later—after the plane, after Kendall’s silent stare into space and Shiv’s awkward, half-assed attempt to make small talk. After the whole “oh, both of our parents played us, and we’re all rearranging deck chairs on a flaming yacht” thing.

No. The tears had come alone. In his room. At 3 a.m., trying not to wake up the villa staff. Trying not to sound like a child gasping for air.

Because she hadn’t even looked at him. And that…that was the worst part. If she had looked at him—even with disgust—he could’ve built something from that. But the absence? That had been annihilating.

It wasn’t just about rejection.

It was about vanishing.

Now, she had. Now, she’d written: Roman.

​​He saw their moments together in sharp relief—the brief tenderness, the charged silences, the bitter fights. The closeness that had been a lifeline, and the distance that became a chasm.
And beneath it all, that underlying thread of guilt — for the ways he’d pushed her away, for the things he never said, for the parts of himself he refused to share.

He was still there in that room, alone but haunted, holding onto the fragments of what could have been.

Roman’s breath hitched as the memory deepened, layering over itself like waves. He could almost feel the cold of the marble beneath his fingertips now, the faint tremor in his chest from the sting of loneliness that night. The unbearable hot weather contrasted sharply with the chill in his veins—how something so close could feel so far away.

He remembered how Gerri had stood just beyond reach, a ghost tethered to his past and present all at once. She hadn’t looked back, hadn’t spared him even a glance. And yet, in that silence, there was an entire conversation — a silent plea, a lament, a reckoning.

Roman’s mind replayed every detail he’d tried so hard to forget. The weight of the years, the moments when he’d reached for connection and been met with a wall. The fracturing of something once steady. He thought about the last time he’d touched her hand, the fleeting warmth, and how quickly it had slipped away.

The email didn’t mention Italy though.

Didn’t mention anything, really. But that’s what made it worse. It was dignified. Gracious, even. She’d written like someone who was still carrying him gently, even though she didn’t have to.

He didn’t deserve it.

11:15 a.m.

He got up again. Wandered shirtless through the penthouse like a ghost. The kitchen lights were too bright. The espresso machine beeped at him like it was mad he’d forgotten how to be human.
Roman poured water instead. Cold. Barely drank it.

He opened Notes on his phone.

Started typing.

Hey. Got your email. Thanks.

Backspaced.

Then typed out:

Hey. I got your email. I—
Sorry, I don’t really know what to say. I think about you too.

Then deleted it again.

Tried again.

Thanks for writing. I’ve been—
I wanted to say—

No.

You didn’t have to say all that but okay.

Backspaced.

I thought you hated me.

Backspaced. Paused.

I’ve been thinking about you too.

That one sat there for a while. He stared at it like it might detonate.

Then he locked the phone. Got up. Sat down again. His fingers itched. His throat itched.

The silence in the apartment stretched like old gum.

He didn’t know what she wanted. Or what he wanted. But part of him wanted to write back. To say—something. Anything. That she’d been the only adult he ever trusted. That he was sorry. That he hated how she looked at him now—or didn’t look at him at all.

Another part of him wanted to smash the phone. Call her bluff. Tell her too little, or too much. Sabotage it.

He imagined what she was doing right now. At home. Probably already dressed. Probably surrounded by books and clean lines and expensive calm. Probably sipping some boutique blend of tea she couldn’t pronounce, the email long since forgotten.

But no—she wouldn’t have written it just to forget it.

Roman rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. His head hurt. Everything hurt. And he hadn’t even left the bedroom except for the glass of water.
He lay down on the floor. Just lay there, flat on his back on the cold hardwood.

12:52 p.m.

Roman stood up and walked to the window. Snow, still. He could see his breath fogging the glass.
He grabbed his phone again.

Another draft:

I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know if this is a good idea. But I miss you. There. I said it.

Deleted.

You’re still in my head. It sucks. But you’re there. Always there.

Deleted.

Are we friends? Were we ever? Do you want to be?

Deleted.

He groaned out loud. Tossed the phone onto the couch. It bounced and hit the floor. He didn’t pick it up.

Instead, he showered. Hot. Too hot. Scalding.

The water didn’t help. Or maybe it did, but only superficially. He stood under the stream until his fingers pruned and his skin turned pink.

He tried not to think about what she looked like now. Tried not to imagine her reading his email response. Would she raise her eyebrows? Laugh? Cry?
He got dressed. Black on black. Easy. Nothing that invited comment.

Then, without really planning to, he walked to his desk and opened his laptop.

Opened his email. Re-read hers.
Again.

The email still sat open.

Roman hadn’t moved in a while. Not really. The sun had risen all the way now—gold light slanting through the apartment windows like judgment.
He read the email again. Then again. The words barely changed, but his brain spun each sentence into a different tone every time. Was it pity? Was it kindness? Was it obligation?

The part that destroyed him the most was this:
“But even now, I don’t regret knowing you. Or working with you. Or… whatever happened between us.”

Fuck.

He stared at it like it might blink first.

Then, slowly, he opened a reply window.

He typed:

Gerri—

No. Too formal.

Hey.

Delete.

I don’t know what to say.

Delete.

I got your message.

Christ. What was he doing? He didn’t know how to write like she did. He couldn’t do that restrained vulnerability thing. He couldn’t do quiet. He could barely even do.
But the email sat there. Waiting. And part of him, the part he barely acknowledged, was still reading it.

Still hearing her voice.

He leaned back in the chair. His back ached. He hadn’t realized how hunched he’d been. He stood up abruptly, like movement would solve anything, and paced to the kitchen.
The floor was too cold. Everything was too quiet.

He pulled open the fridge.The inside hadn’t changed from the last time he looked earlier today. He closed it again.
He leaned against the counter and stared at nothing.

His mind looped. The email. Her face. That day in Italy. Logan’s coffin. Shiv’s eyes. The hotel room after he’d left the funeral. The feeling of un-being.
The buzzing of his phone against the floorboards jolted him back to the present, he went to it, picked it up.

Shiv.

The screen lit up with her name, a reminder that life outside his spiraling thoughts continued — that others expected him, needed him, even if he didn’t feel able to respond.
He stared at the call, heart hammering, his thumb hovered over the screen, torn between wanting to hear her voice and the weight of his own silence pressing down. The last conversation with Shiv had been tense, awkward—fractured by everything they were trying not to say.

He finally swiped to answer.

“Hey,” Shiv’s voice was tentative, softer than usual, touched by the exhaustion of her pregnancy.

“Hey,” he managed, voice rough, barely above a whisper.

“You sound like shit,” she said.

“Nice to hear from you too, sis.”

“How are you holding up? You okay?”, she asked then, her voice softer now.

Roman let out a breath. He wanted to say he was fine, and wanted to lie like he always did. But the truth sat heavy in his chest.
“Define ‘okay’.”

“I’m five months pregnant, Roman. I pee every twelve seconds and I cried this morning because my avocado wasn’t ripe. I don’t have the bandwidth for cryptic Royisms right now.”

That earned a weak chuckle from him. He rubbed his eyes. “I’m...here,” he said instead,it was all that he could offer, the words hanging uncertainly between them.

There was a pause.

“You don’t have to do this alone,” she said quietly, a hint of desperation slipping through her usual sharp tone. “I know we’ve been...complicated. But if you need someone, I’m here. For you, for
the baby.”

Roman swallowed hard, his throat tight. The weight of what she offered was almost unbearable—connection, a lifeline he wasn’t sure he was ready to grab. He didn’t respond for a bit. Just sat there, listening to the low hum of the building’s AC, and Shiv’s quiet breath through the phone.

“I... thanks,” he whispered then, not trusting himself to say more.

They lingered in silence, the unspoken history stretching between them, thick and fragile.

Finally, Shiv sighed. “Call me if you want to talk. Or if you don’t. Just…don’t disappear on me, Roman.”

He nodded, though she couldn’t see it. “I won’t.”

The line went dead before he could say more.

He stared at the screen long after the call ended, the room feeling colder, emptier.

3:23 p.m.

He sat at his desk — unused for weeks. Dust outlined where a laptop used to be.
He opened his email.

Clicked “Reply.”

Typed:

Gerri—
I don’t really know what I’m doing. But thank you for writing. It meant more than I can say.

Paused. Stared at it. Then:

I’m sorry. For everything. I think you know that, but I’ll say it anyway.

Deleted it all.

Stared again.

Typed:

I miss you more than words can express.

Stared.

Then closed the window. Didn’t save the draft.

He got up, poured another glass of water, having forgotten where the last one ended up and stood by the window, looking down at the gridlocked Manhattan traffic below. People moving with purpose. Going to places. Having lives.

He, on the other hand, hadn’t left the apartment in days or was it weeks already?.
He hadn’t really noticed until now.

6:47 p.m.
He wandered to the kitchen, aimless, opening cabinets and closing them again, not really seeing anything. He poured himself a drink—something amber—and leaned against the counter. He had microwaved something that might’ve been risotto. Ate it standing. Couldn’t taste it. Meanwhile, the glass clinked slightly in his hand. It reminded him he was real. Or at least supposed to be.
It was getting dark outside, and he hadn’t turned on any lights. The apartment felt like a shell—dim, cavernous, untouched by human warmth.

The email hovered behind his eyes like a watermark, a quiet echo he couldn’t quite let go. His mind, restless and aching, drifted back to that afternoon in Italy—the villa, the sunlight, the ghosts of what might have been.

He lay on the couch after that and turned the TV on, volume down. Some old movie playing. He didn’t recognize it. Two people kissing in the rain. Fucking cliché.
He squeezed his eyes shut.

Gerri’s voice — remembered, not real — said: You always make everything into a joke before it can hurt you.
She wasn’t wrong.

He opened his eyes then and closed them again, trying to do some breathing exercises he read about online. Then, as nothing helped, let another memory of Italy pull him under.
The sound of the ocean waves crashing faintly in the distance, the scent of jasmine and salt air mingling in the breeze. Gerri walking past him, her face a fragile mask of something unspoken. That moment—the one where everything shifted and yet nothing changed.

He saw her silhouette framed in the doorway, the subtle hesitation in her step, the way her eyes flickered away before he could catch their gaze.
The words unspoken, the emotions tangled beneath the surface.

Roman remembered the quiet regret, the sharp ache of things left unsaid, the heavy weight of years pressing down on them both.
He wanted to reach out, to bridge the distance with a simple message, a confession, an apology for having caused such a turmoil. But the fear gnawed at him—the fear of rejection, of reopening wounds too raw to touch, of exposing the fragile parts of himself he had spent so long hiding.

Roman opened his eyes then, it was too much all at once, he wanted to reply, to reach out but the internal battle wore on, the relentless tide of doubt crashing over him again and again.

9:12 p.m.

The phone buzzed sharply against the wooden side table, jolting Roman from the spiral of his thoughts. He stared at the screen
This time: nothing.

Just a news alert.

He stared at it anyway, hoping.

No new emails.
Of course not.

He picked up his laptop then. The email still sat there, unread again, though he’d already read it this morning. Word by word. Line by line. It had crawled under his skin.
“I don’t know what this is anymore, but I think about you. I wish I didn’t. But I do.”

He let out a breath and stared at the line as if it could speak first.

Roman had always feared silence—not just in conversations, but the kind that crept up around meaningful things. He could joke through awkward dinners and funerals and business disasters. But he couldn’t joke through this. Gerri hadn’t given him a punchline. Just that cool, careful restraint she always wore like perfume. The truth wrapped in cotton—soft enough to hold, hard enough to bruise.

He opened a new tab. Typed out another draft. Deleted the first sentence. Tried again.

“Yeah. I think about you too. Like...more than I want to admit.”
Delete.

“I’m not mad. I mean, I am, but not in the way you think. I just—fuck. I miss you.”
Delete.

“I’m sorry.”

He stared at the two words for a while. They looked strange on the screen. Weak. Vulnerable. Stupid. True. So very true.

He closed the draft without saving once again.

The room was now entirely dark. He hadn’t noticed the sun had set. Just black outside his windows and a faint glow from the city. He turned on a lamp. The harsh yellow filled the space like an interrogation room. Too much. He turned it off again.

He slumped onto the couch, phone in hand, considering texting instead. Something vague. Safe.

“Got your email.”

Too dry.

“That was unexpected.”

Too cold.

“Thanks for writing.”

Too final.

He let the screen fade to black. Tossed the phone on the coffee table and sat forward, elbows on knees, face in his hands.

It wasn’t just the email—it was everything around it. The vacuum they’d left behind after whatever they were dissolved. The silence had calcified. And this? This was like someone gently tapping
at the glass, asking if anyone was still home.
Roman didn’t know if he was.

He stood up and paced the room. He thought of texting Karolina. Or Frank. Or even Kendall. Then he laughed quietly. There was no one he wanted to talk to about this. Not really.
The regret crept up like smoke under a door—quiet at first, then choking.

He remembered Italy again. Not just the villa. The after. On the jet home. Her seat across from his. She didn’t say much. He didn’t either. But he kept glancing at her, hoping for...something. A flicker of softening. A signal that maybe he hadn’t entirely burned it down.

He remembered her posture: rigid, composed, unreadable. He remembered thinking, If I just reach over and say the right thing, maybe— but he hadn’t. He’d curled up instead, nursing his wounds like a coward.

Now, all these months later, she’d extended something quiet. Gentle. Not a door thrown open, but maybe a window cracked just enough.
And he couldn’t even bring himself to reply.

He sat back down and stared at the ceiling.

He hated this about himself. The paralysis. The cowardice. The way he could blow up a building with his mouth but couldn’t send one real sentence to someone he missed.

It was nearing midnight. He had only eaten the risotto. His stomach had long since stopped bothering him about it.

The apartment was too quiet.
He thought of calling her.

The idea terrified him more than anything else. Hearing her voice. What if she sounded…fine? What if she sounded hurt? What if she didn’t pick up?
Instead, he opened the email again. Read it for what must’ve been the twentieth time.

“But even now, I don’t regret knowing you. Or working with you. Or…whatever happened between us..”

He touched his thumb to the screen as if the words had texture.

Then he got up, walked to his bedroom, and sat on the edge of the bed, fully dressed.

He didn’t cry. Not exactly. But something welled up in his chest that made his throat ache and his eyes burn.

He thought: I should write her back.
He thought: I can’t.
He thought: Tomorrow.
But he knew he wouldn’t.

He lay back on the bed, phone on his chest, Gerri’s words folded somewhere deep inside him like a note he didn’t know how to answer.
The screen glowed once before dimming again. Roman didn’t move.

His fingers twitched once against his chest, where the phone rested. It felt heavier than it should. Like her words were pressed into it — her voice folded between the lines he couldn’t stop hearing in his head. “I think about you.” Over and over.

There were drafts of responses in his head. Words that tried to walk the impossible line — of being clever, but not dismissive; vulnerable, but not pathetic. But every sentence collapsed under the weight of how much it mattered. How much she still mattered.

One draft started with “Hi. Thanks for the email.” Another just said, “I’m glad you’re okay.” And another — one he hated himself for even thinking about — said nothing at all, just attached a photo. A memory. Maybe something stupid like the blurry one he’d taken of her once during a boardroom meeting, mid-eye-roll. He remembered thinking it was the only honest expression he’d seen in days.

He hadn’t sent any of them.

And now it was dark. Again. And quiet. Again. Like the day had looped on itself, and the only thing that had changed was how much heavier his body felt.
He shifted onto his side. Pulled the blanket over himself, clothes and all. The apartment stayed dark. Quiet. It suited him.
He didn’t know what time it was anymore.

His body was tired, but his mind wasn’t finished. It flickered in and out of memories — Gerri in boardrooms, Gerri brushing past him, Gerri sitting in silence after he’d humiliated himself, humiliated her. That long gaze from across the villa courtyard. The way she hadn’t looked at him after. Not really.

And now this email. Cool, careful. But something underneath. A ghost of hope. Or maybe just a goodbye in disguise.

He turned onto his back again, staring at the ceiling. The dim city lights left faint, blurred trails on the surface. The silence started to buzz.
He wished he could cry. Actually cry. Not just feel the pressure of it building behind his ribs like a balloon about to pop — but let it spill, hot and stupid, down his face. It might’ve helped. Might’ve drained something out of him, created space for something else.

Instead, it just pressed there. Swelling.

And he whispered, to no one, “I’m sorry.”

It didn’t echo. It didn’t do anything. But it made something inside him ease just enough.

It wasn’t like he thought she’d forgive him. Or that they’d...what, get back in touch? Pick up where they left off? As if there was a place they could return to that hadn’t already been wrecked by everything they never said and everything they said too loudly.

But there had been a thread. A wire that still connected them — something live and humming beneath the years and silence. And now she’d tugged it gently. Reached out without reaching too far. It left him gut-punched.

Not because it hurt — though it did.

But because part of him wanted to believe that maybe he could answer.

That maybe — if he just wrote it right, timed it perfectly, carved himself into the version of Roman she might still respect — then maybe something could crack open between them again. Something small. A conversation. A lifeline.

But he couldn’t do it. Not tonight.
Maybe not ever.

And that was what finally broke him down enough to feel tired. Bone-deep tired. The kind that doesn’t just sink into your body, but into your will.
The last thing he thought about was not the reply he couldn’t write, or the conversation he couldn’t have — but the way she’d signed it:

“Take care of yourself, though I imagine you are not.”

Like it mattered to her, somehow. Still. Even after all of it.

He let the words wrap around him like static — distant, soft, almost warm.

And slowly, finally, he drifted off into sleep. Even there he kept hearing her voice.
And that, somehow, was worse

Chapter Text

Part I — December 4–5: Aftermath

The morning after sending the email began with a faint headache and far too much awareness.

Gerri woke in her bed with the sense that something was unfinished — not just in her inbox, but inside her. That faint weight in her chest, the one she had trained herself to ignore on most days, felt heavier now, sharper. She blinked up at the ceiling and laid still for several minutes, as if her body was catching up to the emotional whiplash of the night before.

And then she remembered.

The email.

Roman.

She sat up quickly — too quickly. Her hand reached automatically for her phone on the nightstand, screen glowing with the usual quiet chaos: six new emails, a news alert about another Matsson-adjacent PR disaster, a text from Catherine with a photo of her cat dressed in a Christmas sweater, and nothing from him.

Not even a read receipt.

Gerri stared at the screen for longer than she meant to. Then she clicked off the phone, set it down gently, and exhaled. Long and slow.

Of course he hadn’t replied. It would’ve been absurd to expect him to. That wasn’t the point, she told herself. The message had been sent. That was the point. She’d done her part — cracked the window, as far as she could bear it. What he did or didn’t do with that was no longer her responsibility.

She had told herself all of this already.

Still, when she got out of bed and shuffled into the kitchen, still barefoot, still not dressed, she checked her email again.

Nothing.

She made herself a strong coffee, ignoring the dull ache that pulsed behind her eyes. Her hair was unbrushed, twisted up into a haphazard knot. She didn’t bother straightening it, or reaching for her skincare products, or doing any of the little rituals that usually created the illusion of control.

Today she wasn’t expected at the office. A rare, open Monday after a packed few weeks of legal chaos and Matsson’s creative brand of professional nonsense. Gerri had blocked the day off for “strategic oversight.” It sounded impressive. In truth, she had just needed a day where no one was allowed to bother her.

She hadn’t accounted for bothering herself.

The apartment was quieter than usual. The kind of quiet that scraped a little. The television stayed off. She didn’t turn on music. She didn’t even open the blinds.

Instead, she sat at the kitchen table with her laptop open and a blinking cursor waiting in a new tab — not on her personal email, not on her work server, just a fresh document where she pretended to plan out talking points for the Matsson-Europe regulatory call next week.

She typed half a sentence.

Paused.

Deleted it.

Checked her inbox again.

Nothing.

Then, mercifully, her phone buzzed.

Karolina.

The name alone made Gerri straighten slightly, as if preparing for a court appearance. It was ridiculous, really — Karolina knew her. Too well, in fact.

She picked up.
“Hey,” Gerri said, tone careful, already bracing.

Karolina’s voice was breezy, light — as if she knew to tread lightly but wouldn’t say so out loud.
“Hi. Just checking in. You’re not on fire, are you?”

Gerri exhaled through her nose. “No. Not yet.”

“Shocking. Thought Matsson might’ve started a dumpster blaze by now.”

“He might still.”

“True.” A pause. “You sound tired.”

“I am tired,” Gerri replied, not even bothering to mask it.

“That tracks.”

There was another pause — not awkward, just intentional.

Karolina spoke again, voice softer this time. “Did you sleep okay?”

Gerri hesitated. That hesitation was probably enough of an answer.

“I slept fine,” she lied, then thought better of it and corrected herself. “I slept some, it was okay.”

Karolina didn’t push. “Okay.”

There was a small silence again, one that made Gerri feel seen and mildly uncomfortable at the same time.

“I figured you might be…I don’t know. In your head a little.”

Gerri’s mouth twitched. “That’s my natural habitat.”

Karolina chuckled. “Yeah, but usually it’s the efficient, terrifying kind. You sound more like… brooding Hamlet in a Max Mara wrap.”

“Great. I’ll have to add that to my brand deck.”

“You should. It’s honest.”

“I’m functioning,” Gerri said, too quickly.

“I didn’t ask if you were functioning.”

Another pause. It wasn’t aggressive. Just…close. The kind of tone that said, You don’t have to say it, but I know.

Gerri sat back in her chair. Looked at the wall.

“It’s quiet,” she said finally.

“I figured,” Karolina replied, not missing a beat.

“I didn’t expect anything.”

Karolina didn’t respond right away. Then:
“I know you didn’t. That’s probably what makes it worse.”

That made Gerri’s throat tighten. She swallowed.
“I sent something. Last night.”

“I guessed.”

“Of course you did.”

Karolina’s voice stayed soft. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”
Then, after a breath, “Not yet.”

“Okay. I’ll wait.”

Another silence passed between them — long, but companionable. The kind that only came with people who had been through a lot together, even if they’d never said most of it out loud.

“Thanks for checking in,” Gerri said finally, her voice quieter now.

“Always. You’d do it for me.”

“Yeah. But I’d pretend it was about a memo you forgot to send.”

Karolina laughed. “Right. And I’d let you pretend.”

They stayed on the line for a moment longer, not saying anything. Then Karolina’s voice again, lighter this time:
“Alright. I won’t keep you. Call me if you want to scream into a void or slander Matsson’s sweater collection.”

“I might take you up on that.”

“I’ll be here.”

Karolina hung up first.

Gerri set the phone down slowly, and exhaled again, then stared at the screen. Her inbox had refreshed.

Still nothing.

She snapped the laptop shut.

It was past noon now. She’d done nothing productive. She hadn’t showered. She hadn’t even opened the living room curtains yet. The apartment had become a tomb again, and she hated it.

But more than that, she hated herself for hoping .

She’d told Karolina that she didn’t expect anything. That she knew how Roman worked, that she was too old and too experienced to think a man like him would suddenly show up with emotional clarity. She’d said all the things that made her sound measured, wise, indifferent.

She’d even believed some of them.

But beneath all that polish, there was still that small, aching part of her that wanted to be surprised. To see his name in her inbox. To see anything from him. Even a joke. Even a question mark.

She wanted to know he still thought of her.

And now the silence echoed like proof that maybe he didn’t. That maybe she’d miscalculated everything. Or worse, that he’d changed his mind about her completely.

She stood up and walked to the window, drawing the curtain just enough to let a blade of grey light in. The city looked quiet. Blanketed in that kind of winter murk that blurred sharp edges, gone was the white layer that had covered the city only days prior. People now rushed through the streets below with coffee cups and scarves and grocery bags. She wondered how many of them had messages in their phones they regretted. How many were waiting on something — or someone — who wouldn’t answer.

Gerri closed the curtain again.

She walked to the bathroom, started the shower, and let it steam before stepping in. She didn’t want to think anymore, so she focused on the water, the temperature, the pressure against her back. She scrubbed harder than necessary. When she got out, she didn’t blow-dry her hair. She didn’t straighten it. She let it curl, unrestrained.

She put on her oldest cashmere sweater, the sleeves stretched from too many winters, and made herself another coffee. Her inbox could wait. The silence wasn’t going anywhere.

But she would not give it more than it had already taken.

For now.

Part II – Mid-December 

By the second week of December, Gerri had stopped checking her inbox every ten minutes. Now she only did it once an hour.

That was progress. Or regression, depending on how you measured it.

Roman still hadn’t replied. Of course he hadn’t. And every time she reached for her phone and saw nothing but a sea of legal threads, internal memos, and holiday discount spam from wine clubs she didn’t remember subscribing to, she reminded herself that this was what she expected. That the silence was the most logical response to a message like hers. That what she’d sent wasn’t supposed to demand anything. It was just… presence.

Still, she felt vaguely humiliated by how often she’d mentally rehearsed what his reply might have looked like. She hated that some part of her kept hoping for even a one-word response. “Thanks.” “Okay.” “Yeah.” Anything.

It made her feel like a teenager. And that, more than anything, infuriated her.

So she buried herself in work instead.

Waystar, under Matsson’s control, continued to behave like a badly programmed social experiment. She floated between video conferences and legal strategizing with the quiet efficiency of someone who could dismantle an entire crisis without ever raising her voice. She worked late. She sent emails at 2 a.m. She turned down an invite to a white-tie event she would have once killed to attend.

When Karolina nudged her on a shared doc — a subtle “You good?” in a comment bubble — Gerri responded with a thumbs-up emoji and a clause revision.

But even Gerri Kellman, human fortress, had her moments of fracture.

Like that Thursday, when she got a text from Peti.

Peti : Are you free for lunch next week? Something simple. Just us. XO

It was unusually soft for Peti. Gerri sat staring at the message longer than she meant to before typing back:

Gerri : Yes. Tuesday?

Peti : Perfect. Midtown or your place?

Gerri : You pick. Midtown is fine.

Peti : You sure? You’ve been working nonstop.

Gerri : Exactly why I could use lunch.

There was a long pause before the next message came.

Peti : Okay. Midtown it is. No work talk though.

Gerri : No promises.

They met the following Tuesday at a small French café Peti liked — charming in that deliberately curated way, all fogged windows, warm brass lighting, and miniature table settings meant to feel intimate but always felt a bit too cramped.

Peti arrived before Gerri. She always did. She was seated at a corner table by the window, flipping through something on her phone, an untouched glass of water in front of her. When she spotted Gerri, she stood, shrugged out of her massive green scarf, and leaned in for a kiss on the cheek.

“You’re early,” Gerri said as they sat.

“You’re two minutes late.”

Gerri allowed herself a small smirk. “I must be getting soft.”

“You must be.”

Peti had inherited more of Baird than Gerri ever expected — the strong jaw, the dry wit, the tendency to spiral into long tangents about economic ethics when she was nervous. She greeted her mother with a kiss on the cheek, wearing a massive green scarf and those terrible boots she loved. Gerri didn’t comment.

They ordered wine. It felt early for it, but neither of them brought it up.

“How’s Catherine?” Gerri asked, not because she didn’t speak to her other daughter, but because she didn’t speak to her enough.

“She’s fine,” Peti said, a little smile curling her lip. “Sent me a video of her cat knocking over a menorah.”

“She’s not even Jewish.”

“I know. She said it was ‘interfaith solidarity.’ Whatever that means.”

They both laughed. It was easy, familiar.

For a few minutes, things felt simple again. They ate beet salad and poached salmon. Gerri listened more than she talked, occasionally nodding along while Peti detailed her latest project, some consulting thing Gerri didn’t fully understand but pretended to. She used to be better at that — pretending to care about the specifics while genuinely caring about the person.

Now it was reversed. She cared deeply, but the performance of it was slipping.

“You’ve been working a lot,” Peti said eventually.

Gerri folded her napkin with deliberate care. “So have you.”

“Sure. But I don’t work for a billionaire who thinks Twitter is a valid legal forum.”

Gerri snorted into her wine. “Matsson’s not that bad.”

“Mom, he tried to NFT an apology.”

“Well. He’s European.”

Peti laughed, and it broke the stiffness between them, just a little. The way it used to when she was a teenager trying to drag her mother into some half-hearted argument about curfews or who she was dating.

They talked about Catherine again for a while — Peti reciting updates like she was ticking boxes on a list. ““She asked if you were okay.”

Gerri blinked. “She did?”

“Yeah.” Peti paused. “I said you were fine. Overworked, same as always. She didn’t seem convinced.”

There it was. The opening Gerri wasn’t sure she wanted. She could say something. Offer something real. But the words tangled in her throat. Instead, she took a long sip of wine and said, “Well. I am overworked.”

Peti gave her a look — not hard, not judgmental, just knowing. “You could come up for air. Once in a while.”

“I’m fine.”

“You always say that.”

Gerri placed her glass down with a bit more force than intended. “Peti, I’m trying.”

“I know.”

Another silence. This one a little heavier. Peti picked at the rim of her plate. Gerri focused on cutting her salmon with precise, unnecessary care.

“I used to bring you here when you were little,” Gerri said, finally. “You always ordered fries and dipped them in crème brûlée.”

Peti smiled. “I was disgusting.”

“You were five.”

“You were always on your BlackBerry.”

“I was…trying.”

“I know.” This time it was gentler. “I know you were.”

They finished eating slowly. The conversation drifted to easier topics — Peti’s consulting project, her apartment flooding during a storm, a weird date she’d escaped from by faking a friend’s emergency. Gerri listened more than she spoke, smiling in the right places, nodding, laughing when required.

But part of her was still in that old memory — Peti in a high chair, smeared with sugar and sticky fingers, and Gerri on a business call, holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder, trying to sign off on a deal while pretending she wasn’t missing her daughter’s first solo trip to a “grown-up restaurant.”

When the check came, Gerri reached for it out of habit.

Peti put her hand over her mother’s. “No. I invited you. I’m paying.”

Gerri looked up, caught off guard. “You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

Gerri looked up at her then. Really looked.

Peti was no longer a child. She wasn’t the gangly, sharp-edged kid anymore. She hadn’t been for a long time. But in this moment, Gerri saw how much time had passed — how many dinners she had missed, how many recitals she had half-attended with a phone in her hand. Her throat tightened. Peti was a woman now — complex, guarded in her own ways, fiercely independent, and carrying a faint echo of her mother’s quiet armor.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. 

They walked out together into the sharp December wind. Peti adjusted her scarf and looked like she was trying to decide whether to say something more.

In the end, she didn’t.

“Text me when you get home,” Gerri said.

“I will.”

And then Peti leaned in, kissed her cheek again, and walked off into the blur of taxis and steam rising from manholes.

Gerri didn’t watch her go.

She stood for a few seconds in the cold, staring ahead at nothing in particular, hands buried in her coat pockets. And when she finally turned to walk in the other direction, her chest felt heavier than it had before lunch.

That night, Gerri FaceTimed Catherine.

It wasn’t planned. It never was, not with Catherine. Plans made her wary, made her defensive. But unscheduled calls — casual, sudden — felt safer, like there was less expectation to meet.

Catherine picked up on the third ring. Her face appeared on the screen, surrounded by a halo of messy blonde curls and the soft yellow light of her kitchen. She was in a worn NYU LAW sweatshirt, slicing an onion on a cutting board, her phone propped up on a jar of tahini.

“Mom,” she said, in a voice that was fond but surprised. “Twice in one week. Did the world end?”

“No,” Gerri said, smiling faintly. “Just wanted to hear your voice.”

“That’s alarming.”

“Don’t start.”

“You cooking?” Gerri added after a moment of watching Catherine.

“Trying. I got this recipe from a friend. It’s probably too complicated for how hungry I am. But I can’t keep ordering takeout. I’m developing an unhealthy relationship with sodium.”

Gerri leaned back against her armchair. “You’ve always had an unhealthy relationship with onions.”

“That’s fair. What are you doing?” Catherine asked then, her eyes soft. 

Gerri tilted the camera slightly to show the dark window behind her, the skyline glittering. “Thinking.”

“Dangerous.”

“Mm.”

There was a short silence — not uncomfortable exactly, but taut.

Gerri let it stretch for a moment. “I had lunch with Peti today.”

“I know. She told me.”

Gerri hesitated. “She said you asked if I was okay.”

Catherine didn’t look away. “Yeah. I did.”

“Why?”

Catherine shrugged, but it wasn’t careless. “You’ve seemed…not okay.”

“I’m fine.”

“You always say that.”

The echo from lunch stung more than it should have.

“I just…” Gerri trailed off. “It’s been a strange year.”

“You mean Logan?”

“I mean everything.”

Catherine studied her mother through the screen. Gerri could feel it — the quiet analysis, the soft disappointment buried under civility.

“You don’t have to explain it,” Catherine said, finally. “I just…I want to know you’re okay. I don’t think you let people in when you’re not.”

“I’m not very good at that.”

“No. You’re not.”

There was no bitterness in her tone. Just a fact.

Gerri sighed, rubbed her temple. “I know I wasn’t the easiest mother.”

Catherine smiled sadly. “You weren’t. But I don’t need you to apologize for that, Mom. I just want you to…let us in once in a while. Even if it’s messy. Even if you’re not polished.”

“That’s asking a lot.”

“I know. But I think you can do it.”

Something inside Gerri softened then. Her throat tightened.

Gerri paused. “There’s been a lot to adjust to.” she said finally. 

Catherine leaned in toward the screen, her voice quieter now. “You don’t have to adjust alone, you know. Even if we’re not…close like some families, we’re still here.”

Gerri looked at her daughter, really looked. The lawyer. The woman who had, at twenty-six, delivered an argument in front of the Second Circuit with more poise than most people twice her age. The girl who came out at seventeen with no apology in her voice and only mild impatience when Gerri had asked too many questions she thought were supportive, but probably weren’t.

“I know,” Gerri said. “It’s not that I don’t want to be close to you. I just…I never really knew how to balance things right.”

Catherine let out a quiet breath. “I know you tried. You were just always better at managing crisis than intimacy.”

That stung more than Gerri expected. Probably because it was true.

“You were always so independent,” Gerri said.

“I had to be.”

Another pause.

“Do you ever feel like I failed you?” Gerri asked, and instantly hated how small her voice sounded.

Catherine blinked. “No. I mean…not failed. Maybe emotionally underfunded.”

Gerri laughed, a little too sharply. “That’s generous.”

“I know you did your best,” Catherine said. “You just… always had to be somewhere else. It was like you were building a fortress around all of us. And now that I’m older, I get why. It just didn’t feel that way back then.”

“You’re not seeing anyone, are you?” Gerri asked. She meant it as a change of subject, but it landed too obviously.

Catherine didn’t flinch. “No. I’m seeing no one. It’s very romantic. Just me and my litigation briefs.”

Gerri smiled faintly. “Any particularly sexy cases?”

“One. A tech firm suing an ex-employee over defamation. Everyone’s guilty and boring.”

“You always said you’d change the world.”

“I’ve scaled back. Now I’m just trying not to be part of the reason it burns.”

The quiet that followed wasn’t sad. Just settled. Familiar.

“Are you still thinking of visiting for Christmas?” Gerri asked.

“I could,” Catherine said. “I hadn’t planned to, but… maybe it’s time. Peti’ll probably guilt me into it anyway.”

“I’d like that.”

“I know.”

There was another beat of silence. Then Catherine leaned toward the camera, brow furrowing slightly.

“You know… you can talk to me, too. I mean it. I know you and Peti have this shorthand, but I can handle the hard stuff.”

Gerri swallowed. “It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just… I’m not used to being seen like that.”

“You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t even have to be strong all the time.”

“That’s not how I was raised.”

“I know. But maybe it’s how you finish.”

That line — gentle, a little barbed, and completely Catherine — stayed with Gerri long after the call ended.

When they finally said goodbye, it was with no promises, no emotional declarations. Just a simple “I’ll see what I can do for Christmas” and a low, “Love you,” that Gerri didn’t expect but was grateful to hear.

She sat still for a long time afterward, staring at her reflection in the darkened screen.

After a while, Gerri stood in her living room for a moment, phone still warm in her hand, before walking slowly to the hall closet. She reached up, pulled down a box she hadn’t touched in years — labeled simply HOLIDAY DECOR, written in Baird’s hand.

She sat down on the floor, legs crossed, fingers brushing over old baubles and tangled lights, and let the memories in.

It had been Christmas Eve.

The kind of upstate, picture-perfect one — fresh snow still clinging to the roof, a fire glowing warmly in the hearth, and the smell of spiced cider hovering like memory itself in every room of the house. Baird had insisted they rent the place just for that year — a one-time splurge, he called it — and Gerri hadn’t argued. He said it would be good for the girls. She was three weeks off the tail-end of closing a long, brutal contract in D.C., and she was trying her best to be agreeable.

The house was tucked away on a wooded hill, surrounded by white-dusted firs and the kind of silence Gerri never trusted — too thick, too pure. No honking. No clicking heels. No inbox. Just branches shifting beneath snow and the faint scrape of children running through hardwood-floored hallways.

Catherine was nine. Peti, just five. They’d both woken far too early, running down the creaky stairs in matching pajamas Gerri had ordered and forgotten about until the girls had opened the package on their own. Red and gold, reindeer print, slightly oversized. Peti’s sleeves trailed into her cereal all morning.

Baird made breakfast. Scrambled eggs, bacon slightly burned at the edges, toast that came out a little too black because he always underestimated the toaster settings.

Gerri stood near the kitchen window, her second coffee cooling quickly in her hand. Her laptop was open on the sideboard, a familiar browser window blinking with half-drafted contracts. She glanced at it too often.

“Work can wait,” Baird said gently from behind her, slipping his arms around her waist. He smelled like cinnamon and flannel. “You promised.”

“I know,” she murmured. “It’s just—one thing I need to approve before the week turns over.”

“It’s always one thing.”

She turned in his arms, guilty. “I’m sorry.”

“You say that every year.”

“I mean it every year.”

He kissed her cheek and said nothing more.

Catherine was setting up some elaborate stage made from couch cushions and tinsel. She’d spent the whole week preparing a “holiday performance.” Gerri had been briefed — a dramatic reading of The Night Before Christmas , with Peti as the designated “visual effects.” She was serious about it. Had made handmade programs using glitter pens and insisted they be seated before curtain .

“You’re going to watch, right?” Catherine asked, looking up from her crayon-smeared script with a practiced air of self-importance.

“Of course,” Gerri said. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

She meant it. She really meant it. She was trying. God, she was trying.

When the “show” began, Gerri sat cross-legged on the rug, legs aching beneath her slacks. Her wineglass stood forgotten on the side table. Baird settled behind her, legs splayed across the sofa, one hand resting lightly on her shoulder like an anchor.

Catherine read every line with full dramatic flair, pausing for emphasis, raising her voice at key moments, as if performing for a grand jury.

Peti, bless her, was pure chaos. Every time Catherine said the word “mouse,” she screamed, threw paper snowflakes in the air, and fell dramatically to the floor like a cartoon starlet. She was so proud of her role she kept making sound effects — “BANG!” for Santa landing, “WHOOOSH” for the sleigh.

It was ridiculous. It was perfect.

And for a full twenty minutes, Gerri forgot about her inbox.

She watched her daughters — really watched them — and let the joy crack something open in her. Catherine’s face flushed with seriousness and Peti’s eyes bright with excitement. They were both brilliant in their own absurd way.

Afterward, Baird clapped like they’d won a Tony. Gerri applauded too, but her eyes stung in a way she hadn’t expected.

Later that evening, they exchanged the traditional one gift each — a habit Gerri had started when the girls were babies, something about pacing out the dopamine. She handed Catherine a slim box wrapped in silver with red ribbon — one of the few she’d wrapped herself, clumsily. Catherine tore it open.

A set of metallic gel pens and a soft leather-bound notebook.

“So you can keep writing your stories,” Gerri said. Her voice was tight around the edges.

Catherine held the notebook in her lap, quiet for a moment. “Thank you,” she said. She looked surprised. Not because she didn’t like it — because Gerri had remembered. “It’s nice.”

Peti’s gift was a stuffed octopus, seafoam green with big button eyes and arms that curled like ribbons. “You said you wanted something with eight arms,” Gerri explained.

Peti let out a full-body squeal. “Her name is Sylvia!! She’s a science octopus!!”

Baird leaned in and murmured, “A science octopus, huh?”

“She helps me count ,” Peti said, hugging it to her chest.

Gerri watched her daughters’ joy and felt something complex bloom and ache inside her — pride, yes, but also grief. Like she was always one step behind their lives.

After dinner — roast chicken, green beans with almonds, Baird’s too-salty mashed potatoes — the girls retreated to the den. Catherine was lecturing Peti on the artistic importance of staging while Peti made Sylvia perform high-speed aerial flips. The sound of them laughing together echoed off the cedar beams.

Gerri lingered in the kitchen.

Her laptop was still on the counter, plugged in, slightly warm to the touch. Just one quick peek at her inbox. Just one contract to skim.

She clicked.

The screen glowed. The first line read, “Hi Gerri, hope you’re having a restful holiday, but—” She told herself then it would only be for ten minutes. Just a quick reply to a partner. A check on the numbers. A skim through the contracts. But ten minutes bled into twenty, into thirty.

“You promised them,” Baird said quietly, appearing in the doorway.

“I know,” Gerri replied, without looking up.

“You told Catherine you wouldn’t work.”

“It’s just one email—”

“It’s not the email. It’s the message.”

She looked up then. “I’m doing my best, Baird.”

“I know you are.” He came closer. “But Gerri, your best can’t always mean less of you.”

That stuck. It lodged somewhere behind her ribs and stayed there, humming quietly like a shame she couldn’t quite name.

That night, after the girls had fallen asleep in a pile of wrapping paper and pillows, Gerri and Baird sat by the fire. He had his old flannel robe on. She was in one of his sweatshirts, a mug of cold wine in her hands.

“She wants to be a writer,” Gerri said suddenly.

Baird nodded. “She’s good.”

“She is. And Peti…she’s soft. Emotionally soft. I’m not sure how to parent that. I wasn’t built for soft.”

“You don’t have to fix them.” Baird said gently 

“I’m not trying to fix them.”

“You’re trying not to break them.”

Gerri stared at the fire. “Is that so wrong?”

“No,” Baird said, leaning in to kiss her temple. “But maybe you can give yourself permission to be broken around them once in a while, too.”

She didn’t answer. But she leaned into his shoulder, let his warmth anchor her, and for a moment, she let the fear slip.

The fear of failing them. The fear of becoming too much like her own mother. The fear of loving imperfectly.

“You’re hard on yourself,” he said much later, like an afterthought that took a while to build.

“I have to be. I can’t…I can’t risk getting it wrong. I’ve seen what getting it wrong does to women in this business. In life.”

“They’re not business.”

Gerri looked down at her wine. “I know.”

“They’re your daughters. And you love them.”

“I do,” she whispered. “So much it terrifies me.”

He leaned over and kissed her temple. “You’re allowed to let them love you back.”

That line — simple, devastating — stayed with her for years.

That night, she crept into the girls’ room and stood there, just watching. Catherine’s notebook already open by her side, gel pens scattered across the comforter. Peti curled around Sylvia like a lifeline, one foot hanging off the bed. They both looked so peaceful. So untouched.

She wanted to believe she could keep them that way.

She wanted to believe she could keep herself.

It was the only Christmas she remembered feeling fully present for. And even then, only in pieces.

The sound that pulled her from the memory was her phone buzzing across the marble countertop.

Gerri startled, blinked twice. She was still in her apartment, not the cabin. No fire. No girls. Just the overlit kitchen, a half-drunk cup of lukewarm tea, and the low buzz of a city she no longer felt connected to.

The name on the screen made her spine straighten before she even picked it up.

MATSSON (DIRECT LINE)

She paused, glanced at the time. 10:47 p.m.

Of course. He had no concept of time zones, boundaries, or dignity.

She let it ring once more, then answered.

“Matsson,” she said, already too sharp.

“Gerri,” he replied, dragging the vowels like he was chewing on them. “Are you watching PGN right now? The anchor in the blue suit — he’s got a lazy eye, right? Something weird going on there.”

Gerri closed her eyes. “It’s nearly eleven.”

“Is it?” he said, not apologetic. “Feels like afternoon here. I had three espressos and a ten-minute cry. Guess which one helped.”

“Neither,” Gerri deadpanned.

“Correct! I need you to do damage control. One of the little royals is leaking again. I can smell it.”

“Which one?” she asked, already reaching for her laptop, hating herself for doing it.

“Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe Kendall? Shiv? I don’t know. They’re like wounded dogs. They chew on whatever bone is closest.”

“And what bone would that be this time?”

“Maybe the proxy mess from Q3. Maybe my tweets about Sweden being a superior civilization. I don’t know. You tell me, Counsel.”

She hated that he still called her that. Not Gerri. Not Ms. Kellman. Just Counsel , like she was some interchangeable prop.

“You’re saying there’s a leak, and you want me to plug it,” she clarified.

“I want you to seal the hole, cover it in cement, and smile while you do it.”

“Understood.”

“And Gerri?”

She already knew what was coming. That smug tone.

“You’re a killer, right? That’s what they all used to say? Logan’s little scalpel?”

She didn’t answer.

“You’re not going soft, are you?”

There it was.

“No,” she said, voice clipped. “Not even close.”

“Good. Because this time, I want you to make someone bleed.”

The line clicked off.

No goodbye.

Just the acid sting of those last few words still ringing in her ears.

Make someone bleed.

She stared at her reflection in the darkened screen. Then at her hands.

They weren’t shaking, but they were clenched. Tight. White-knuckled. She hadn’t realized it.

She opened her email. Not Roman’s folder. The other ones. Crisis lines. PR. Legal responses. Internal reports.

The noise of the job came rushing back in like a wave breaking over her.

But the warmth she’d been clinging to, the softness of the memory — it evaporated completely. Like steam on granite.

She didn’t sleep that night.

Instead, she sat at the edge of her bed with her laptop open, composing and deleting replies, drafting neutral language to vague accusations that hadn’t even surfaced yet. She switched between tabs compulsively. Checked for Roman’s reply again. Nothing. Of course.

And still, the silence of her inbox felt louder than Matsson’s demands.

By morning, the apartment was a mess of half-drunk coffee cups and unopened folders. She’d pulled out a stack of old photo albums at some point — why, she didn’t even remember — and now they sat open on the dining table like artifacts from a life she no longer recognized.

There was one photo in particular. Catherine and Peti, side by side in red coats, both laughing — caught in a gust of wind on 5th Avenue. Gerri was in the background, slightly blurred, mid-phone call.

It hurt to look at. And still, she didn’t close the album.

She called Karolina that afternoon. Didn’t even think, just dialed.

Karolina picked up on the second ring. “What’s on fire?”

“Nothing,” Gerri said. “Not yet. I just…needed a voice that wasn’t shouting.”

Karolina paused. “You okay?”

“No.”

Another pause. Then: “Want me to bring soup?”

Gerri laughed softly. “Jesus, you’re old school.”

“I learned from the best.”

It helped. For five minutes, it helped.

Then the email from Matsson’s assistant came in: “Reminder — CEO wants full report draft by Monday. Include off-the-record risk assessments.”

She read it. Read it again. Then closed her laptop with more force than necessary.

The rest of the week blurred. She showed up. She briefed departments. She shut down rumors before they reached newsrooms. She performed triage.

But the moment she got home each night, the weight returned.

The house felt colder. The silence more punishing.

And Roman still hadn’t written back.

She told herself she hadn’t expected a response.

But that was a lie. She had hoped.

She hated herself for hoping.

By December 20th, she stopped checking the inbox so compulsively. Told herself it was pathetic.

She worked late on the 21st. Let her assistant leave early. Sat alone in the conference room drafting bullet points about reputational fallout, wondering if this — this isolating, bloodless damage control — was all she had left.

That night, walking home, she passed a choir singing on the street.

She stood there longer than she meant to.

And then, without knowing why, she pulled out her phone and texted Karolina:
“Do you think it’s ever too late to fix something you’ve broken?”

Karolina responded ten minutes later:
“Depends on the something. And on how honest you’re willing to be about the breaking.”

Gerri stared at the message for a long time.

Then she put her phone away and kept walking.

Snow had started falling again.

Part III - Christmas Eve and Day

The morning of Christmas Eve came with a strange stillness.

Not the peaceful kind. Not the comforting silence she used to chase in rare weekends upstate with Baird and the girls. No — this was the kind of stillness that pressed in around you, like walls inching closer without making a sound.

Gerri woke before her alarm. Again.
She didn’t need it these days — her body kept waking her with the same internal insistence, like it hadn’t gotten the memo that there was nowhere to be, no conference call to prepare for, no crisis to anticipate.

Just Christmas.

She lay there a moment longer than usual, watching the faint light creep across the ceiling. Then she exhaled slowly and sat up. The bed was too crisp, too cold, too neatly made even after a night of sleep. She smoothed the sheets, as if trying to erase the imprint of another restless night.

The apartment was still dark, save for the soft blue-gray of a winter morning pressing against the windows. She padded to the kitchen, started the coffee — grind, brew, pour, sip — and stared at the backsplash while the machine hummed.

No decorations. Not this year. Not after Matsson’s phone call when she was about to, at least, look at them, maybe even put some up. 

The box of ornaments, with Baird’s handwriting on it, was tucked somewhere behind travel files and tax folders again. She hadn’t touched it again in the past week. The girls used to help her decorate the tiny fake tree they kept in the corner of the living room, but now it felt like a hollow gesture — like performing cheer for a room that didn’t care.

She opened the fridge. Took out two eggs, ignored them. Closed it again.

Her phone buzzed softly.

She didn’t jump.

It wasn’t Roman. Of course it wasn’t. She hated how he was still constantly in her mind, how every buzzing from her phone could mean he replied which he wouldn't do, she knew him too well for that. 

Instead it was an automated message from her grocery delivery: “Reminder: Your holiday order will arrive between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.”

She clicked it away.

Gerri moved through the apartment like she was rehearsing for a version of herself she hadn’t played in years. Cleaned the counters. Made the bed (again). Answered a single email from Matsson’s assistant with a clipped “Received.” Folded laundry she didn’t remember washing. Lit a candle she didn’t like the smell of.

Then she sat at the kitchen island and stared at the digital clock until it rolled past noon.

Catherine was supposed to arrive around 2:30. Maybe earlier, depending on the train. Gerri hadn’t asked her to come, not really at least, just mentioned it in the phone call — Catherine had decided to come then, maybe Peti did guilt trip her in it, no one knew for sure. A short visit, Catherine had said. No pressure. Just Christmas Eve through the morning. Then back to her place downtown, where she was meeting friends for a holiday dinner.

The thought made Gerri wince.

Not because she didn’t want her daughter to have her own traditions.
But because this — this “short visit,” this politely truncated obligation — was probably all she had earned.

The groceries arrived just after one. A young delivery guy in a knit beanie handed her two brown bags and said “Happy holidays” like he meant it. She nodded, smiled, tipped in cash.

She unpacked slowly: rosemary, cranberries, brie, a bottle of Catherine’s favorite dry Riesling. No turkey. Just a small chicken, some roasted vegetables, the kind of meal that didn’t scream Christmas so much as whisper I tried .

By the time she was setting the brie on a slate board, the buzzer rang.

Catherine.

She was early, as always. Coat half-zipped, a grey scarf around her neck, hair up in a messy bun that still somehow made her look polished. She carried two tote bags — one clearly filled with wrapped gifts, the other with a laptop peeking from the top.

Gerri opened the door and stepped aside.

“Hey,” Catherine said. Her voice was warm but tentative.

“Hi,” Gerri answered, offering a faint smile.

They hugged, the way people do when they haven’t decided yet how much to say out loud. It wasn’t awkward — not exactly — but it wasn’t easy either. Catherine held her a beat longer than expected, and Gerri felt, once again, something crack, small and quiet, beneath her sternum.

“You made it.”

“Train was fine. Cold, but fast.”

“I made your brie.”

“Figured you would.” Catherine smiled faintly and stepped inside.

She moved through the apartment with the ease of someone who had once called it home but now saw it like a museum of the past — familiar, curated, distant.

“The place looks the same,” Catherine noted.

“Give or take a few more unpaid therapy bills,” Gerri replied, dry.

Catherine snorted. “You want help with anything?”

“It’s all mostly done.”

They drifted into the kitchen. Gerri poured wine. Catherine took it. They stood across from each other like two people playing out a script neither one had written, waiting for the scene to shift.

“How’s work?” Gerri asked.

Catherine shrugged. “Quiet. Court’s been light. I’m working on a brief for a housing rights case, though. Could get interesting.”

“That’s good.”

“And you?”

Gerri raised her glass. “Oh, you know. Corporate chaos. Male egos. Lawyers pretending they’re more clever than they are.”

“So the usual?”

“Exactly.”

Silence stretched between them. Not uncomfortable — not yet — but expectant.

Then Catherine said, “Did you end up messaging him?”

It took Gerri a full beat to answer. “Yes.”

“Did he reply?”

Another pause. “No.”

“I’m sorry.”

Gerri shrugged, eyes on the wineglass. “I didn’t send it for a reply. Not really.”

Catherine didn’t push. She never did, not right away. That was the thing about her — she knew exactly when to leave space and exactly when to close it.

They moved to the living room. Catherine curled up in the armchair, Gerri on the couch. Music played low in the background — a jazz rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” that made Gerri’s throat tighten without warning.

Dinner came slowly after that. They cooked together, in that half-silent way mothers and daughters often do — a rhythm built on repetition rather than conversation. Catherine chopped vegetables. Gerri handled the chicken. At one point, their elbows bumped, and Catherine smiled without looking up.

“You remember when I burned the cranberry sauce?” Catherine said, amused.

“You didn’t burn it,” Gerri replied. “You caramelized it. Aggressively.”

“It turned into glue.”

“And Peti tried to eat it anyway.”

They laughed.

And for a moment, it was almost easy.

The doorbell rang again around six.

Gerri hadn’t been expecting it.

She was just pulling the roast vegetables out of the oven—apron tied neatly around her waist, sleeves pushed up, the scent of garlic and rosemary rising around her—when the sound made her flinch. She’d assumed she and Catherine were settled in for the evening. Quiet. Predictable. Manageable.

Catherine looked up from where she was uncorking the Riesling. “That her?”

Gerri blinked. “That…who?”

“The girl scout you hired to tell you you’re still intimidating,” Catherine deadpanned.

Gerri rolled her eyes. “It’s probably the concierge. Holiday check-in or-,”

Catherine raised an eyebrow like she knew better. She usually did.

Gerri untied her apron, smoothing it with one hand as she crossed the hardwood floor toward the door. She wasn’t nervous. Not exactly. But something in her chest tightened all the same.

When she opened the door, the cold air hit her first—then the sight of Peti, wrapped in a navy coat and cream scarf, cheeks pink from the wind and a subtle tension in her jaw that Gerri recognized too well: it was the same one she saw in the mirror every morning.

“Hi,” Peti said. Her voice was neutral. Carefully so.

Gerri’s throat caught. “You’re…here.”

“Well, that’s what you do on Christmas, isn’t it?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

“I wasn’t either.”

There was a pause. Not awkward, exactly. But fragile.

“I didn’t bring anything,” Peti added, stepping inside. “Catherine said you had enough wine.”

“That’s true,” Catherine called from the kitchen. “I’ve opened bottle number two.”

Gerri took Peti’s coat and hung it up before her fingers could betray the tremor in them. When she turned back, her daughter was already toeing off her boots, glancing around the apartment with the kind of detached familiarity that made Gerri ache. She knew this space. But she didn’t belong to it.

“You can stay,” Gerri said, quieter now. “The guest room’s made up.”

“I might. Depends.”

“Depends on?”

Peti shrugged. “Just…things.”

Catherine shot her mother a look— don’t press —and Gerri nodded, leading them back into the kitchen.

Dinner came together surprisingly quickly.

The chicken was golden and crisp, the vegetables charred at the edges, the salad Catherine threw together was chaotic and over-dressed, but Gerri didn’t say anything. Peti didn’t offer to help, but she leaned against the counter, watching, amused, and that was something.

They sat around the table, wine glasses filled, plates full, and for a moment — just a moment — it looked like something approaching tradition.

The table was set with silver napkin rings and linen she hadn’t used in years. Peti raised an eyebrow when she saw it.

It was easy, for a moment. Unrehearsed.

But it didn’t last.

“You do know it’s just us, right?”

“I have nice things. I might as well use them.”

“Right. For the aesthetic.”

Gerri gave a thin smile. Catherine snorted into her wine.

They sat together, three women at a table full of food, the air filled with quiet chewing and the clink of cutlery. For a while, it was almost comfortable.

Peti told a story about her office holiday party—something about a karaoke machine and a failed duet with her boss. Catherine laughed too loudly. Gerri smiled, genuinely, surprised by how much she missed that sound.

The conversation circled. Travel plans. Old friends. A classmate of Peti’s who was now writing for The Atlantic .

“You remember Georgia?” Peti asked. “That girl who wore fishnets to debate club?”

“Didn’t she used to eat dry ramen out of the packet?” Catherine added.

“She’s a journalist now. Opinion section.”

Gerri blinked. “I think she emailed me once.”

“Of course she did,” Peti said, grinning. “You’re her villain origin story.”

“I’m everyone’s villain origin story.”

Peti opened her mouth like she wanted to argue—then closed it. Said nothing.

The moment passed.

They moved to the living room after dinner with a shared bottle of wine and a plate of cookies that had clearly been bought, not baked. Peti sat on the armchair and curled her legs under her. Catherine scrolled briefly on her phone before tucking it away. Gerri turned off the overheads and left only the lamps on, warm and low. It softened the edges of everything.

“I was thinking of going back to school,” Peti said suddenly, somewhere in the middle of a conversation about mutual friends they no longer kept up with.

Gerri looked up. “Really?”

“Not full-time. Just some coursework. Design, maybe. Digital arch.”

“That’s…good. I think that’s good.”

“I wasn’t asking.”

Gerri felt that one land, sharp and familiar. She nodded again, slower this time.

Catherine broke the silence. “You’d be great at it.”

Peti smiled faintly. “Yeah, well. We’ll see.”

There was a long pause. The wine was nearly gone. Outside, snow started again, feather-light and quiet against the windows.

“I kept the snow globe,” Peti said, out of nowhere. “The one from Aspen. With the fox inside.”

Gerri blinked. “I didn’t know.”

“You gave it to me when I was nine. You were late to the ballet recital and you brought it instead of flowers.”

“I remember.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

Gerri’s chest tightened. “I remember more than you think.”

Another long pause.

Then Catherine stood up. “I’m going to put on tea. Anyone?”

They both nodded. Gerri watched her daughter disappear into the kitchen, the quiet clatter of mugs and water filling the space between them.

“Why did you email him?” Peti asked.

Gerri’s head snapped toward her. “Catherine told you?”

“No. You just have that look.”

“What look?”

“The ‘I emailed Roman Roy’ look.”

Gerri stared at her. Peti shrugged.

“I don’t know what I expected,” Gerri said finally.

“Did he reply?”

“No.”

Peti looked down at her hands. “You know he was kind of awful to you, right?”

“I know.”

“But you still…”

“Yes.”

There was no shame in her voice, only resignation. And maybe, just maybe, the faintest trace of something else — affection, stubborn and persistent.

“I think I just wanted him to know I was still here.”

Peti didn’t answer. She just nodded, slow and understanding, like someone who knew exactly what it meant to want something even after it had shattered.

After a while, Gerri got up to check on dessert—store-bought tart, she wasn’t pretending otherwise—and found herself paused in the hallway outside her bedroom. The light was low. Her reflection in the mirror looked a little softer now. Not undone, just…human.

She returned to find Peti and Catherine scrolling through old photos on a tablet—ones she didn’t know they’d kept.

“There’s this one of us in the Hamptons,” Catherine said, turning it toward her. “You’re in that awful wide-brimmed hat.”

“You looked like a Bond villain,” Peti said.

“I wore SPF. Excuse me for aging better than both of you.”

They smiled. Gerri looked down at the photo—her, holding a wine glass, Baird in the background with his arms around the girls.

It hurt in a way that didn’t bleed anymore. Just a dull ache.

Later that night, they played music. Not carols — jazz, old vinyls Gerri hadn’t touched in years. Catherine danced in her socks across the kitchen floor. Peti took a photo of the three of them on the couch, all of them looking tired, but real. Unfiltered.

No one mentioned Christmas morning plans.

No one had to.

They just sat together.

And for the first time in a very long time, Gerri didn’t feel like she had to play the role of matriarch or strategist or survivor. Just… mother. Or something close.

When Gerri went to brush her teeth she heard laughter— real laughter—from the guest room. Catherine telling Peti some story about a colleague. Peti groaning. A shared history she had almost nothing to do with. And yet everything.

She stood in the hallway for a long time before going to bed.

That night, Gerri dreamed of Baird. Just a fragment. Him, at the foot of the bed, folding laundry like he used to. She reached for him and woke up with her hands still outstretched.

The apartment was quiet. Still dark. Snow still falling outside.

She didn’t check her inbox.

Not yet. 

Part III. 2 - Roy Family Christmas 

The drawer always stuck. It didn’t matter how gently or forcefully she pulled it — there was always that little hesitation, like the wood was considering whether it trusted her. Gerri tugged again, and with a reluctant groan, it came free. She wasn’t looking for memories. Just a charger.

But her fingers brushed paper. Something thick, textured, wrong.

She frowned and reached inside. Not a charger. Not anything useful.

Cards.

The top one was familiar: a glitter explosion of crayon and handwriting from her daughters when they were in grade school — “Merry Chwis-mas Mommy” in lopsided marker. Another from Karl, with a bad joke in Helvetica. One corporate and utterly hollow from an old Waystar board member.

And then —  her fingers pause. A smaller card. Thinner stock. Unlabeled envelope. The handwriting loose, erratic, like someone half-dared to make the gesture.

She slides it out carefully.

There it was. 

Roman.

She didn’t need to open it. She knew.

But she did.

Inside: “From your most exhausting annual HR violation.”
Beneath it, in smaller print: “Hope you get everything you didn’t ask for.” 

She hadn’t thought of this card in years. Or maybe she had. Quietly. Unconsciously. The way you thought of things you’ve buried but never burned.

It was obnoxious. Dismissive. Telling.

It was also — unmistakably — him.

And suddenly, she was back there.

Some Years Ago – The Roy Christmas

The penthouse was cathedral-quiet when she arrived.

It wasn’t that no one was home. It was that everyone was already performing. A stillness that stretched over too much space, interrupted only by the soft echo of heels on marble.

Gerri’s own.

Roy events were never casual, despite whatever PR pretenses were put out. Everything was curated — from the staff uniforms to the arrangement of the gift bags under the “tree.” It wasn’t even a tree, really — more like a sculpture of cold silver branches wound in LED light. No warmth. No scent of pine. Nothing messy. Nothing real.

The apartment stretched out in marble and silence. A live string quartet played in the corner like they were auditioning for a funeral. Everyone inside looked like they hated each other in various expensive shades of Armani.

A server — polished, underdressed in a way that was somehow still expensive — took her coat without meeting her eyes. Gerri murmured thanks and moved deeper into the cavernous cold of the Roy holiday display.

Gerri moved through the room with practiced ease. Neutral smile. Eyes sharp. She found herself with a flute of champagne before she could remember if she wanted one. It didn’t matter. You drank at Roy events. You smiled, nodded. You absorbed Logan’s mood like secondhand smoke.

She scanned the room

Connor was talking politics with someone who looked like she’d sell jewelry made of shark teeth. Willa hovered nearby. Kendall was pacing, clearly high. Shiv was nowhere to be seen. Logan was seated like a king, nodding at whatever people said without listening.

She didn’t belong here, not really. But she’d long since learned how to make herself indispensable. Necessary was the closest thing to safe you could be in Logan’s orbit.

And Roman - Roman was there. 

She saw Roman within minutes.

He was leaning against the fireplace, drink in hand, mouth twisted in something between amusement and contempt. He hadn’t shaved properly. His tie was crooked. His posture defiant. He looked like a boy trying too hard to seem like a man. He was already watching her before she noticed.

When he caught her eye, he raised his glass — not in a greeting. More like a dare. A challenge. Something else entirely.

Gerri took a sip of champagne. Then another. She didn’t nod. But she didn’t look away either.

Dinner was served in courses that no one touched. Gerri was seated between a woman from ATN legal and a hedge fund executive she’d once threatened with litigation. The conversation was polite and acid-tipped.

Logan made a speech halfway through the second course. Called Kendall “a fighter,” called Connor “a patriot,” called Shiv “still the smartest in the room if she ever showed up,” and then looked at Gerri.

“And Gerri,” he said, holding up his glass, “the real backbone. The steel rod up this company’s spine. And the one person smart enough not to get too close to any of my kids.”

People laughed.

Roman didn’t.

Gerri felt heat crawl up her chest, beneath her collar. She smiled anyway.

She always smiled.

Shiv arrived late. Glossy. Glacial. She kissed Logan’s cheek, ignored everyone else, and poured herself a triple whiskey. Gerri caught her eye once. Shiv gave a tight nod, then looked away.

It was the kind of party that left bruises under the skin. Nothing said out loud. But everything meant.

Connor gave her a book wrapped in gold paper. She hadn’t gotten anyone anything.

Roman didn’t say much. But he didn’t stop watching her either.

Around dessert — a flourless cake Gerri didn’t touch — Roman drifted closer. Said nothing. Just leaned near her chair until she finally turned.

“You look like you want to light yourself on fire,” he muttered.

“I’m not the only one.”

“Let’s escape.”

She stared at him. “Excuse me?”

“Balcony. Two minutes.”

And then he was gone.

The cold hit like clarity. Like Relief.

The balcony was empty, the string quartet still faint through the sliding glass door. She pressed her hands against the railing, looked down at the sharp lights of the city, glittering and sterile. Nothing like snow. No softness here.

Roman came out five minutes later, drink in hand.

“You waited.”

“I needed air.”

“You could’ve stayed inside. Heard Logan insult your uterus again.”

Gerri exhaled through her nose. “You’re drunk.”

“Not nearly enough.”

He leaned on the railing next to her. Not touching. Not looking. Just there.

“Bet you’re regretting that promotion now,” he said.

She glanced at him. “Which one?”

“Any of them.”

She didn’t answer. He handed her a glass of something clear and dangerous. She took it.

“Do you think this is what Christmas was always like for rich people?” he asked, tone lazy, eyes sharp.

“I wouldn’t know.”

He looked at her. “Sure you would. You’ve been rich longer than I’ve been an adult.”

Gerri’s lip twitched. “Wealth doesn’t make family less miserable, Roman. Sometimes it just makes it quieter.”

Roman’s mouth quirked. “That’s poetic. You write that in your cards?”

“I send emails now.”

“Of course you do.”

“Why do we do this?” he asked suddenly.

“What?”

“Play nice. Sit still. Laugh when he says we’re worthless.”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to.

He took a sip. “Do you think I’m a joke?”

The question came too fast. Too raw.

She blinked. “What?”

He glanced at her then — really looked. “Not to him. To you.”

“I think you’re many things, Roman.”

“But mostly ridiculous.”

“No.” She paused. “Not mostly.”

Silence stretched between them.

Then he pulled something from his coat pocket. A slim white envelope.

“I got you something.”

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Don’t make it weird,” he said.

“It’s already weird.”

“Okay, don’t make it weirder.”

She took it. “Thank you.”

“You’re not going to open it?”

“Not here.”

He nodded. Like he understood.

They didn’t say anything else for a while.

The party throbbed behind them. Inside, Logan was mid-rant about something she couldn’t hear and didn’t want to. Roman leaned against the railing, face tipped up to the winter sky. His hair was messy. His jaw sharp. There was something boyish about the set of his shoulders. Something ancient in his eyes.

“You okay?” she asked quietly.

He didn’t look at her. “Are you?”

“No.”

“Cool. Then it’s festive.”

She exhaled. Cold air. No breath.

“I hate this holiday,” he said after a beat. “I hate everyone here.”

“Thank you for including me.”

“You’re the exception.”

It was the closest he ever came to saying anything real.

They returned inside without speaking. He disappeared. She saw Shiv whisper something to Logan that made him frown. Kendall stormed off before coffee. The entire room vibrated with tension no one dared name.

Gerri didn’t say goodbye.

She slipped out into the cold, walked alone to her waiting car, slid inside, and only then — with the door closed and the driver silent — did she open the envelope.

Roman’s scrawl. “Hope you get everything you didn’t ask for.”

She smiled. Just once. Just for a moment.

Then folded it and placed it in her purse.
And went home.

December 25, Present Day

Gerri set the card down next to her laptop.

She didn’t smile this time.

The room was quiet. Outside, snow fell against the window like it remembered something she didn’t.

She just opened her inbox.
And saw nothing.

Still.

She didn’t expect one. But something in her sank anyway.

Part IV - Christmas morning 

The apartment wasn’t quiet. Not yet.

Gerri woke to the faint clink of mugs and soft voices in the kitchen — the low murmur of Catherine and Peti trying not to wake her, failing as gently as possible. The sun hadn’t fully risen yet, but the light already pressed at the edges of the blinds, casting her bedroom in a low blue tone.

She lay still for a moment, listening.

It had been years since both her daughters had slept under the same roof as her. Even in their younger years, Christmas mornings had often been chaotic — missing batteries, lopsided tree ornaments, one of them inevitably crying. Baird would have been up before all of them, coffee brewed, slippers on, humming something out of tune just to annoy the girls.

She missed that noise.

This — this restrained quiet between grown children and a mother they weren’t quite sure how to sit with anymore — was harder in some ways. More polite. Less forgiving.

Gerri slipped out of bed, pulled on a robe, and padded out toward the kitchen.

Catherine stood at the counter, pouring coffee into two mugs. Peti sat cross-legged at the kitchen table, scrolling through something on her phone. Both looked up when they saw her.

“You’re up,” Catherine said, surprised but not startled.

“I live here,” Gerri replied, dry.

Peti smiled. “We were trying to leave you out of it. Let you sleep.”

“I don’t sleep in. That’s a fantasy I’ll never afford.” She reached for the third mug in the cupboard, poured her own.

The three of them stood or sat in silence for a while, the way people do when something has been said already in another room, or years earlier, and no one wants to reopen it.

Eventually, Catherine set her mug down. “We should head out. I promised Charlotte I’d drop by early.”

Peti added, “And I’ve got lunch with Tobi’s family. Her mom makes these terrifyingly good latkes.”

Gerri nodded. “Of course. Go.”

But she didn’t move from the counter.

Catherine crossed the space first and hugged her. Not tight, but warm. Familiar.

“Thanks for the food. And the…you know. For trying.”

“I didn’t poison anything,” Gerri replied softly, lips brushing her daughter’s temple.

“That we know of,” Catherine muttered.

Peti followed, a little awkward. She hugged Gerri like she didn’t quite remember how — like she hadn’t done it in a while.

“I’ll call you before New Year’s,” she said, uncertain.

“Please don’t,” Gerri said dryly, then softened. “Text instead. I’ll be in meetings.”

Peti rolled her eyes. “Okay. Love you anyway.”

And then, they were gone.

The sound of the door closing echoed sharper than it should have in the stillness that followed.

Now the silence was hers alone.

She carried the coffee to her living room and stood by the window but didn’t look out. Snow fell softly. Still. It had been falling for days now. The skyline was dull, muffled beneath the white. The city never truly stopped, but it had slowed enough to let her hear herself think — and she wasn’t sure she liked what she heard.

She opened her laptop.

Inbox. Forty-two unread emails.

Matsson had, apparently, tweeted something inflammatory again. A screenshot of a meme mocking “legacy dinosaurs in pearl earrings.” It wasn’t subtle. Gerri was copied on several threads from PR and legal, already trying to clean it up.

She didn’t read them. She closed the tab.

Her eyes flicked to the Sent folder.
To the message.

Still nothing.

She had sent it the morning of December 4th. It was now Christmas. Twenty-one days. No reply.

She told herself this was expected. Roman Roy was a creature of silence. Or more accurately, of loud noise followed by utter withdrawal. She had known that. Had known what she was doing. What she wasn’t doing.

But the stillness of it stung.

Gerri closed the laptop.

She spent most of the morning tidying. Not because anything needed cleaning — she had always kept her space in order — but because there was a ritual comfort in it. Dishes washed that had never been used. Cushions fluffed. The small stack of coasters realigned. She wiped down the counters twice. Rearranged a vase that no longer held flowers.

Eventually, she wandered back to her office.

The drawer was still ajar.

She hadn’t touched it since.

Now, she sat down and gently pulled it fully open. The stack of cards still sat where she’d left them. Her daughters’ glitter-laced notes, Karl’s ridiculous printed one, the impersonal ATN holiday greeting.

And beneath them — Roman’s.

She didn’t lift it. Just looked.

A single card. A stupid line. A mess of ink that meant nothing.

And everything.

Gerri leaned back in her chair. For a long time, she just sat there, watching the snowfall filter through the window beyond her bookshelf. The day was bright in that pale, overexposed way December often was. Light without warmth.

Her hand moved almost without thought. The laptop opened again. She hesitated for a beat. Then clicked into her email.

New draft.

She stared at the blank window for a long time.

Then she began typing.

To: Roman Roy
Subject: (none)

I’m not sure why I’m doing this again.

This is not the kind of tradition I’d like to set.

But it’s Christmas Day, and for whatever it’s worth, you’ve crossed my mind. A few times, actually. And while I know I shouldn’t admit that — I’m doing it anyway.

There’s nothing new to say, not really. I meant what I wrote the first time. And the silence since then has been…noted. But not unexpected.

I’m not writing to ask for anything. Not a reply. Not closure. Not clarity. Just — maybe to remind you that you’re not invisible. Not to me.

Merry Christmas, Roman.

— Gerri

She stared at the message for a long time.

It was shorter. Cleaner. Colder, maybe. But not untrue.

There was nothing more she could say without making a fool of herself. And even this — even this — to her felt like a risk.

Gerri’s finger hovered over the Send button.

She didn’t press it.

Instead, she clicked Save Draft.

Then she closed the laptop again and stood. The window was brighter now, the snow slowing. Somewhere below, she heard the faint sound of a car door, a distant laugh, the rustle of someone else’s Christmas morning.

She turned away from the glass. Walked into the kitchen. Poured herself another cup of coffee.

And told herself — as she had every day for weeks — that she was fine.

That the silence was just silence.
Not a message.
Not a verdict.

Just a space between what was said and what couldn’t be.

The message sat unsent in her drafts, like a door she wasn’t ready to open — but couldn’t quite close, either.

Chapter Text

Part I - “The Same Old Message”

December 25.

He woke up too late. The kind of late that made everything feel wrong before he even sat up.
11:43 a.m., the digits harsh on the lock screen of his phone. No messages. Just a dark apartment, the blinds still drawn, and a dull ache pressing behind his left eye like a hangover, even though he hadn’t had a drink the night before. Not really.

Just one glass of something expensive and flat. Some dusty bourbon Shiv had given him last year, still sitting nearly full on his kitchen shelf like a joke. He hadn’t even liked it then. But it felt right to open something bad on Christmas.

He didn’t get up at first. Just lay there, staring at the crack between the curtains where a thin strip of light made the dust visible. Like snow, almost. Like the real kind, maybe, if he looked at it slanted.

Eventually he sat up, blinking against the light of his phone screen again.

And there it was.

Gerri Kellman
December 4, 5:14 a.m.
No subject.

He had never deleted it. Of course he hadn’t. But he hadn’t opened it again either—not since that first time, three weeks ago, when it had landed like a gut punch in the middle of an already unlivable morning. And he spent the whole day re-reading it like an addict. 

Now he tapped it with his thumb, just once. The message re-opened. Black text on white background.

Roman,
I’ve gone back and forth on whether to write. It’s not something I usually do—looking back like this. But I couldn’t ignore the instinct tonight.

You said things that hurt. I heard them, and I carried them. I won’t pretend otherwise. But I also know what grief does to people. I’ve seen it twist the best of us into something unrecognizable.

I’m not writing to reopen anything. I don’t need apologies or explanations. I’m not even sure what I expect from this.

I just wanted you to know that I’ve thought about you. More often than I’d like to admit.

And I guess…I just wanted you to know I’m still here.

Take care of yourself, though I imagine you are not.
— Gerri.

Roman stared at the last line for too long.

He wasn’t. Taking care of himself. He hadn’t been. She knew. Somehow, even now, she still knew.

He tossed the phone onto the mattress and rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. The sheets were a mess, twisted like he’d fought someone in his sleep. Maybe he had.

He sat still like that for a long time.

It was Christmas. The apartment was silent.

No plans. No one waiting on him. No one to disappoint except maybe himself.

He didn’t even know what time the world started spinning on days like this. Everything felt muffled. Ghosted over. Like the city had been hit with one of those weird, sterile snowfalls that looked clean but felt hollow.

Roman dragged himself out of bed.

He padded barefoot across the floor to the kitchen, opened the fridge. Nothing worth engaging with. He poured water into a glass, drank half of it, and left the rest sweating on the counter.

The email echoed in his head the entire time. The formality of it. The gentleness. The careful distance laced with something that still felt devastatingly personal.

Still here.

He wished she hadn’t written it. He wished she had. He wished he hadn’t read it again. He wished he could stop.

The flashback didn’t come with a warning. It never did.

Roy Christmas, 2007

It had been snowing that year too, but the kind that turned gray the second it touched the curb. Slush stuck to the sidewalks in front of the Roys’ Manhattan townhouse—one of the rotating showrooms Logan maintained between transatlantic flights and mergers. None of them ever felt like a home. This one was worse than usual. Too modern. Too much glass. The kind of place you could scream in and still hear the echo of your own loneliness.

Roman had arrived an hour late on purpose. There wasn’t a time you could show up that wouldn’t be wrong, so you might as well be wrong and dramatic.

The townhouse was silent except for the muted classical music coming from the wireless speakers—Vivaldi, maybe. Or something pretending to be festive. A hired quartet had been canceled last minute, he found out later, because Logan decided Christmas was “a fucking distraction.” The staff moved quietly, almost reverently, as if afraid to disrupt the absence of the patriarch himself.

He remembered the table set for six, even though only four of them were ever going to show up. And eventually only three did. Marcia was in Paris. His mother was off the grid. Kendall had sent a single line by text: “Not coming. Tell dad merry fucking everything.”

Connor arrived first, too cheerful, dressed in a green cashmere sweater with a reindeer pin on the collar. Roman remembered thinking he looked like a rich middle school principal.

Then Shiv, hair pin-straight, wearing something crimson and tight, tapping away on her Blackberry like she was orchestrating a coup. Roman took the seat that should’ve been Logan’s, just to see if anyone would flinch. No one did.

He hadn’t seen Gerri that day — or the day before, or after — but he remembered wishing she were there. That had been the year she sent him that email about the compliance audit and included a “Merry Christmas” in parentheses at the bottom. He had stared at it longer than he should have.

He hadn’t answered.

Back in the townhouse, Shiv had muttered something under her breath about “a fucking hostage dinner.” Connor had laughed too loud. Roman had picked up a fork and held it in his hand like he might stab the silence.

There was a duck, or maybe a goose. He never could tell. It looked too glossy, like it had been shellacked for a food magazine. The plates were porcelain, rimmed with gold. Silverware heavy enough to double as weapons. The candles on the table flickered in stiff precision, like even the wax had been trained to behave.

Nobody said grace. Nobody even said “Merry Christmas.”

The house was like a mausoleum, the kind with central heating and imported rugs. Roman picked at his food, the knife in his hand too sharp for how little he was cutting.

Shiv had said something snide about Connor’s “ambitions” with the farm, Connor had tried to quote Lewis Binford and failed.

Roman had leaned back, eyes fixed on the crystal chandelier above. He’d counted the lights. Twenty-four. Or twenty-five. It was hard to tell with how they refracted in the stemware.

He hadn’t spoken much. Just muttered the occasional “hm” or “cool” or “fuck me” in response to whatever dull conversation they were pretending to have.

And at some point—he remembered this clearly—he had excused himself, walked out onto the townhouse balcony with a glass of wine, and stared down at the street.

The snow was turning dirty. A woman in a red coat was yelling into her phone. A taxi honked four times in a row and no one moved. The cold seeped through his blazer, and he didn’t care.

He remembered not opening the gift bag the assistant handed him on behalf of his dad. He remembered walking out after thirty-five minutes and going home to jerk off, then cry in the shower without knowing which came first.

Roman came back to the present with the taste of dust in his mouth.

He sat down on the edge of his couch and stared at nothing.

Gerri hadn’t written again. Of course she hadn’t. He hadn’t answered. She had extended something — a fragment of forgiveness or memory or maybe just proof of life — and he had done nothing. Not even a thumbs up. Not even “yeah, you too.”

But the way she said it.
Still here.

It sounded like don’t forget me.

It sounded like you still matter.

Roman pulled his phone closer again. Opened the message. Just stared.

Then he opened Notes.

Typed:

You don’t know how much I wanted to answer you. How much I still do. I just don’t know how to start without sounding like a goddamn idiot or a liar or both.

Deleted it.

Typed again:

Still here too.

Deleted that.

Typed:

If I wrote something now, would it even mean anything? After three weeks of silence?

Deleted.

He set the phone down carefully like it might explode.

Leaning forward, elbows on knees, he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes.

Then whispered, “Fuck.”

He didn't cry. Not really. But something close to it happened. Something that lived behind his ribs and pulled everything downward.

He didn’t answer her.

Not that day.

Not yet.

Part II - “Drift”

December 26 

The day after Christmas felt like ash. Not the soft kind. The kind that stung. The kind that settled into the throat, dry and bitter, and wouldn’t go down no matter how many times you swallowed.

Roman woke up at 4:12 p.m. to a room still dark, shades drawn, silence unbroken. The floor was scattered with the clothes he hadn’t put away, the bourbon bottle still sitting in the same spot, half-watched, like it might blink first. He hadn’t moved much since Christmas. Just shifted from couch to bed to bathroom and back, as if he was playing musical chairs with his own ghost. His mouth tasted stale. His chest felt hollow in that stretched, weightless way that sometimes followed long stretches of not crying. Not sleeping. Not speaking.

His phone was at 6%.
No new messages.

He blinked at the ceiling, then rolled to the side and stared at the outline of his dresser in the gloom. It was too quiet. The kind of silence that didn’t soothe—it accused. And his apartment had gotten good at it.

He’d moved through the day like smoke, or fog—something without edges. Hadn’t checked the news. Hadn’t checked the fridge. Just sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall for what might’ve been hours.

When he finally reached for his phone, his thumb slid automatically to the Mail icon.

Inbox: 1. Unread.

Still her email.

Still unread, technically. Still glowing faintly like it might vanish if he blinked wrong.

He didn’t open it yet. Just looked at the timestamp again.
5:14 AM.
Of course it was. She always did things quietly. At the margins. The moment when no one else was watching.

And for a second, that thought gutted him.

He scrolled back, months back. Past old work messages, texts from Shiv, Connor’s “lol merry xmas!!” with an accidental double exclamation, an Uber receipt from a night he didn’t remember.

And then—
A text from Gerri.
From March.

Let’s keep this quiet. Not just for optics.

He didn’t know why that line caught in his throat.He hadn’t responded at the time. They were still pretending everything was fine. Still showing up to the same meetings, keeping the choreography tight. But even then, her phrasing had caught him.

Not just for optics.

Like it had meant something. Like he had, once.

His throat felt tight. He blinked hard.

There was no food in his stomach. No sound in the room. Just the buzz of a life stalled mid-motion.

He tried to nap again. Couldn’t.

He lay in the dark, jaw clenched, not thinking about her. Not thinking about her martini glass balanced on napkins at offsite dinners. Not thinking about how she used to tilt her head at him, slightly, like he was a puzzle she wasn’t sure was worth solving.

But it didn’t work.

She was everywhere.

And he had no idea what to do about it.

December 27

It was colder. Sharp. He went out.

Wandered the city like a ghost in a black hoodie. Passed through Midtown, the east side. Ended up near East 20th by accident.

And there it was—the Japanese place on East 20th. Glass walls. Dim lights. Warmth humming from inside.

He stopped on the sidewalk, just outside the window.

The memory came uninvited.

She had chosen the place for a restructuring dinner—something to do with European assets, he didn’t remember the details. What he remembered was how she walked in late, hair damp from the rain, coat folded perfectly over one arm, her bag looped at the elbow.

When the waiter arrived, he went to pour them house sake.

She had cut in, gently but firmly:

“No, not that one. The Junmai Daiginjo. Not too cold.”

Her voice was calm but edged and yet elegant. Just enough to make the waiter nod and rush off like he’d been corrected by royalty.

Roman had stared at her, impressed. Annoyed. A little turned on.

“Wow,” he’d muttered. “Ordering like a Bond villain.”

She’d smiled faintly.

“You want to impress shareholders, Roman, start with your palate.”

That was her. Always teaching, even when she didn’t mean to. Always slipping something useful between the sarcasm.

He remembered watching her sip from a tiny porcelain cup, then lean forward and say, with zero irony:

“You’re not as stupid as you pretend to be.”

It was one of the nicest things anyone had said to him.

Now, standing on the sidewalk, the restaurant glowing gold from within, he pressed his hands deep into the pockets of his coat and didn’t go in.

Instead, he walked back downtown. Past shuttered storefronts, the ghost of Christmas lights still flickering halfheartedly. People passed him, laughing, fighting, living. He didn’t look at their faces.

Back home, he opened Notes.

Typed:

You once said I’d be okay without you. You were wrong.

He stared at it.

Then he deleted it.

December 28 

He didn’t remember waking. Just being.

The windows stayed shut. The heating clicked on too loudly. He looked at his reflection in the microwave door and winced. Pale. Eyes red. Not sleeping well. Not really sleeping at all.

He tried to watch something. Anything.
Clicked through five episodes of a show. Didn’t absorb a single frame.

Later, he ordered food. Didn’t eat it.

The email was still there. Her message. Untouched in his inbox, blinking like a beacon.

He opened it again.

It wasn’t new anymore. He knew every line by now. Had memorized the shape of the silence between the sentences.

I’m not writing to reopen anything. I don’t need apologies or explanations

He wished it was and he thought about reopenings anyway. For hours.

He drafted replies. All night.

Typed:

That night in Italy, when I asked for help—I wasn’t trying to trap you. I just didn’t know how else to ask anyone for anything.

Deleted it.

Typed:

You were right to walk away. I wouldn’t have stayed either.

Deleted.

And then, finally, in a burst of recklessness, like pressing on a bruise to prove it still hurt:

I loved you. Maybe I still do. Fuck.

The words hung there, blinking.

It hit him then—not just the truth of it, but the finality.

He had loved her.

That ridiculous, brilliant, impossible woman.
And he’d ruined it. Torn it apart like everything else he touched. Left her standing on the side of the road with nothing but his mess in her hands.

His chest ached. Not metaphorically. Not in a poetic, heartache-y way. It physically hurt.

He closed his eyes.

Then, almost reverently, he hit backspace.

Letter by letter.

Until there was nothing.

Then shut the laptop.

Left the room.

Didn’t come back that night.

December 29 

He went out again.

Wandered toward a hotel downtown — one where Waystar used to house out-of-town execs. The hotel lobby was warm. Plush. Expensive. Still dressed in half-hearted garlands and dim white lights that flickered like they were running out of batteries. He remembered being there once with Gerri, years ago, during a shareholder weekend. They’d met at the bar, exchanged six sentences, and then she’d left early. Still, he remembered how she looked in that setting. Slightly out of place. Slightly more powerful because of it.

Roman slid onto a barstool at the far end, at the same bar, and ordered before he could talk himself out of it.

“A martini. Extra dry. Twist.”

The bartender nodded. Didn’t blink.

He watched the man stir it, pour it into the chilled glass, drop the lemon peel like a question mark.

When it slid across the bar to him, he didn’t touch it right away.

He just looked at it.

Clear, perfect, cold.

Her drink.

She always called it that, like it was a punchline and a signature in one.

“It’s my drink,” she’d say, half-smiling. “Classic. Clean. Just enough bite.”

She’d always made it sound like a warning. Or a challenge.

He picked up the glass now and sipped.

And for a moment—just a sliver of one—he could see her across from him. Hair in her french twist. Eyes sharp. Voice low and wry.

“Try not to embarrass yourself, Roman.”

He laughed, softly. Bitterly.

And set the glass back down.

Untouched again.

Then he pulled out his phone. Opened Voice Memos.

Whispered:

“Hey. I miss you. You probably hate me. I kind of hate myself too.”

He didn’t finish. Deleted it before it could save.

December 30

Roman hadn’t moved much all day.

The blanket over him was bunched and half-slid to the floor, forgotten. The couch had molded itself to his shape like it had been built for this very purpose—lying still, bones stiffening in place, watching hours pass like they were just more things he’d failed to notice.

Outside, the city vibrated with the particular hum of year-end desperation. People preparing. Buying last-minute champagne. Fighting over overpriced dinner reservations. Choosing outfits. Booking drivers. Laughing in that practiced New York way: loudly, without meaning.

Roman heard all of it. None of it touched him.

He hadn’t spoken to anyone all day. He hadn’t meant to break his silence either. But then his phone buzzed—soft, insistent—and for some reason, he glanced at it this time.

Shiv.

He let it ring once. Twice.

Then he picked up.

“…Yeah.” he answered, voice scratchy, sleep-lined.

There was a moment of quiet. Just static. Then her voice, calm and unusually careful:
“Hey.”

Roman pulled the blanket higher across his chest. “Hey.”

“You sound like a raccoon that fell down an elevator shaft.”

“Thanks. Been working on it.”

A breath from her, not quite a laugh. “You eaten anything today?”

He rubbed his eyes. “Define ‘eaten.’”

“You know what I mean.”

“No,” he said, curling in a little more beneath the blanket. “But I opened the fridge earlier. Made eye contact with a bottle of mustard.”

“Great,” she deadpanned. “You and the mustard are making real progress.”

He didn’t reply. The quiet between them stretched out.

Shiv filled it. “I’m not here to scold you.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“Roman…” Her voice gentled again, like she was bracing for something. “I’m not gonna push. But you’ve been pretty…ghost-y lately.”

“Yeah, well. I’m trying this new thing called avoiding the people who know I’m falling apart.”

“That’s a classic.”

He cracked a dry smile. “It’s going really well.”

The line was quiet for a moment, after a beat Shiv said. “Just wanted to hear your voice.”

That made him go still. Just for a second.

“I’m five months pregnant,” she added, softly. “It’s either check in on you or spiral about raising a kid in a world where Elon Musk has an AI sex podcast.”

That pulled a choked snort from him. “Jesus Christ.”

“I know.”

More silence. This time, not the comfortable kind.

“You doing okay?” she asked, even though she knew.

“Define okay.”

“Still having trouble getting out of bed?”

Roman didn’t answer.

“That email,” she continued, carefully, “from Gerri. You never replied?”

His jaw clenched.

“No,” he said eventually. “What the fuck would I even say? ‘Hey, sorry I told you you were bad at your job and then obliterated your entire life and ghosted you for months, but I’m super sad about it’?”

“Maybe,” Shiv said. “Or maybe just…that you saw the message. That it mattered.”

He didn’t respond.

“Silence becomes cruelty after a while,” she added. “Even if it’s fear doing it.”

His breath caught. That one cut. That one landed.

He closed his eyes. “What if I don’t have the words?”

“Try anyway.”

“I did. I do. I try and I stare at the fucking screen and all I can hear is her voice the day I said it. That line— You’re not good at your job —and the way her face changed when I said it. And then nothing I write feels like it matters.”

Shiv was quiet for a beat. Then she said, simply:
“You loved her.”

His whole body went still.

“I know you did,” she continued. “You don’t have to admit it to me. But I saw it. We all did. Even she did, I think.”

His eyes burned suddenly. “Doesn’t matter now.”

“It does,” Shiv said. “Just not in the way you want it to.”

He let out a shaky exhale. “It’s like—I miss her and I fucked it and I don’t know what she wants from me. Or if I even have the right to want anything back.”

There was nothing for a few seconds. Then Shiv, her voice gentler now:

“You know what I want for you?”

“What?”

“Just one moment where you stop punishing yourself for everything.”

“I deserve it.”

“Maybe. But you don’t have to live there.”

His voice cracked. “It’s easier.”

“I know. But it’s also lonelier.”

They sat in that for a long time.

“I miss you,” he said, surprising even himself.

“I miss you too,” she replied.

He didn’t say anything else.

“You don’t have to be alone forever,” she added. “You really don’t.”

“Feels like I do.”

“You don’t.”

Another long pause.

“I should go,” Shiv said. “It’s late.”

Roman nodded, even though she couldn’t see. “Yeah.”

“I’ll call again soon, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Love you, Rome.”

He didn’t say it back. But he didn’t hang up either. Not for a long time.

When the line finally clicked dead, the apartment felt darker. Stiller. And somehow heavier.

He didn’t get up.

Didn’t go for a drink. Didn’t turn the lights on.

Just lay there on the couch, a blanket thrown haphazardly over him. The city beyond the glass was louder now. People preparing for the New Year. Making plans. Spending money. Living.

He watched them without really seeing.

At 11:27 p.m., he opened the email one more time.

Read every word.
Every line.
Every space between them.

His throat tightened when he got to:

I’m still here.

He read it again.
Then again.

Like it might change.
Like maybe it already had.

The screen dimmed. He tapped it back awake.

Still there.
The same message. No reply needed. No reply sent.

Roman leaned back against the cushions, closed his eyes, and whispered into the darkness:

“Yeah. I know.”

He didn’t cry.
He didn’t move.

But something beneath his chest curled tighter.

And stayed that way.

Part III - December 31st - “Waiting"

The last day of the year started like all the others had, which was to say: it barely started at all.

Roman woke late, or maybe not late — it was hard to tell anymore when you never really slept. The sun was already low on the horizon, dragging streaks of gold and blue across the windows of his apartment. Light bounced against the furniture he hadn’t touched in weeks. His back ached from the couch, and his mouth tasted like whatever he’d eaten last, hours or maybe a full day ago.

He didn’t check the time. He didn’t need to. It wasn’t like he had anywhere to be.

He sat upright slowly, blanket twisted around one ankle. The same blanket he’d had wrapped around him since Christmas. The one he hadn’t washed. It smelled faintly like gin and silence. A nice scent, really. Could bottle it.

His phone was still on the floor next to the couch, where it had landed the night before. No notifications, except the usual barrage from people he hadn’t seen in months. “Happy almost!” “Plans tonight?” “You better not be in a bunker somewhere.” One of them — from Connor — included an American flag gif and the words “Let’s drink to democracy, brother!” Roman stared at it for a long time. Didn’t reply.

Then there was Shiv’s photo. From that morning.

Just a blurry mirror selfie of her bump with the caption:
“Happy almost. Don’t be a dick tonight.”

He hadn’t replied to that either. But he’d stared at it for a while — long enough that the phone’s screen went dark again and reflected his own face back at him.

He dragged himself into the kitchen and opened the fridge, closed it again. Nothing looked edible. There was a sandwich from the 29th still in its box. He left it there.

Instead, he poured a glass of water, drank two sips, and dumped the rest. It didn’t taste right. Or maybe he didn’t.

The city outside was already ramping up. Fireworks, car horns, music blasting from high-rises. People living their lives with the obnoxious, collective certainty that tomorrow was something to look forward to. That midnight changed anything. That turning a calendar page would erase all the things that had rotted the year from the inside.

Roman walked to the window and stood there for a long time. Just watching. He pressed his forehead to the cold glass and let his breath fog the pane.

He wondered how many of them were celebrating. How many were kissing at midnight. How many were about to make promises they’d break by February.

And then he thought of her. Because of course he did.

He hadn’t reread her email in a few days.

Had tried not to.

But this morning, when his eyes opened to the gray light and the faint throb behind them, he had. Of course he had.

December 4, 5:14 AM
He’d read the timestamp like it meant something. Like it was a code. 5:14. A time when no one sane was awake. A time when only people like them wrote emails they didn’t mean to send, said things they didn’t know how to unsay.

Her message hadn’t changed.

Roman,
I’ve gone back and forth on whether to write. It’s not something I usually do—looking back like this. But I couldn’t ignore the instinct tonight.
You said things that hurt. I heard them, and I carried them. I won’t pretend otherwise. But I also know what grief does to people. I’ve seen it twist the best of us into something unrecognizable.
I’m not writing to reopen anything. I don’t need apologies or explanations. I’m not even sure what I expect from this.
I just wanted you to know that I’ve thought about you. More often than I’d like to admit. And I guess… I just wanted you to know I’m still here.
Take care of yourself, though I imagine you are not.
— Gerri

He’d read it a hundred times now. And every time, he reached that same line — “I’m still here.” — and felt something pull in his chest like a muscle he forgot how to stretch.

Still here.

What the fuck did that mean?

It had been nearly a month now. He hadn’t replied. Couldn’t. Didn’t know how. He’d written replies. Plural. One that said “Thanks.” One that said “I miss you.” One that just said “Yeah.” But none of them were right. None of them were enough.

He’d let the email sit in his inbox like a wound he couldn’t stop poking. Like a cigarette burn on skin — sharp at first, then dull, then just there, part of you.

He turned away from the window and went back into the kitchen.

The bottles were still there, tucked in the back of the cabinet like they were waiting to be remembered. Nolet’s gin. Chambéry vermouth. He didn’t even know why he still had those — he didn’t drink martinis. Not really.

She did.

Her drink.

He could still hear her saying it — dry, flat, amused. Like she knew how ridiculous it was to have a “signature cocktail” and knew she was too old to be precious about it, and still claimed it anyway.

He made one, just to see if he could.

He even chilled the glass like she did. Twisted the lemon peel like she did. Stirred, not shaken, because of course she would hate anything so dramatic.

He took one sip and winced.

Still not his drink.

But for tonight — maybe it was.

He carried it back to the couch and sat down slowly, the glass cold in his hand.

The first time he’d seen her drink one was years ago — one of those meaningless Waystar winter galas, full of too much money and not enough oxygen. Everyone fake-smiling through shrimp cocktails, and Gerri had been standing by the balcony doors, drink in hand, swaying slightly on her heels in a way that looked deliberate.

She’d caught him looking and raised an eyebrow.

“What?” she’d asked.

“Nothing. Just — that’s a real grown-up drink.”

She smirked. “I am a real grown-up.”

“You’re also drinking jet fuel. Which is bold.”

She’d laughed once, dryly. “It’s not about liking it. It’s about keeping people at a distance.”

He hadn’t understood that then. Not really.

Now he did.

He sipped again and let the bitterness settle in his mouth. Let the sting travel all the way down.

The city was loud now. Fireworks starting early. The hiss and crack of them echoing between buildings.

Roman leaned his head back against the couch.

He reached for his phone.

Opened the email again.

I’m still here.

It wasn’t a love letter. It wasn’t even forgiveness. But it was something. Something she hadn’t owed him. Something she had given him anyway.

He opened a new draft. Let his fingers hover.

Then typed:

“You didn’t have to write that.”

He stared at it.

Deleted it.

Typed:

“I know you didn’t want anything from me. But it mattered.”

Deleted that, too.

Typed:

“I loved you. Still might.”

Backspace. Backspace. Backspace.

None of it sounded right. Or maybe all of it sounded too right. Too much.

He closed the app. Threw the phone across the couch. It landed in a cushion with a soft thud.

He pressed his fingertips to his eyes.

He didn’t move much.

Just lay on the couch, the martini untouched now, blanket bunched up behind his knees. The city beyond the glass roared with celebration — strangers counting down to a new year like it would save them.

Roman watched them without really seeing.

At 11:57 p.m., he reached for his phone again.

Opened the email one more time.

Read every word. Every line. Every space between them.

His throat tightened when he got to that line again.

I’m still here.

He read it again.

Then again.

Like it might change.

Like maybe it already had.

The screen dimmed. He tapped it back awake.

Still there.

The same message. No reply needed. No reply sent.

Roman leaned back against the cushions, closed his eyes, and whispered into the dark:

“Yeah. I know.”

He didn’t cry. He didn’t move.

But something beneath his ribs curled tighter.

And stayed that way.

Meanwhile the countdown was a distant noise. Some building nearby had a rooftop party, and the whole block seemed to vibrate with the sound of people celebrating — laughter, shouting, music vibrating against the windows.

Roman sat in the half-dark with the TV off, lights dimmed, glass in hand, but untouched.

He didn’t check the time again. He just waited.

The kind of waiting that wasn’t hoping for anything. Just…letting the seconds pass.

When the countdown started — far off, tinny voices shouting “Ten! Nine! Eight!” — he stood.

Not fast. Not dramatic. Just enough to make the world tilt slightly under his feet.

He walked toward the window, his socks silent against the hardwood floor. The city was glittering beneath the snowmelt and flashing lights — thousands of people believing, just for a second, that something was changing.

Roman pressed his forehead against the glass.

He whispered it — the words catching somewhere in his throat.

“Happy New Year, Gerr-Bear.”

He smiled. Or maybe it was more of a wince.

Then, after a beat, he went back to the couch.

The fireworks burst like gunshots across the skyline, but he didn’t flinch.

Instead, he picked up his phone again and opened a blank note.

Typed, slowly:

You didn’t make me worse. I just didn’t know how to be better with you watching me.
You were right not to save me. But fuck, I wish you had.

He stared at it.

Didn’t send it.

Just tapped “Save” and let it sit there, next to a dozen other drafts he’d never show anyone.

Midnight passed.

Fireworks still cracked in the distance, but the world was already starting to pull away from it. The echo of celebration faded into the background, replaced by the dullness that came once the novelty wore off and the hangovers crept in.

Roman stayed where he was, sitting in the hollowed center of his couch like a man who’d forgotten how to leave a room.

And then — slowly, without warning — his eyes stung.

It wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t even a sob, at first.

It was a tightening in his chest that bloomed upward, pressure behind his eyes, a lump forming in his throat like something had been stuck there all along.

He blinked fast, once. Twice. Then gave up trying.

Tears came, silent and steady, slipping down his cheeks in slow lines. No choking sounds. No dramatic gasps. Just a slow unraveling, like fabric fraying in one place until the whole seam gave out.

He let his head fall back against the couch cushions and stared at the ceiling through the blur. His mouth stayed shut, jaw clenched so tightly it ached. He didn’t even breathe heavily — just shallow, careful inhales like anything deeper would make the whole thing worse.

It wasn’t loud.

But it hurt.

There was something especially humiliating about crying like this — not in public, not in some catastrophic burst of feeling, but alone. In the dark. On a night when everyone else was kissing and drinking and promising to be better versions of themselves.

He wasn’t better.

He wasn’t even different.

He was still Roman Roy, sitting in an apartment that felt too big now, clinging to a message from a woman he’d driven away and never apologized to.

He let the tears come.

Let them dry on his face.

He didn’t wipe them. Didn’t move. It was like his body knew that if he shifted even an inch, he’d collapse under the weight of it.

So he stayed. Curled in on himself, the blanket pulled high, the martini glass abandoned somewhere on the coffee table. Cold light flickered from the skyline through the windows, painting him in fragments.

Eventually, the crying stopped. Or rather, it slowed — dried into something smaller. More manageable. Not gone. Just buried again.

He swallowed. Blinked at the ceiling.

And laid back.

Blanket to his chin. Phone silent. Inbox still unchanged.

Just Roman. Just this.

And the new year, already too heavy in his chest.

Flashback — Italy, mid-May

It was hot that day.

Even in the villa’s marble-tiled corridor, with its absurd old-world ceiling fans and imported Swedish air purifiers, the air felt like it stuck to his skin. Roman had been pacing near the corner room — her room — for fifteen minutes before she finally came out.

He’d heard her voice earlier, down the hallway. Cool. Controlled. Talking to Shiv or maybe Karolina — he couldn’t tell anymore who was still on speaking terms with whom. All he knew was that he had waited.

He wasn’t sure why he had. Not really.

He had nothing new to say. Nothing rehearsed. No strategy.

He just wanted her to see him.

Gerri stepped out in heels — those sharp, taupe slingbacks that made her legs look longer than they were, and her already-perfect posture seem impossible. Her hair was up. She was wearing gray, or maybe taupe — some neutral that made her look untouchable.

And she saw him. Of course she did. He was standing right there.

But she didn’t stop.

She walked past him like he wasn’t even there.

No flinch. No hesitation. Just… silence.

Roman’s breath caught in his throat.

He hadn’t known silence could feel like a door slamming shut.

He turned, just slightly, to watch her back retreat down the hallway. It felt like something dropped out from inside him — like the elevator cables snapped mid-ride. Like someone had pulled the brake cord on the last shred of dignity he had left.

He didn’t call after her. Not because he didn’t want to — but because he didn’t know what sound would come out if he tried.

So he stood there.

Just stood there.

And when he finally did move, he walked to the wall, leaned against the cool stone like it might keep him from falling apart entirely, and muttered under his breath:

“Please, Gerri.”

But there was no one left to hear it.

Back in the present, Roman sat on the edge of the bed, hands gripping the sheets.

The memory had never left. It just waited.

There was something about the way she’d passed him — how quiet it had been, how intentional — that came back to him most often. Not the look in her eyes (because there hadn’t been one), not her voice (because she hadn’t spoken), but the absence. The refusal to give him anything.

And fuck, he’d deserved it.

He deserved all of it.

But it still crushed him.

Not in a violent way. Not a tidal wave.

No — it crushed him like time. Like erosion. Slowly. Ceaselessly.

Like the weight of what he could’ve said, should’ve said , compressing his chest by millimeters until he couldn’t breathe right anymore.

It was late when the fireworks stopped, maybe 2 a.m, maybe later. He hadn’t checked.The hours bled together now anyway — the before-midnight and the after-midnight, the before-her-email and the after.

The voices from the street had gone quiet though. New York — the parts of it that mattered — had fallen asleep or passed out or moved on. 

Roman hadn’t.

He sat on the floor of his living room, back against the couch, knees drawn up, elbows resting atop them. Blanket hanging off one shoulder. His spine ached. His stomach cramped slightly — he hadn’t eaten since breakfast, maybe the day before.The remains of the martini sat a few feet away, forgotten. He hadn’t touched it since before midnight.

His phone was in his lap.

Not in his hand. Not open.

Just there.

He didn’t know what he was waiting for. A message from her? That would be too much. Too soon. Too unlikely.

Maybe he was waiting for the guilt to lessen.

It didn’t.

He hadn’t reread her email again. He didn’t need to. He knew every word by now. They’d imprinted themselves somewhere behind his ribs.
“I’m still here.”

It was stupid how much that line had taken him apart. Not because it offered hope — it didn’t, not really — but because it reminded him of what he’d done. How deeply he’d fucked it all.

She had still been there.

And he hadn’t gone to her.

He thought about what it meant to still be somewhere.

She hadn’t said for you.

She hadn’t said come find me or I forgive you.

She just said still here .

And maybe that was the most honest thing either of them had ever given the other.

It hurt like hell…

He stood, finally, not with any purpose, just to get the ache out of his knees. He wandered to the kitchen in the half-light, opened the fridge, then closed it again without reaching for anything.

He wasn’t hungry. He was never hungry anymore. The taste of food felt irrelevant — everything felt like cardboard when your chest was full of rot.

He poured water. Didn’t drink it.

Stared out the window again, but this time without pretending he was watching anything.

He was just... existing.

That’s what this was now: not living, just lingering.

He could still see her at the funeral. Her hair neat. Her blouse pressed. Her expression carved out of stone. She’d looked at him once, he thought. Maybe. But she hadn’t approached. Neither had he.

Because he was a coward.

Because he’d been taught that love was power, and power meant never kneeling, never bending, never begging — even when you should.

Especially when you should.

Eventually, he returned to the couch. Lay down flat this time, let the blanket drape over him like a shroud. The leather stuck to the back of his neck — cold and clammy.

He tapped his phone awake.

Opened a new message.

Just stared at the screen.

The cursor blinked like a dare.

After a while, he typed one sentence:

“Happy New Year, Gerri”

Then added: 

“I loved you.”

He stared at it.

and added:

“I think I still do.”

He sat with that for a long time.

The text just hovered there.

Unsent.

He thought about deleting it. He thought about sending it. He thought about throwing the phone across the room.

What the fuck was he doing? She didn’t need this. Didn’t ask for this. He couldn’t even give it to her the way it should be given — not clean, not honest, not with a future attached.

Just fragments. Shards of something too late.

He hit “Save Draft.”

Didn’t trust himself to delete it. Didn’t trust himself to send it, either.

It just... existed.

Like him.

And then turned off the screen.

He laid back down on the couch, the city lights casting cold stripes across the ceiling.

He reached blindly for the throw pillow and shoved it under his head. Pulled the blanket up to his chin, tighter this time.

It was cold. The kind of cold that came after 3 a.m., when the heating dipped and your body stopped fighting.

He whispered something then — not loud, not coherent.

Maybe her name. Maybe nothing.

And just before his eyes drifted closed, his chest still aching, his stomach still tight, his mind still spinning uselessly...but still not quite sleep, not quite wakefulness 

The line that had lived in him since the email came. The one he didn’t know how to reply to.

The one that echoed louder the longer it went unanswered.

He said it again.

“I know.”

Softer this time.

Quieter.

It wasn’t a fix. It wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t a promise.

It wasn’t enough.

But it was what he had.

Somewhere across the city, the sky was already starting to lighten — not with hope, but with inevitability.

Roman Roy fell asleep on his couch, jaw tight, limbs curled in like a child who’d never learned how to be held.

The new year had arrived.

And with it, the silence stayed.

But the silence, for once, didn’t feel empty.

It felt like waiting.

Like maybe — maybe — something was still possible.

Not today. Not tomorrow.

But someday. 

Chapter Text

Part I — “The Draft (again)”

(December 26–27)

Gerri didn’t check her inbox the next morning.

Not the first thing, anyway. She made coffee. She straightened her hair. She watched a segment on PGN about fiscal policy in the Midwest that she couldn’t recall a single word of ten minutes later. And then, as she hovered near her laptop — as her fingers hovered near the trackpad — she caved. She checked.

Still no reply.

Of course not.

She closed the tab too fast, like she could undo the moment if she moved quickly enough. She hadn’t expected anything — not really — and yet, the absence of a reply still left a particular kind of ache. Not sharp, not bitter. Just…dull. Familiar now after more than 3 weeks. Like a bruise she kept pressing on.

She told herself that was the last time. That she was done hoping for a response that wasn’t coming.

By the afternoon of the 26th, she checked again.

Nothing. Of course. 

By the morning of the 27th, she didn't even bother with the pretense. She sat at the table with her coffee and opened her inbox like she was checking the weather. Calm, routine. Controlled.

Still nothing.

She closed the laptop. Slowly this time.

It shouldn’t hurt. She told herself it didn’t. It was just a blank screen, after all. A quiet thread gone un-pulled. She told herself this was what she expected. He was never good at answering things. Especially not when they mattered.

That night, Karolina called. It was still snowing outside and Gerri looked out of the window as she answered. 

“Hi,” Gerri said, her voice low, already knowing the tone on the other end before Karolina even spoke.

“I’m not calling for a therapy session, I swear,” Karolina began lightly. “Just—checking in. Thought maybe we could grab lunch this week. Somewhere they don’t serve things in little tasting spoons.”

Gerri smiled faintly. “Somewhere with real food? Groundbreaking.”

“That’s the spirit,” Karolina replied, laughing softly. “You free tomorrow?”

They met at a small Italian place near Bryant Park Gerri remembered from some long-ago client lunch — small tables, heavy chairs, red booths with seams worn soft from years of elbows and quiet deals. The kind of restaurant that was just upscale enough to avoid tourists but comfortable enough that no one bothered with full sentences. And had a red sauce that left something permanent on your blouse if you weren’t careful.

She arrived three minutes early, ordered a sparkling water she didn’t touch, and took the corner seat in the booth, her back to the wall. A strategic angle. She wasn’t being watched, but it helped her feel like she wasn’t visible.

Karolina arrived right on time, sliding in across from her with a gust of cold air and a leather coat that looked expensive even for her. She shook out her scarf and grinned as she set it down.

“You look less like shit than I expected.” Karolina said, sliding into the booth.

Gerri raised an eyebrow. “And you're as charming as ever.”

“I try, It’s part of my Gen Z rebrand. Brutal honesty with a wellness filter.”  Karolina set down her coat, shook out her hair and sat down. 

Gerri gave her a look. “You’re not Gen Z.”

“Don’t ruin the illusion.”

They paused while the server brought breadsticks and menus. Karolina ordered quickly — gnocchi with brown butter — then raised an eyebrow at Gerri.

“Go on. Say it.”

“Say what?”

“That I dragged you out here like some meddling younger friend who saw you spiraling and thought, maybe carbs would help. ”

“I assumed that was the subtext.”

Karolina exhaled a small laugh. “Maybe. But also—it's lunch. You used to like lunch.”

“I still like lunch. I just don’t like people.”

“Lucky for you, I barely count.”

They both fell quiet for a moment as the server dropped off another glass of water for Karolina. Gerri looked down at the menu again even though she already knew what she’d get. Penne arrabbiata. She liked its directness. It didn’t pretend to be something it wasn’t.

When the server left, Karolina stirred her water with the straw and looked at Gerri a little too long. “You’re still thinking about him, huh?” 

Gerri didn’t answer right away. She folded her napkin with too much care, eyes on the creases. Then finally, she said, “Don’t start.”

But she didn’t deny it.

“I won’t. I’m just—” Karolina started, looking at Gerri with something soft in her eyes that wasn’t pity but something that came awfully close to it. 

“I know.” Gerri interrupted, hoping to be saved from the questioning for once. 

Another beat passed. This one more brittle.

Karolina leaned back then. “I’m not trying to therapize you, Ger. I just…I notice things. You’ve been different. Quiet in a different way.”

“I’m always quiet.”

“Not like this.” Karolina tore a piece of breadstick. “It’s like…you’re holding your breath. Waiting for something.”

Gerri folded her napkin more carefully than she needed to. “Maybe I’m just tired.” she responded. 

Karolina nodded. “That, I believe.”

The food arrived. Gerri stabbed her penne with more aggression than strictly necessary.

“You know,” Karolina said eventually, “when I got out of that PR nightmare with Lukas last month, I half expected you to rip his throat out in the next board meeting. You didn’t. You just…let it go.”

“I’m learning detachment.”

“Bullshit,” Karolina said gently.

They ate in silence for a minute.

Then Karolina added, “You sent him something, didn’t you?”

Gerri didn’t answer. She didn’t need to, it was probably written all over her face.

“I’m not judging,” Karolina said. “God knows I’ve drunk-emailed worse people. But I figured, knowing you, it wasn’t impulsive.”

“It wasn’t impulsive,” Gerri said quietly.

“No reply?”

Gerri didn’t respond. She took another bite of her pasta and kept chewing like that could somehow ward off the question.

“That’s not a no,” Karolina murmured. “That’s a silence.”

Gerri exhaled slowly. “There’s nothing to reply to. Not really.”

Karolina looked at her with something that wasn’t pity — Gerri would’ve hated pity — but had a touch of grief to it. “You cared about him.”

Gerri’s tone shifted — not defensive, but sharper. “You don’t know everything.”

“I know enough. I was around.” Karolina countered.

They were quiet again. The snow outside has started again, thick flakes falling down, it made everything seem almost dream-like.

Then Gerri said, almost to herself, “It’s not the caring that bothers me. It’s how long it takes to stop.”

Karolina leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Do you want to stop?”

Gerri looked up. Her eyes didn’t waver, but they were tired. “What difference does it make?”

Karolina didn’t push further. Just offered her a piece of bread from the basket. Gerri took it without comment.

“You’re not alone, you know,” Karolina said finally. “Even if it feels like it.”

Gerri smiled then — dry, crooked. “That’s the thing about feelings. They’re rarely rational.”

But even as the conversation flowed, Gerri felt the itch. The hum. That small, constant flicker in the back of her brain. The email. The inbox.

She hadn’t opened it in twenty-four hours. That was supposed to feel like a win. It didn’t.

As the server came by with the check. Gerri reached for it automatically, but Karolina beat her to it.

“My treat,” she said. “You can pay next time.”

Gerri arched an eyebrow. “Optimistic.”

Karolina stood, slipping on her coat. “You’ll call me. Or I’ll call you. That’s how this works.”

Outside, the city was colder, and snow was still falling. Gerri stood on the curb for a moment, the breeze slipping under her coat sleeves.

Karolina leaned in as they waited for their respective cars. “He’s not going to write back. You know that, right?”

Gerri nodded once. “I do.”

Karolina’s voice softened then. “But maybe that’s not what it’s about anymore.”

Gerri didn’t answer.

Her Uber pulled up, and she got in.

As the car slid into traffic, she thought about that — about what it was about. What she’d been waiting for.

And whether or not she’d already said everything that needed saying.

Later that evening, back in her apartment, she opened her laptop.

The draft was still there. Clean. Minimal. Controlled. Almost cold, if she was being honest. But not untrue.

She read it again.

I’m not sure why I’m doing this again.
This is not the kind of tradition I’d like to set.
But it’s Christmas Day, and for whatever it’s worth, you’ve crossed my mind. A few times, actually. And while I know I shouldn’t admit that — I’m doing it anyway.
There’s nothing new to say, not really. I meant what I wrote the first time. And the silence since then has been…noted. But not unexpected.
I’m not writing to ask for anything. Not a reply. Not closure. Not clarity. Just — maybe to remind you that you’re not invisible. Not to me.
Merry Christmas, Roman.

She closed it again.

Cringed.

What had she expected from that? Some great revelation? A moment of grace? She’d written it because it was the only thing she could think to do. But maybe it had been a mistake. Maybe it had said too much. She was almost glad she didn’t send this one then but then thought that maybe, just maybe it said exactly what needed saying — and that was the worst part.

Roman hadn’t replied to her email that she sent. She told herself that was fine. That it wasn’t about a reply. That she was better than this kind of waiting. That this draft would never see the light of day just because of that. 

But that didn’t stop her from checking. Or rereading the draft.

Or wondering.

And god, she was tired of wondering.

On the night of the 27th, she made herself a scotch instead of a martini. Something warmer. Rougher. She took a sip and stared at the blank document on her screen. Not the draft. A new one.

She didn’t type anything. Just sat there, the cursor blinking.

Her fingers hovered over the keys.

Then she closed the laptop.

Enough for today.

She went to bed late that night, her mind louder than it had been in days. Gerri Kellman — poised, precise, perfectly composed — lay awake and thought about the message she hadn’t sent, and the one he hadn’t answered.

And the ache — soft and quiet and familiar — curled somewhere under her ribs.

Part II — “Workaholic”

(Dec 28–Jan 2)

By the time Gerri returned to the office, Manhattan was still half-asleep from the holidays. Everything in the city had that liminal, between-year atmosphere — half-empty sidewalks, post-Christmas sale signs flapping limp in the wind, paper cup litter frozen to the curb. Even the traffic was quieter, the collective exhale before resolutions and tax season collided.

She walked into Waystar’s lobby and paused. Not because of anything she saw. But because of what she didn’t.

For twenty years, she could’ve counted on Karl’s voice echoing off these stone walls, Frank in his rotation of muted ties, even Logan’s looming absence felt like a shape. But now the space was filled with new voices — Matsson’s Swedish imports, ambitious and brittle, already staking out corners of the empire like they were promised land.

Gerri rode the elevator up without speaking to anyone.

By 7:12 a.m., she was already at her desk, coat barely off, screens lighting up in front of her.

Her calendar was full — Matsson had made sure of it. Some of the meetings were legitimate, some redundant. Some, she suspected, were just power plays. But she showed up to each one, crisp and meticulous as ever, nodding through jargon, absorbing slights like a stone in water.

Matsson was worse than before the holidays. Restless. Arrogant. Still tweeting too much, often after midnight. He’d called her “killjoy counsel” in front of a new head of strategy — a term that would’ve rolled off Logan’s tongue with menace but out of Matsson’s mouth felt like a teenager testing limits. She didn’t flinch. But she noted it.

She always noted it.

The Wednesday meeting stretched too long. She sat through it with one hand curled around a pen she wasn’t using. Her face betrayed nothing. But inside, the tension pulled tight like piano wire. Matsson kept pacing, circling back to a clause in a contract she’d already explained twice.

At one point, he interrupted her midsentence and said, “You sound like a judge on Xanax.”

The room laughed. She didn’t.

Her smile was surgical. “Well. I’ll take ‘calm under pressure’ as a compliment.”

Then on Thursday he walked into her office without knocking, holding a protein bar and a Post-it note with three different time zones scribbled on it.

“Legal is making us too boring,” he said, like it was an accusation. “I want sexy. I want disruptive.”

She didn’t look up from her screen. “You’ll get sued.”

“Not if your people write prettier rules.”

Gerri tilted her head and offered a paper-thin smile. “My ‘people’ are drafting enforceable compliance, not bedtime stories.”

Matsson laughed and walked off. But not before muttering something in Swedish she didn’t need translated to know was dismissive.

Later that day, she had a 74-minute meeting with three departments trying to align a new launch strategy. She contributed to every slide. Asked three smart questions. But mostly she thought about the last email she hadn’t sent.

Back in her office, she opened her inbox again. Her fingers hovered over the Drafts folder like they always did when the silence got too loud.

To: Roman Roy
Subject: (none)

That same unsent message, sitting like a landmine. She didn’t open it. Just stared.

In a long meeting earlier that day, she had found herself glancing at her phone screen every few minutes — not checking for a reply, not really. Just scanning. As though some corner of her mind hadn’t yet accepted that nothing was coming.

She leaned back in her chair, eyes unfocused.

“I survived Logan,” she thought. “I’ll survive this.”

But it felt different now. Her body betrayed her — slower to recover, slower to rally. Not exhausted from the workload. Just tired in a new way. Power fatigue, Karolina had once called it. Gerri hadn’t understood the term at the time. Now, she did.

Her reflection in the darkened glass of her office window startled her. She looked smaller than she remembered. Older. Her French twist was loose at the edges. Her blouse slightly wrinkled at the collarbone. Things she never used to allow.

When Karolina knocked on her office door that Friday evening, Gerri was still working, shoes kicked off beneath her desk, a migraine beginning to nudge the base of her skull.

Karolina entered with a takeout bag in one hand and a concerned expression smoothed into professionalism.

“I brought dumplings,” she said. “You’ve eaten, right?”

“Define eaten,” Gerri muttered, blinking at her screen. “Chewed and swallowed? Or just stared at the food long enough to convince yourself you’re full?”

Karolina set the bag down and sat across from her, crossing her legs.

“I’m guessing that’s a no.”

Gerri pushed her laptop closed and sighed. “I’m busy.”

“You’re drowning.”

“I prefer ‘swimming with weights.’”

Karolina unwrapped the takeout containers. The scent of ginger and sesame filled the room.

For a while, they ate in silence. Comfortable enough, or something like it.

Karolina broke it first. “You’re gonna snap.”

Gerri raised an eyebrow. “I’ve been snapping inwardly since September.”

Karolina gave a wry smile. “You’re allowed to break, you know. Just…not in public. Not around Matsson. He smells it like blood.”

“I’m not breaking,” Gerri said, stabbing at a dumpling. “I’m recalibrating.”

Karolina leaned forward, elbows on knees. “What are you recalibrating toward?”

Gerri didn’t answer. Instead, she stood and walked to the window, arms crossed.

“I built half of this company’s legal foundation,” she said softly. “And I’m being asked to step aside without ever hearing it aloud.”

Karolina’s voice was gentle. “That’s what they do, Ger. They ice you out before they name it.”

There was a long pause.

Then Karolina asked, voice softer: “How’s the draft?”

Gerri didn’t respond immediately. She took a sip of water and looked down at her food.

“Still saved,” she said finally. “Still unsent.”

“I figured.”

“You think I should delete it?”

Karolina shook her head. “I think you’ll know when it’s time.”

Gerri gave a dry laugh. “I’m not so sure.”

Karolina didn’t press. She never did. But before she stood to leave, she glanced back over her shoulder and said, “You know, Ger…the longer you keep pretending you’re not still thinking about him, the more obvious it gets.”

Gerri met her gaze, unflinching.

“Don’t start.”

But she didn’t deny it.

After Karolina left, Gerri sat for a long time in her darkened office, the lights of the city flickering against the windows like static. She reached for her laptop again. Opened the email. Didn’t change a word.

Just sat with it open.

The words glowed back at her.

I’m still here.

She read it again. Then closed the screen.

The ache wasn’t sharp anymore. But it hadn’t dulled either.

It had simply settled. Like dust. Like truth.

Part III - “Catherine and Peti”
(January 3–5)

Gerri didn’t realize how cold her apartment had gotten until Peti walked in and frowned at the thermostat. It had been a mild January so far, all things considered, but the apartment carried a certain chill that no radiator ever seemed to fix. Not quite drafty—just cold. Impersonal.

“Jesus, Mom,” Peti said, dropping her bag by the door and rubbing her hands together. “Is this an apartment or a meat locker?”

“It’s set to 68,” Gerri replied, not looking up from the stovetop where she was overcooking pasta. “Perfectly reasonable.”

“You and your Scandinavian thermostat fetish,” Peti muttered, moving to switch the dial before Gerri gave her a look that halted her hand midair.

Peti gave a theatrical sigh and moved toward the kitchen. “You know, I have an actual winter coat. I could’ve worn it if you told me your apartment had the ambient temperature of a banker’s soul.”

Gerri glanced at her daughter then, just briefly. Peti—twenty-six now, still sharp, still dramatic. She had Baird’s eyes, which Gerri noticed more and more the older Peti got.

“You hungry?” Gerri asked.

“Is that a serious question? Of course I’m hungry.”

Dinner was casual: overcooked pasta, a salad that leaned more garnish than greens, a bottle of white wine Peti brought herself. They ate at the kitchen island. Gerri sat with her back straight; Peti curled one leg under her like she was home again.

They bantered easily, but Peti’s eyes were sharper now. She watched her mother the way people watched old buildings after an earthquake — checking for cracks.

“You sleeping?” Peti asked midway through the meal, too casually.

Gerri didn’t look up. “I sleep enough.”

“That’s not an answer. You look exhausted.” Peti countered, watching Gerri closely. 

“It’s a busy time at work.” Gerri tried to deflect, feigning casualty in hope Peti would drop the subject. 

“You always say that.”

Gerri took a sip of wine. “Because it’s always true.”

“Seriously,” she said after a while. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” Gerri lied because it was easier than admitting or even acknowledging her feelings. 

“You always say that.”

“Because it’s true.”

“No,” Peti said. “It’s your default.”

Gerri folded her arms. “Don’t start.”

And Peti didn’t push. After a while they moved to the couch,  Peti pulled the blanket around herself and added, “I like coming here. Even when it’s ice-cold. It feels like home, I guess.”

Gerri softened then. “You can come anytime.”

“Even if I bring laundry?”

“Even then.”

They smiled at each other. Something passed between them — unspoken, but not unnoticed.

Later, while they sat together watching an old film, Peti leaned her head lightly on Gerri’s shoulder. Just for a second and Gerri didn’t move. Didn’t even breathe.

It reminded her too much of the past — of nights when both girls were still small enough to crawl into bed with her after nightmares. Of Baird standing in the doorway, smiling, watching them all in a rare moment of stillness.

They didn’t talk about Roman at all. Peti wouldn’t have asked even if she suspected. But Gerri saw the glance she gave her phone, the quiet moment when her daughter studied her face like she was trying to understand the equation of it.

When they said goodbye a few hours later, Peti kissed her cheek, pulled her coat tighter, and said, “You should really get a humidifier. Your place is dry as hell.”

Gerri watched her go with a small smile. The apartment felt much colder once she was gone.

Catherine came two days later. No warning, as always. Just a knock on the door and a voice calling, “Don’t shoot, it’s me.”

She brought coffee and sarcasm. She was in a blazer, charcoal wool, lawyer-chic with a deliberately undone top button and tired eyes beneath a sharp brow, briefcase in hand. Gerri had barely finished making coffee when she buzzed up.

“Didn’t know if you’d flake,” Catherine said lightly as Gerri opened the door. “You’ve been dodging my texts like I’m subpoenaing you.”

“I’ve been busy,” Gerri replied, then added more softly, “But I’m glad you came.”

The hug was brief. Polite. Catherine’s body was cool from the wind outside.

Inside, Gerri motioned her toward the armchair by the window. “Coffee?”

“Always.”

She looked good. Tired, but good. Her suits always fit like they were made for her and her hair was tied back in a way that said, “Don’t ask me about feelings.”

​Catherine watched her mother move around the kitchen with the same quiet efficiency she remembered from her teenage years — precise, withholding, impeccable. A woman too polished to spill anything, emotionally or otherwise.

They sipped coffee and talked lightly for a while. Work. Catherine’s new client, the firm’s recent merger, a judge she described as “a walking case for mandatory retirement.” Gerri nodded in all the right places, even offered a dry laugh here and there.

But the undercurrent buzzed between them.

Then Catherine set her coffee down, softened her tone.

“You look tired,” Catherine said, watching Gerri more closely now. “You okay?”

Gerri looked at her daughter, expression unreadable. “Of course. Why?”

“Just...” Catherine paused. “I know what you look like when you’re not sleeping.”

Gerri let out a small sigh. “Everyone seems obsessed with my sleep lately.”

“Because it’s your tell.”

They were quiet for a moment. Then Catherine asked, with a kind of delicate defiance, “Is it about work? Or is it something else?”

Gerri replied, too quickly. “Just the usual. Work’s been intense.”

“You say that every year.”

“Every year, it’s true.”

Catherine tilted her head. “Is it Matsson?”

“Isn’t it always.”

The room went quiet.

Then, gently: “You can be honest with me, you know.”

Gerri froze. Not visibly. But internally — like a wire snapping taut.

“Can I?” she said, her tone dry. Then softer: “It’s not about you.”

Catherine didn’t push. She just leaned back, crossing one leg over the other.

“It never is. With you.”

The silence returned. But it was heavier now. Charged.

Then, unprompted, the memory came. A flash from years ago. Catherine at seventeen. Gerri remembered it with a sharpness that surprised her. Catherine had come home from college for winter break and sat her down on the same couch they were now drinking coffee on.

“I’m gay,” she’d said, chin lifted like a soldier expecting fire.

Gerri had paused — too long, probably. She remembered her mind rushing to practicalities: how to support, how to protect, what that meant socially, financially, legally

Then Gerri nodded slowly and said, “Okay.”

Just that. Okay.

And Catherine had paused. Then frowned.

“That’s it?” she’d asked.

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know. Something. Anything real.”

Gerri had felt herself retreat even then, defaulting to caution.

“I love you. You’re my daughter. It doesn’t change that.”

And Catherine had said—quietly, with a slight tremble in her voice: “You love us. You just don’t know how to show it when it counts.”

The words had stayed with Gerri longer than she cared to admit.

Now, sitting in the same room, Gerri blinked. Catherine was staring at her, maybe remembering the same thing.

“I worry about you,” Catherine said. “You pretend like you’re titanium, but you’re not.”

“I’m just older than you,” Gerri said. “I’ve learned to compartmentalize.”

“Or bury.”

Another silence. Then:

“Are you seeing someone?” Catherine asked. Casual. Too casual.

Gerri hesitated. Her throat went dry. “No.” she replied, after a beat. 

Another beat passed.

“You miss him.”

It wasn’t a question.

And Gerri didn’t answer.

Catherine stood then, smoothing her blazer. “Call me if you need something. Even if it’s just to talk. I know you won’t. But you should.”

“I know.”

They hugged again. This one lingered — a second too long. Then Catherine was gone.

Gerri closed the door quietly. Leaned against it for a moment longer than she meant to. And breathed.

She didn’t cry. She never did.

That ache was back. Familiar now. The one that came after people left and didn’t know how much they were missed.

Later that night, she sat at her desk again. The draft email once again glowed from her screen.

I’m still here.

Roman’s silence rang louder than ever.

And in her chest, the guilt swirled with memory — of daughters she couldn’t comfort, a man she had hurt, a love she couldn’t name.

She whispered to the empty room: “You love them. You just don’t know how to show it when it counts.”

And the room, as always, said nothing back

Part IV - “January Static”

(January 6–12)

By the second week of January, Gerri had settled into something like autopilot. Her alarm still rang at 5:30 every morning, and she still moved through her days with the same clipped precision — black heels, pressed blouses, the carefully curated scowl she wore in the halls of Waystar like armor. But beneath it, the static had grown louder.

The city had returned to its usual pulse — taxis honking, scaffolding hammering, the street-side coffee carts whistling steam into the frigid air. But everything in Gerri’s world felt suspended. The inbox remained unchanged. The email — the one from Christmas Day — still sat in her drafts.

She hadn’t reread it. Not since the night in december a few days before the new year.. 

She hadn’t deleted it either though.

She simply avoided it. Like a hallway in her apartment she no longer walked down.

Her days, once again, were filled with conference calls and document redlines, but she moved through them with the numbness of someone who’d forgotten the plot. Matsson was particularly volatile that week — unpredictable even for him. He swung between long-winded theories about synergy and outright dismissive remarks that bordered on misogyny. One morning, when she corrected him gently in front of the new CFO, he leaned back and said, “Didn’t know we were doing retro gender politics this year.”

Gerri didn’t flinch. She never did. But it took every ounce of restraint not to walk out of the room.

Later, at her desk, she stared out the window for ten full minutes. Then, without fully realizing it, she opened the email draft again.

Just to look.

She didn’t change a word. Didn’t even scroll. Just looked at it. Then closed the tab.

 “I’ll survive this.” She thought the second time within this month that barely even started. 

But her body told a different story. The ache in her back had become chronic. Her eyes burned constantly from sleepless nights. She found herself staring at walls. At patterns in the carpet. At her own reflection in the glass — always composed, always crisp, and looking more tired every day.

Karolina called again midweek. It was becoming a regular occurrence as well, these check-in calls or whatever she should call them.. 

“Hey, just checking in,” she said as Gerri accepted the call. “You haven’t insulted a single VP this week, and I’m starting to worry.”

Gerri smirked. “I must be getting soft.”

“Or buried.”

A pause.

“I’m okay,” Gerri said finally. “Just tired.”

Karolina let it hang there. Then said, “You can call. If you want to. Just talk. Doesn’t have to be about him.”

Gerri didn’t ask how Karolina knew how he was constantly on her mind. She didn’t have to.

“I know,” she said. “Thanks.”

They hung up shortly after. The silence afterward felt both comforting and oppressive.

That night, with the TV murmuring some PGN panel in the background, she saw a chyron she wasn’t expecting:

“ROY FAMILY ESTATE RUMORS — Roman Roy Sells Stake in PR Sub-Division”

There was a picture of him. Archival, probably. He looked younger. Thinner. Not like how he had at the funeral — not hollowed out and shaking behind a podium.

She sat forward without meaning to.

Then she changed the channel.

But it lingered. As these things tended to do. 

She turned off the TV shortly after. Got up and stared out the window. The city glowed gold and blue beneath her, distant and unreachable, no snow anymore. She thought of him again — and then of something else. A moment from months ago.

He had called her once at night — late, maybe 2 or 3 in the morning.

“I was thinking about death,” he’d said bluntly.

She’d rolled her eyes. “That’s healthy.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

There was a beat of silence. Then:

“If I die, will you even notice?” he asked, voice quieter like he surprised himself by even asking. 

She remembered the way the question had hung there — not dramatic, but sharp. Not accusatory, just curious in a way that gutted her more than if he had yelled. She had been silent a little too long.

“Roman,” she said eventually, carefully. “Why are you asking me that?”

Another pause. Then he exhaled. “I don’t know. Just felt like asking.”

“You’re not going to die,” she replied, steady, the lawyer in her taking the wheel. “And even if you were planning to, this isn’t the way to talk about it.”

“But it’s late,” he said. “And you always answer when it’s late. Doesn’t that mean something?” he asked.

She sighed. “It means I don’t sleep enough.”

“I think I just wanted to know if someone would care,” he admitted, voice even smaller then. “If it was you.”

“Roman,” she said again, slower this time, trying to shift the axis of the conversation. “You’re not a ghost. You’re not invisible. Of course I’d care.”

“You’d…what? File a lawsuit on my behalf?” he joked, his voice raw.

“Maybe,” she said, and that made him laugh — a strained, wounded sound.

The call had ended not long after. She told him to sleep. He told her to stop pretending she wasn’t worried about him. Neither of them really said what they wanted to. But the echo of his words had stayed with her.

Back in the present, Gerri sat down at her desk and closed her eyes. 

She had noticed him gone, not dead but out of her life. Of course she had noticed.

But what good was that now?

She didn’t open the draft again that night.

But she thought about it.

And the silence — the one she’d once used like a tool, like a weapon, like protection —

Now, it felt like its own kind of message.

One she wasn’t sure how to answer either.

Part V — “Karolina, Again”

(January 13–14)

The January wind had teeth that week—sharp and merciless, funneling through the avenues like it had something to prove. It whistled against the high glass of Gerri’s apartment and bit through the sleeves of her wool coat as she stepped out of the black car that dropped her off a block early. She needed the walk. Needed the distance, however short, to ground herself. To rehearse the version of herself she’d wear that day.

Her inbox still had no new messages. The Christmas email sat untouched in drafts, a ghost she no longer dared to open. And the one from December— the one —was still unread. She didn’t need to check to know that.

That morning, she hadn’t even hovered her mouse over the mail tab.

She was trying to be better about it. Less obsessive. Less foolish. But as she stood in front of the small café Karolina had picked—brick-fronted, old, the kind of place that used a chalkboard menu and had bad jazz playing quietly indoors—she felt something tighten in her chest.

Karolina was already inside. She was seated at a corner table, scrolling through her phone, her long Max Mara coat draped over the back of the chair like she lived there. Gerri stepped inside, shaking off the wind, and joined her.

Karolina looked up immediately. “You look frozen.”

“I am frozen,” Gerri replied, rubbing her hands together. “New York in January. Who knew.”

“Glad you came,” Karolina said with a softness that wasn’t there the last time. She flagged down the waiter and gestured between their menus. “Tea?”

“Something hot and medicinal,” Gerri said. “Do they serve vodka in teacups here?”

“Probably. But I’m told we’re respectable women.”

Gerri smiled, barely. She set her bag down and unclipped her coat. She was still in workwear—tailored black, sharp lines—but without the stiffness she wore around Matsson. Here, it was just armor for muscle memory.

The waiter came and left. Steam rose from their cups. Karolina broke a biscotti in two and held out the larger half. Gerri took it, though she didn’t eat.

There was a moment of peace between them then, long enough for Gerri to almost pretend she wasn’t bracing herself for the inevitable. These feelings were becoming a regular occurrence now, especially with Karolina but even with her daughters..

Karolina tilted her head slightly, studying Gerri across the rim of her cup.

“You’ve been quieter than usual.”

Gerri didn’t look up. “Maybe I’m evolving.”

Karolina gave a small, skeptical smile. “Into what? An ice sculpture?”

Gerri smirked faintly but said nothing.

Karolina stirred her tea absently, then let the silence stretch—comfortable, pointed. Finally, she said, gently, “He still hasn’t replied, and he’s still in your mind right?”

Gerri didn’t respond at first.

“Don’t start again,” she said after a beat, her voice flat.

But she didn’t deny it either, why would she? Everybody seemed to know anyway these days. 

Silence. The kind that only settles between people who know each other well. Gerri looked down at her cup. She hadn’t touched the biscotti.

Then Gerri said, low and firm, “He’s not going to reply.”

“No,” Karolina agreed, gently. “But maybe it’s not about him anymore, is it?”

Gerri glanced out the window. The street was busy—coats and umbrellas, cold breath in the air. Everything moved with that sharp, hungry rhythm cities take on in deep winter. Everyone on a mission. Everyone going somewhere.

Her voice was very quiet when she replied, almost inaudible. “Maybe it never was.”

That truth settled between them, a soft thud between cups and biscotti crumbs. Karolina didn’t answer right away.

“I think,” she said finally, “you needed to say it. Not to him. Just…to someone.”

Gerri nodded once. “That doesn’t make it less pathetic.”

“No,” Karolina said gently. “But it makes it real. Which is worse.”

Gerri let out a quiet laugh at that. Dry. Honest. Her hand moved reflexively toward the napkin, folding and unfolding it between her fingers.

After a while of silence Gerri looked at her. “I don’t want to be that woman.” she said, voice quiet and vulnerable in a way that once would’ve made her cringe.

“What woman?” Karolina responded softly.

“The one who clings. Who waits. Who confesses things in drafts and pretends she hasn’t.”

“You’re not,” Karolina said, her voice resolute. “You’re the woman who’s still standing after Logan Roy, after Matsson, after raising two daughters and holding this company together with dental floss and litigation. If you feel something—if you felt something for him—then you felt it. That doesn’t make you weak. That makes you human.”

Gerri didn’t know what to say to that. It felt both comforting and deeply unhelpful.

Karolina leaned back then, watching her carefully. “You loved him.” she said after a beat. 

Gerri didn’t move. Her eyes stayed on the napkin again, folding it carefully over and over. 

“I think I loved what he gave me,” she said slowly. “Or what I thought he gave me. Attention. Want. That strange, broken worship that felt like something close to meaning.”

Karolina’s gaze softened. “And did you give him something back?”

“I don’t know.” Gerri looked up then, the smallest furrow in her brow. “I told myself I did. Guidance. Protection. Control. But that’s not love. That’s…management.”

“Sometimes it’s both,” Karolina replied. “Sometimes love is showing up. Even when you can’t do it the way they want.”

Gerri sat with that. Let it seep into the edges of her certainty.

Then, softly, she said, “I wrote him twice.”

Karolina blinked but didn’t look surprised. “I figured.”

“I never sent the second one.” she added, her voice stayed soft. 

“Do you want to?” Karolina asked, her voice matching the soft tone of Gerri’s. 

“I don’t know.”

Karolina tilted her head. “Would it help?”

Gerri looked out the window again. The wind picked up, scattering a swirl of paper against a passing car.

“I don’t know that either.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, cups cooling, steam gone. When they finally rose to leave, Karolina reached out, squeezed Gerri’s arm lightly. A rare gesture between them. Real, grounding.

Eventually, the tea cooled completely. Gerri looked down and realized she hadn’t drunk more than two sips. Karolina flagged for the check.

They stood outside a few minutes later, cold air rushing between them. Gerri pulled her coat tight around her and Karolina turned toward her. 

Karolina hesitated, then said, “Whatever you’re waiting for—just remember it doesn’t have to define you.”

Gerri nodded, the motion small. “I know.” And maybe she did. A little more now than before.

Before they parted, Karolina added, “You’ll be okay, you know.”

Gerri looked at her. “That’s a lie.”

Karolina shrugged. “A hopeful one.”

They smiled at each other. It wasn’t warmth, exactly. But it was something very close to it.

They parted ways at the corner not long after that. Karolina headed east. Gerri west. The wind pressed against her back like it was ushering her forward.

She didn’t check her inbox that night.

But she didn’t write another draft either.

And that felt—if not like progress—at least like a pause.

Part VI — “Closing the Tab”

(January 15)

The city had frozen overnight. The windows in Gerri’s apartment were laced with frost by morning, pale veins of ice threading along the corners. Even indoors, she could feel it — that unkind January chill that settled into old buildings, the kind that heating systems battled but never truly beat.

She’d been up for hours. Not by choice.

The first light of dawn hadn’t crested yet, but Gerri was already in the kitchen, a cardigan wrapped around her shoulders, fingers curled tight around a cup of tea she kept reheating and never quite finished. Her inbox remained open on her laptop, its light casting a bluish wash across the marble countertop. The subject line of the second draft — the one she never sent — blinked back at her, still empty.

One email sent. One never delivered. Both unanswered.

She didn’t expect that to change. But she hadn’t deleted either. That had to mean something.

Gerri stared out the window, watching the ghost of her breath fog the glass, and thought, absurdly, about gloves. Roman never wore them. Always out in a coat too thin, wrists exposed like he didn’t care what got frostbitten.

She turned away then.

The city was waking up without her. She didn’t have meetings that day. She could have worked from home, buried herself in contracts or policies or, more likely, busywork. But the air felt too stale. The space felt too still.

She needed to move, and so she did. She put on her coat, a shawl and within mere minutes she was out and walking in the harsh January wind, walking without direct directions, just letting her legs take her somewhere. 

After what must have been an hour or more, Gerri came to a sudden halt, her fingers cold, she barely felt them anymore, she stopped in front of a record store that surprisingly was still there.

It had changed, of course — ownership, layout, color of the walls. But the general structure was still the same. 

Decades ago, she'd come here with Baird.

Flashback – Winter, 1983

She was twenty-four, still learning how to live in her skin and even less sure how to wear ambition like armor. It was one of those brittle Manhattan days in late December when the sky looked whitewashed and the wind carved up the sides of buildings like it had teeth. Her heels clicked fast against the pavement as she walked, coat collar turned up, hair pulled back too tight.

The firm had kept her late again. Another junior associate burning out on redlines and coffee dregs. Gerri was used to that. She’d carved out her space by saying less, proving more. She never flinched. Never snapped. Her superiors called her steady. Her peers called her cold.

She preferred neither. But it worked.

And then there was Baird.

She hadn’t been looking for anything when they met. Least of all a man eighteen years older, close to Logan Roy’s inner circle, with a sharp mind and a sharper mouth. He wasn’t flashy, not in the way younger men sometimes tried to be — not the type to show up in pinstripes or brag about wins in the Hamptons. But he had presence. He carried it like gravity. He had a calm voice though and endless patience for her sharper edges.

They had started talking months ago — at a Waystar holiday party, of all places. She’d been clutching a flute of flat champagne and edging toward the exit when he said something dry about the color of the shrimp cocktail. She made a face. He made her laugh. And then, she was still there an hour later, coat over her arm, somehow telling him about the hours she worked and the dumbass partner who still called her “kid.”

They hadn’t stopped talking since.

That afternoon, Baird had called her office phone. She answered on the fourth ring, already expecting to say no.

“Come outside,” he said, his voice low, warm — like the rumble of distant thunder.

“I can’t,” she muttered, already reaching for her pen again. “I’m buried in a motion to strike and my boss thinks sleep is a myth.”

“Gerri,” he said softly, with just enough weight to make her pause. “Come outside.”

And so she did.

He was waiting near the corner, no gloves, coffee in hand, a red scarf wound too loosely around his throat. She blinked in the cold light.

“You’re going to catch something,” she said, stepping closer.

He smiled, unbothered. “Worse things have happened.”

She took the coffee from his hand when he offered it. “Two sugars?”

“Of course.”

“How’d you know?” she asked. 

“You always make a face when it’s wrong.”

A ghost of a smile tugged at her mouth. “Great. So I’m predictable.”

“Not predictable,” he replied, gently. “Just legible. If you know what to look for.”

Gerri stared at him for a beat, then looked away. “That sounds worse.”

“Only if you’re afraid of being seen.”

She didn’t answer that.

They walked for a while. Down a quieter street, boots brushing through patches of dirty snow. She kept sipping the coffee. He said nothing for a long stretch.

When she finally glanced over, she asked, “So where are we going?”

“You’ll see,” he replied, light but cryptic.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the best I’ve got.”

“God,” she muttered, shaking her head. “You and your riddles.”

“You’ll like this one.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

But he was right in the end.

He stopped in front of a little storefront, half-sunk below street level. The awning was faded and dusted with snow, and the display window was filled with crooked rows of record sleeves — Coltrane, Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Bowie. A handwritten sign in the window read We close when we feel like it.

“A record store?” she said, lifting an eyebrow.

He nodded. “Come on.”

“I don’t own a record player.” she insisted. 

“Not yet.” he replied, in this calm voice of his.

She frowned. “Is this some kind of analog metaphor for your generational trauma?”

“Jesus,” he chuckled then, pushing the door open and holding it for her. “Just go inside.”

The bell above the door jingled. Inside, it smelled like dust, wood polish, and a hint of clove. Warmth curled around her collarbones like breath. The man behind the counter gave a nod without looking up from his crossword.

The space was small, but it felt endless — bins of vinyl, handwritten notes tacked to walls, posters curling at the corners. Someone had a jazz record playing quietly in the background. Ella Fitzgerald, maybe. Or Dinah Washington.

“Have you ever bought a record?” Baird asked, voice low beside her.

She shook her head. “I listened to the radio. AM.”

“Then start here,” he said, gesturing toward the blues section. “Three records. First, one that reminds you of home. Second, one you secretly love but won’t admit. Third, is the one you want played at your funeral.”

“That’s dark,” she said in a dry tone.

“That’s honest,” he replied, teasing.

She rolled her eyes but walked over anyway. She’d wandered the aisles pretending not to care, not to enjoy it. But she had.

Her fingers traced over cardboard edges — Tell Mama , Lady Soul , Black Gold . She hesitated on Nina Simone, then picked a Nina Simone vinyl — one of the live albums.

And Baird noticed and said, “Of course you would.”

“What does that mean?” she’d asked, pretending to be annoyed.

“It means you want control,” he’d said simply. “But you feel too much.”

She didn’t reply to that but murmured, “She’s angry,” 

“She’s right to be,” he replied, tilting his head. “That’s part of what makes it beautiful.”

“Beauty doesn’t have to hurt,” she muttered.

Baird looked at her for a moment, then said quietly, “Maybe not. But sometimes it does anyway.”

She didn’t reply.

She picked up Joni Mitchell’s Blue , glancing at it like it had caught her off guard.

“You don’t strike me as a Joni girl,” he said.

“I’m not.” she replied.

He smiled. “Okay.”

They didn’t say much else. When it came time to pay, she reached for her wallet.

“Put it away,” he said gently, handing over a bill to the clerk.

“I didn’t ask for that,” she replied, stiffening.

“I know.”

She hesitated. Then added, “Don’t make a habit of it.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

They stepped outside, breath rising like smoke. The air was sharp with cold, wind cutting off the Hudson. 

“You didn’t have to come all the way down here,” she said, quietly.

“I wanted to,” he said with equal softness. “You don’t have to ask.”

She adjusted her scarf, fidgeting with the knot.

“I don’t really know what this is,” she said suddenly, the words slipping out before she could reconsider them. “You and me. I mean, I’m not— I don’t do…this.”

He looked at her carefully, the kind of look that didn’t flinch.

“I know,” he said. “I’m not asking you to define it.”

“I’m not asking you for anything,” she added quickly.

“I know that, too.”

Then, with a faint smile: “But you let me walk you through a record store. That counts for something.”

She huffed out a laugh despite herself.

And for a few seconds, in that cold air, with her gloves tucked under one arm and the bag of records in the other, she felt like maybe — just maybe — being seen wasn’t the worst thing.

They didn’t kiss. Not then. He didn’t try. He just stood with her for a little longer until she said, “Okay. I should go.”

He nodded. “Next time, I’ll let you choose the bookstore instead.”

“I don’t believe in next times.”

“That’s okay,” he said, his voice impossibly soft. “I do.”

He took her hand — just for a second — and then tucked it into his coat pocket like they’d done it a thousand times. And she let him walk her to the corner.

She’d never forgotten that.

Present Day — January 15, 2024

Gerri stood outside the store, the sun-bleached awning, collar of her coat turned up against the wind, gloved fingers curled tightly around the strap of her handbag. The paint was more chipped now. The handwritten sign in the window — We close when we feel like it — had faded, the ink cracked like old skin. But it was still there. Just like she remembered.

She hadn’t meant to end up on this block. Hadn’t planned it. She’d taken a day off — the first in months — and just…walked. Her feet had led her places she wasn’t sure she wanted to go. This was one of them.

It was cold — the kind of cold that made your knees ache. The kind that crept through seams and cuffs, no matter how much wool or leather you wrapped yourself in. New York in mid-January didn’t pretend to be anything but what it was: unforgiving. Honest.

Maybe that’s why she came.

The bell above the door still worked. It gave the same tired jingle as it had thirty years ago. A sound so soft and brief you could miss it, unless you were listening for it.

The man behind the counter wasn’t the same one from back then. This one was younger. Bearded. Wearing headphones. He barely glanced up.

That suited her just fine.

The warmth of the store hit her like an afterthought. The air smelled the same — vinyl, wood, faint incense — like time hadn’t dared touch it. She walked slowly past the bins. Her heels made little sound on the scuffed floorboards.

She paused near the blues section. Her fingers brushed lightly over the records.

Nina Simone.

Etta James.

Aretha.

She found Blue again — same album cover. Same haunted expression in Joni’s eyes. She didn’t pick it up. Just stared at it for a moment too long.

A soft memory flickered — her mittened hand holding the paper bag with those three records inside, Baird standing beside her outside the shop, scarf loose, his voice like gravity.

"You let me walk you through a record store. That counts for something."

Gerri inhaled through her nose. The air inside the store was too warm now. She loosened the top button of her coat but didn’t take it off.

There was a quiet between the bins. A kind of hum only she could hear. It felt like her thoughts were louder here. Less organized. Less defensible.

She moved toward the back. Past jazz. Past folk. Toward the corner where the used LPs were stacked. Some were warped. Others were still in plastic.

There, tucked into a bin labeled Classics—$5 and under , was a weathered copy of Ella in Berlin .

She remembered that one.

Baird had played it the first night she came to his apartment. Back when she still wore suits too stiff and drank gin straight because she thought that’s what people in power did. She’d curled her legs under her on his leather couch, shoes off, and he poured her a martini with green olives skewered like trophies.

“Her drink,” he’d teased when she wrinkled her nose. “You’ll like it.”

She hadn’t. Not at first. But she drank it anyway. And learned to like it over time.

Her hand hovered over the record.

Then pulled back.

She didn’t need to take anything with her. Not this time.

She circled once more through the aisles. Let herself drift to the far end of the store, where the old stereo system was still rigged up behind glass. Some old Bowie record was playing — Wild Is the Wind. Low. Scratchy. Beautiful.

It made her chest tighten unexpectedly.

She didn’t cry. She rarely did. But her throat ached in that particular way that warned her to leave soon.

She turned to go then, brushing past the counter.

The guy behind it looked up finally, just as she reached the door. “Find everything okay?”

She gave a faint smile. “Didn’t need anything.”

“You sure?”

Her voice was smooth, quiet. “I already had it.”

The bell jingled again as she stepped back out into the cold.

The wind hit harder now. Harsher. But she didn’t turn up her collar.

Instead, she walked.

Not quickly. Not aimlessly. Just forward.

She didn’t check her phone. Didn’t open her inbox.

The drafts were still there, untouched since Christmas. The first email — sent, unanswered. The second — saved, unsent.

She didn’t need to look at them again to remember what they said.

They were etched into her now. Like the crack in the record store window. Like the faded ink on that old sign.

She crossed the street without waiting for the light to change, boots clicking steadily over frozen pavement. Somewhere behind her, music spilled faintly out the door as it closed.

And somewhere ahead, the city — brutal, beautiful — waited. Still turning. Still moving.

And so was she.

Back in her apartment the radiator hissed. Her coat was damp from the snow. She tossed it over the back of a chair and pulled her hair free from the collar, flexing stiff fingers as she moved toward the laptop still open on her dining table.

She sat down slowly and clicked open the drafts.

Two emails. December 4th. December 25th.

One sent. One never was.

The second one still felt…exposed. Shorter. Blunter. It hadn’t tried to dress itself up in grace. But the truth of it, she realized, hadn’t dulled. Not even now.

She could send it. She really could. And he might even read it. Might even open it again, read both messages back to back, trace the months she’d spent wondering and worrying and—

But she didn’t. She didn’t send it.

She moved both messages into a folder she’d created right then. Labeled simply: “Personal.”

Then she closed the laptop.

For the first time, without hesitation.

After that, she stood and crossed to the window. The snow had stopped. The sky was going dark again, that early January dusk that came too soon. Her reflection floated faintly in the glass — older, steadier, more tired than she remembered.

She pressed her palm against the cold glass. Watched the city blur beyond it.

Some silences weren’t meant to be broken. But they could still be survived.

That night, Gerri slept. Not long. Not deeply.

But enough.

Chapter Text

Part I - “Static”

It had been forty-three days since she sent that email. Not that he was counting.

Not that he’d woken up every morning since December 4th and immediately glanced at his phone, half-hoping something had changed even though it never did. Not that he’d started checking the timestamp on her email like it might shift or grow or sprout a new paragraph he’d missed. Not that he had the number written down somewhere on a yellow sticky note stuck to the underside of his laptop like a fucking grief talisman and not that he knew it was exactly forty-three days, five hours, and some change since he first read it and felt something inside his chest fall clean through.

The apartment was quiet. Not peaceful. Not calm. Just the dead, stifling kind of quiet that comes after a party no one wanted to throw. Roman had stopped turning on music or the TV. Had stopped doing most things. He didn’t know if it was morning yet—just that the sky was a washed-out kind of gray, the sort of pale that didn’t commit to anything. Not light. Not dark. Just suspended.

Like him.

Roman had been sleeping on the couch again. Not because he liked it. Not because it was more comfortable. Just because the bed had started to feel too performative. Too clean. Like it expected someone in it who made an effort.

The couch didn’t care if you stank.

He shifted under the blanket that he still hadn’t washed since New Year’s. The blanket he was under smelled faintly like dry skin and time. It was too warm in some places, not warm enough in others. He hated it but couldn’t throw it off. His legs had that dead-tingly feeling from being still too long. He flexed a foot. Winced.

Still here. Still useless.

The email had stopped shocking him. Mostly. The initial adrenaline had faded, but the weight hadn’t. He’d read it too many times now to feel startled by it, but not enough to make peace with it. He knew the first line by heart. The pauses. The way she’d signed off. The restraint inside every word.

It didn’t help.

If anything, it made it worse.

His phone sat facedown on the floor. He hadn’t looked at it since yesterday. Or maybe the day before. Who the fuck knew. He had notifications muted except for Shiv and—yeah, well. No messages. Obviously. Not even Shiv today.

A groan crawled out of his throat and died somewhere between his teeth. He sat up slowly, blinking at the low light. His eyes were dry, scratchy. He hadn’t cried since that one time in late December. Not really. He wondered sometimes if he still could. The blanket slid off. His knees cracked like old furniture. 

Still here. Still this version of him.

Still no reply was sent to her.

He went to the window. Put one palm flat against the glass like some cliché of isolation. The city looked blurry. Streetlights diffused by snow flurries that hadn’t decided whether to stick. Cars moved like they were trying not to be seen.

He pressed his forehead to the cold glass. “Still alive,” he muttered, just to check. It didn’t sound convincing.

When the espresso machine beeped from the kitchen, he didn’t move. He hadn’t even made coffee. It was just the machine resetting itself.

Fucking haunted.

He turned away. Sat back down again. Checked the floor for his phone and picked it up. Clicked it on. No messages. Just a PGN push alert.

Kellman departure rumored, Matsson declines to comment.

The words hit harder than they should have.

He stared at them, brain frozen. For a second, he didn’t move. Then blinked once, twice, thumb hovering over the notification like maybe if he didn’t touch it, it wouldn’t be real.

Then: fuck .

It was real.

Was she leaving? Or had she already left? Or had been pushed, maneuvered, quietly removed, gently edged out by whatever smug-tweeting Swedish startup boy was running the place now.

She hadn’t mentioned it. Not in the email. Not in the draft he’d read over and over like it had hidden code buried between the words. No reference to any of this. Just that cool, even tone. That subtle hum of presence and apology and distance.

Roman dropped the phone into his lap and exhaled like someone had hit him in the stomach.

What the fuck was she doing leaving like that?

He rubbed his hand over his face, pressed hard into his temples, then shoved the blanket off and stood too quickly. The blood rushed downward and he swayed for half a second, catching himself on the edge of the couch.

The room looked the same. It always did. But it felt colder now.

He crossed to the window again, bare feet hitting the hardwood with small, uneven slaps. The city outside was half-frozen, dull light bouncing off the layer of snow that hadn’t quite melted. Cars moved in slow trails. Some people walked, hunched, coats pulled tight.

And her. Somewhere in this city.

Maybe gone from Waystar. Gone from the center of it all.

Gone.

He pressed his forehead to the glass. It was freezing against his skin. Sharp enough to remind him that he still had a body. Still existed.

“Cool,” he muttered under his breath. “So we’re all fucking ghosts now.”

He let the thought hang there. Didn’t know if he was talking about himself or her or Logan or the whole fucking company.

He rubbed his eyes, then dropped his hand to his side, phone resting in his palm like it weighed twenty pounds.

She hadn’t said anything about leaving in the email. But maybe that had been the plan all along. Maybe the email was the goodbye, and he was too fucking dense to clock it.

Maybe she’d waited. Maybe she’d given him the chance. And he’d done what he always did—nothing. Just fucking nothing.

Roman paced too fast. The room spun a little. He steadied himself on the arm of the couch and stared blankly at the dark TV screen. He could see his reflection—shoulders hunched, hair sticking up at one side, T-shirt wrinkled and collar stretched.

“Jesus Christ,” he said to no one.

He drifted toward the kitchen. Opened the fridge. Half a lemon. A container of something unidentifiable. A bottle of wine he didn’t remember buying. He closed it again.

He shut the fridge. Opened a cabinet. Found a half-empty box of instant noodles and didn’t bother heating it. Just opened the packet, poured it into a mug, and added hot water from the tap. Stirred it with a spoon that might not have been clean.

The steam fogged up his vision. He wasn’t even wearing glasses. He didn't even own some.

He sat on the barstool and stared out the window, waiting for the noodles to soak. The PGN alert replayed in his head like a song hook.

Kellman departure rumored, Matsson declines to comment.

Fuck you, Matsson.

Fuck you for outlasting her. For making her leave. For being the kind of slimy chaos vortex that even she couldn’t fix anymore. And fuck him, too. Roman. For being the other reason she was gone. For being the one who made it impossible to stay.

He shoved the mug aside. Lost his appetite somewhere between guilt and rage.

And just stood there. Let the silence creep back in.

Then opened the laptop on the counter, not because he wanted to, but because he needed proof that the email still existed. That he hadn’t imagined it.

It was still there.

Still unsorted. Unarchived.

Unread, technically, if the little dot meant anything.

He clicked it open. Read the first line.

Roman —

And that was enough.

He slammed the laptop shut again.

Roman stood up again. Pacing now. Couch to window. Window to kitchen. Kitchen to hallway. Past the bathroom.

Hands shoved in his hair. Nails catching slightly at his scalp. That stupid, prickling pressure building behind his eyes again.

Fuck.

He walked into the hall. The shadows were long and colorless, even though it wasn’t even noon. That’s when he saw it—on the floor in the hallway, near the door. A coat. Folded neatly like someone had taken it off just moments ago.

Except it was his. Except it had been there for weeks.

He stopped and stared at it.

It looked like hers.

That same sleek dark grey. The kind of practical expensive she wore without showing it off. For a split second, he thought maybe she’d been here. Maybe she was here. Maybe he’d finally lost it.

Everything here was his now. And still none of it felt like it belonged to him.

He laughed out loud. It didn’t sound human.

He went back to the living room and sank onto the couch, legs splayed, head tilted back. He stared at the ceiling. Counted one, two, three cracks in the molding. Imagined one splitting open. Let his mind drift somewhere between blank and spiraling.

He hadn’t left the apartment in three days. Maybe four.

Time was elastic now.

His phone buzzed against the floor. He didn’t move at first. Then slowly reached for it.

One name lit the screen.

SHIV

He answered.

“Hey,” he said, voice rough.

“Hey,” she replied, voice tired but clear. “Are you alive?”

He huffed. “Debatable.”

“Not a great answer,” she said. Then softer, “I was gonna give you one more day before I sent someone over.”

“You gonna send Connor with a casserole?”

“Don’t tempt me.”

There was a pause. Not tense, exactly. Just a long inhale neither of them took.

“You saw the news,” she said finally.

Roman let the silence answer for him.

“She’s gonna leave,” Shiv said again, more to herself this time.

He ran a hand down his face. “Yeah. I know.”

“Did you know it was happening?” she asked, voice gentle now, like she wasn’t trying to accuse, just understand.

“No,” he replied. Then added, quieter, “She didn’t tell me.”

“She sent you that email, though. Right?”

He shut his eyes. “Yeah.”

There was another pause. He could almost hear her sipping something, maybe tea.

“You reply?” she asked.

Roman exhaled through his nose. “No.”

“Why not?”

He hesitated. Then said, too quickly, “Because I didn’t know what to say. Because it felt like—like opening a door that wasn’t even there anymore.”

Shiv’s voice was quiet. “Okay.”

“She sounded... calm,” he muttered. “Like it didn’t destroy her.”

“Does it need to?” she asked gently.

“No,” he said. Then, “Yes.”

A breath of silence.

“Roman,” she said carefully, “you don’t have to punish yourself forever.”

He didn’t respond.

“I mean it,” she added. “Whatever happened with her... it happened. But you’re allowed to move forward. You’re allowed to respond to someone who tried. Who reached out.”

“I know.”

“She wouldn’t have written if she didn’t care. You know that too.”

“I don’t know what I know,” Roman said, and his voice cracked a little, almost imperceptibly, but he felt it in his throat like broken glass.

Shiv didn’t push. She waited. Let it stretch.

“Just... reply,” she said eventually. “Even if it’s one line. She deserves that. And you—” She hesitated. “You might need it more than you think.”

He nodded, though she couldn’t see it.

“Okay,” he said.

She didn’t say anything else. Just hummed a little, like she was debating whether to say more, then let the call end with a soft, “Take care, Roman.”

When the line went dead, the silence felt sharper.

Like it had edges now.

He sat there for a long time.

Then finally stood, walked to the counter, and opened the laptop again.

Clicked open the draft reply he hadn’t touched in days.

Typed one word.

Deleted it.

Typed another.

Deleted that too.

His fingers hovered. His chest ached.

Then he closed the laptop again, and whispered, to no one in particular, “Maybe tomorrow.”

But he didn’t believe it. Not yet.

He walked to the window and pressed his forehead to the glass again.

Below, the city kept moving.

And up here, nothing did.

Part II - “Drafts” 

The apartment was so quiet it felt unreal. Like he’d slipped behind a pane of glass and was watching the real world move around him, distorted and unreachable.

Roman sat at the kitchen counter, hands resting on the cool metal, eyes unfocused, the laptop screen in front of him glowing in the low light. The cursor blinked steadily. Almost calmly, yet also mockingly.

He’d opened a new reply to her email and had been staring at it for—God, half an hour? More? He didn’t know. He didn’t care. Time had thinned out, becoming weirdly elastic. His brain ran in circles, looping and unraveling itself like a ribbon snagged in a fan.

He hadn’t written a single real thing.

Just sat there.

And kept starting.

His first attempt after another few minutes of staring:

“ Hey .”

Just that. A little nothing. A familiar echo.
It looked wrong. Too light. Too casual. Like texting someone after a night out.

He stared at it. Thought about her opening it. Thought about her seeing “hey” from him after all this time.

It was either funny or pathetic. Possibly both.

He deleted it.

Then the second attempt:

“I got your email.”

He stared at that one longer.

It was honest. Technically.

But it felt like saying “I received your package” after someone mailed you a lock of their hair.

Way too sterile.

He imagined her reading it. Tilting her head, mouth tight, expression unreadable. One eyebrow maybe raised, maybe not. A little sigh at her desk. Or at home.

Wherever she was now.

Delete.

He leaned back in the chair then and cracked his neck. Tried to breathe slower.

The air in the apartment had grown dense, humid with silence. His pulse ticked in his throat. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw fireworks.

Then leaned forward again.

Third draft:

“I miss you. Obviously. That’s not subtle. Not sure subtlety was ever our thing.”

He paused. His fingers hovered.

“You’re still in my head. Even when I try to shove you out. Especially then.”

He reread it. His chest tightened.

Too raw. Too exposed. Too open-ended. It might sound like an invitation. Or a trap. Or just sad.

He imagined her parsing it with clinical precision. Red-penning it like a legal memo.

He deleted the whole thing in two quick taps.

Eventually he gave up and moved to the couch, dragging the laptop with him. Balanced it on his stomach. Lay flat, like maybe the horizontal position would shake something loose.

It didn’t.

He opened a new tab instead. Scrolled back through old photos. Old drafts. Old texts.

There she was. In the archive.

A blurry photo from a board meeting over a year ago. She wasn’t the subject of the picture, not really — just caught mid-expression, one eyebrow raised, mouth twisted in that half-smirk, half-eye-roll that meant she was amused and tired and smarter than everyone in the room.

He didn’t even remember taking it.

She looked alive. Sharp. Human.

He stared at the image for a long time.

His thumb hovered over “Share.”

For a second, he thought he might send it. No words. Just the photo. Just: I saw this again and thought of you. Or: This is still how I see you.

Something small. Human.

But the thought of her opening it — of her not replying, or worse, replying with distance — made his stomach twist.

He closed the tab.

Didn’t send it.

The email itself was still open, minimized, waiting like a wound.

He brought it back up.

Read it again.

That line again:

“I’m not promising anything more than that. Just presence.”

It always hit the same way. A quiet offering. A hand extended but not pushed. Just stillness. Something you could rest in, if you wanted to.

He didn’t know how to rest.

But he wanted it.

God, he wanted it so bad.

He opened another draft.

“Italy hasn’t left my head. The villa. That hallway. You walking past me like I wasn’t even there.”

He sat with it. Swallowed.

“I kept thinking you might look back. But you didn’t. And I didn’t call your name. And I still don’t know why.”

His hands shook a little. He backspaced through the whole thing.

Too much. Too late.

He left the couch then, walked the perimeter of the room like an animal in a cage. His shoulders were tense and his jaw tight. He didn’t know how to be in this body right now. Didn’t know how to be with this much silence.

He stopped in the hallway. The coat was still there, the one he thought looked like hers. Grey, high-collared. Folded neatly where he’d dropped it after Christmas.

He stared at it. His throat tightened once again.

He picked it up. Dropped it in the laundry hamper.

Didn’t know why it mattered. But it did.

Later, in the bedroom, the light was softer. He sat on the edge of the bed, laptop open again.

Typed a few more lines.

“You were always so fucking composed. You made it easy to pretend I was fine too.”

“I think maybe I loved you. Not sure if I do still. But I think maybe I did.”

He stared at that one the longest.

Felt his chest constrict, the way it had in Italy.

That hallway.

She’d walked past him like he wasn’t real. Like he was air.

He’d wanted to say her name, but it had stuck in his throat. He’d stood there like a goddamn statue.

Felt the air she carried behind her hit his chest like a cold wind.

He remembered the way her heels clicked. The line of her shoulder as she turned the corner.

The silence had been complete.

And it had never really ended.

Roman sat on the bed, blinking slowly, jaw clenched so tightly it ached.

He opened a voice memo app. Hit record.

Said nothing.

Then quietly, almost a whisper: “I don’t know how to do this.”

Stopped the recording.

Deleted it.

And started another draft:

“I don’t even know what you’d want from me. I don’t know what you ever wanted. Maybe just decency. Sorry I fucked that up too.”

He let that one sit.

Then added:

“I’m scared that if I say the wrong thing, you’ll disappear. And I’m scared that if I say nothing, you already have.”

The screen blurred slightly. He blinked hard.

Deleted the message.

Again.

After a while, he scrolled through their old texts. The last real one was months ago.

Her:

“Try not to self-destruct today.”

Him:

“No promises. Want to get a drink and supervise me?”

No reply.

He'd never followed up.

By the time it was fully dark, Roman had drafted eleven different replies.

One bitter. One clinical. One a single sentence:

“I never stopped thinking about you.”

He saved them all in a folder named “Maybe.”

Closed the laptop.

Lay back on the bed. Stared at the ceiling, wide-eyed.

His chest ached. But he didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Didn’t send anything.

Just whispered, one more time, “I’m not ready.”

And hated how true it still was.

Part III - “Complusion”

It was the coat that did it.

Not hers, not really, not even close when he thought about it for more than a second. But enough. Enough to make something kick under his ribs.

Dark gray wool. Cinched waist. That same neat, architectural collar. The woman wearing it was walking ahead of him across 56th Street, her pace steady, businesslike, head down against the cold. From the back —from a distance— she could have been.

Roman had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk like he’d been hit. Just stood there, blinking stupidly, hands shoved into his jacket pockets so hard his knuckles ached.

His breath clouded in the air. His heart, for one stupid second, actually skipped.

Then the woman turned. She wasn’t Gerri. Of course she wasn’t her.

You idiot, he thought. He exhaled, hard, and kept walking.

He hadn’t meant to be out this long. Hadn’t meant to be out at all.

But sometime after the sun rose and the apartment grew too quiet and the silence felt like it was pressing on his chest from the inside, he’d pulled on a coat and left. No real plan. Just motion, just the need to not be there.

And maybe — no, definitely — he hadn’t stopped himself from walking toward her neighborhood.

He told himself it was just a route. Just muscle memory. Just city lines and corners and scaffolding. But that was bullshit. He wanted to see her.

Not to talk. Not to confront. Just…to confirm.

Conform that she was still here. Still real. Still occupying a world that overlapped with his.

All of it had started with the photo.

He’d opened the folder again this morning — Maybe — the one where he kept all the unsent drafts. That blurry picture of her in the boardroom. His cursor had hovered over it for what felt like ten minutes. He hadn’t even blinked.

Then he’d stood up, put on socks, then boots, then the coat and left.

He walked uptown. Took side streets. Let his body move without really thinking.

The cold bit at his face. His ears burned. The wind cut through his jeans.

But he didn’t care.

Somewhere around 60th he stopped for coffee he didn’t want and drank half of it without tasting it. His hand shook the whole time. He wasn’t cold, not really. Just vibrating from the inside out.

There were people everywhere. Suits and scarves and shiny coats, people holding phones and dogs and small bags of groceries.

And still, in every corner of every crosswalk, he was looking. For her.

Even when he told himself he wasn’t.

He walked past a bookstore she once mentioned in passing. Walked past a bar they’d gone to with the legal team, years ago, when they were pretending to still be functional.

He kept walking.

However, it didn’t feel like he was chasing her. Instead, it felt like she was just out of frame. Just a few steps ahead. Like the city itself had swallowed her and was keeping her somewhere just out of reach.

It happened again two blocks later.

Another woman. Similar build. Her hair,  from behind, was even pulled into that same no-nonsense french twist.

Roman’s breath caught. He didn’t mean to move faster, but he did.

She turned then. Still not Gerri.

He felt something in his stomach crumple, like paper folding in on itself.

And he kept walking.

Eventually he ended up near Lexington, near a bar he didn’t remember meaning to find. He stood outside for a second, watching the warm light inside, the glint of glass, the shadowed motion of a bartender’s hands.

He didn’t want to go in.

So of course he did.

The martini wasn’t even good. Too wet. Too warm. Served in a glass with a little lip he didn’t like. But it didn’t matter. He hadn’t ordered it for the taste.

It just felt like the kind of thing you ordered when you were haunted or at least felt like you were haunted.

He didn’t drink it though.

Just sat at the corner of the bar, hands cupped around the stem, staring down into the pale liquid like it might reveal something.

The place was quiet, late afternoon lull. Two men in suits at a table by the window, one woman with a laptop nursing a wine. No one looked at him.

He tried to imagine what she’d look like if she walked in now.

Her coat. Her shoes. The sound of her voice.

He thought he remembered it perfectly.

But he was starting to doubt even that.

He left without finishing the drink. Didn’t pay attention to where he was going next. Just let his feet move. His fingers were freezing.

At some point he passed a woman who glanced at him like she might know him — not as Roman Roy, but as him . The version of him that used to occupy rooms beside her.

But it wasn’t her. Still not her. Never her . 

Later, at dusk, he found himself near her building.

Not right in front. Just close enough to recognize the way the light hit the sidewalk.

He didn’t look up. He didn’t need to.

He wasn’t going to knock. He wasn’t going to do anything.

He just stood across the street for a while, hands in his pockets.

Looking at the pavement.

Then left.

By the time he got home, the sky was dark and his legs hurt.

The apartment was exactly how he’d left it. Cold and still.

He dropped his keys and sat on the floor, leaned his back against the kitchen counter.

Eventually he opened his phone.

Drafted a message:

“I walked through the city today. I thought I saw you twice.”

Then deleted it.

Wrote:

“You’re everywhere. I can’t explain it. You’re in the sidewalk. The bar. The coat someone else is wearing.”

Then deleted that too.

Started typing:

“Please—”

Stopped.

Closed the app entirely and put the phone face down.

It was almost midnight when he stood up again and turned off the lights. He didn’t bother with the bedroom.

Instead, he lay on the couch. Pulled the blanket over his chest that he used since after christmas and hadn’t washed since.

And whispered, into the darkness, so soft he almost didn’t hear it himself:

“Happy new year, Gerr-Bear.”

Because even though it was too late —
Even though it was halfway through January —
Even though it wasn’t his place anymore —

He needed to say it. Just once.

Even if no one heard.

He woke to silence so complete it didn’t seem possible it belonged to the world outside his body.

No sirens. No wind. Not even the usual buzz of the building’s heat system clicking on like it was supposed to. Just that strange, heavy sort of quiet that made him feel like the apartment had stopped spinning while the rest of the planet carried on without him.

The blanket he’d fallen asleep under had twisted around his legs like a tourniquet. His neck ached. His right hand was curled stiff against his chest, fingers partially locked like they’d been gripping something all night. There were faint grooves across his palm — from his shirt, probably. He hadn’t undressed the night before. Just collapsed. Breathed. Let go.

Let go of what, he wasn’t even sure.

The light through the window was gray again. The kind that didn’t announce itself. Nothing gold or bright or warm about it — just the blank color of a January sky filtered through dirty Manhattan glass. Roman blinked at it for a long time before he moved. His throat was dry. His jaw, sore.

And then, the memory slipped in, soft but firm. No fanfare. Just a small, insistent nudge in his ribs.

He’d said something last night. Whispered it. Maybe thought it. Maybe both.

Happy New Year, Gerr-Bear.

The room didn’t react. Nothing about the apartment shifted to reflect that tiny trespass.

But he felt it. The echo of it. The way it had sounded in the dark, curled under the blanket, barely louder than his own breath.

He sat up slowly, carefully. His body protested. The stiffness that came from not sleeping well, from not really moving, from holding tension in all the places that didn’t show.

There was a bad taste in his mouth. His shoulders hurt. He winced as he stretched, back popping once, then twice. He stayed seated for a long moment, head in his hands, elbows to his knees.

Then he got up.

Not because he wanted to. But because there was nothing else to do.

He moved through the apartment slowly. Not aimless, exactly, but not with purpose either. Like the air was thicker this morning. Like the floor was absorbing some of his weight.

He walked to the window first, pressing his palm to the glass like he always did, as if that might offer some kind of clarity or shock of reality — but it was just cold. Nothing else.

Outside, the city looked flat. Blurred at the edges. Traffic moved, but sluggishly. He couldn’z make out people from how high up he was but he imagined that down there was a person in a blue coat walking a dog that kept stopping to sniff patches of ice. Everything had that quiet, almost apologetic air of a Monday after a bad dream.

Roman let his forehead rest against the pane for a second. Closed his eyes. Then stepped back.

The kettle clicked on without him noticing. He must’ve hit the switch when he passed it. The sound startled him — a sharp interruption to the silence that had settled in like fog.

He didn’t want tea. But he made it anyway, watched the water swirl and steam, the teabag blooming slowly into a deeper color.

Routine. That’s what people said helped. Small acts of control. He didn’t feel in control of anything, but he stirred the tea anyway. Added honey. Didn’t taste it. He set it down on the counter, untouched.

His laptop was there too. Closed. Humming faintly beneath its aluminum skin.

He stared at it. But didn’t touch it.

Not yet at least.

He wandered back into the living room and sat on the couch again, legs folding beneath him like they were trying to disappear. He pulled the blanket up, not because he was cold, but because it felt wrong not to have it.

The silence settled in again. But this time it was different.

This time, he could feel something pressing against it.

It wasn’t guilt. Not exactly. Not regret either. It was quieter than that. It had no name. Just a shape. A pull. A compulsion.

He didn’t delete it. Just stared. Let himself read it again.

He read all twelve.

Felt them settle in his chest like stones. Each one a shape that hadn’t fit.

Each one a letter to a version of her he could never quite reach.

He opened her email again. Not because he didn’t remember it — he did. Every line. Every pause. It had etched itself into his ribs the first time, quiet and exact, like someone had threaded wire through his chest and pulled just tight enough to bruise.

But this time he didn’t read it to know what it said. He read it to feel what it did to him now.

He let his eyes move slowly. Let himself sit with the shape of her language. Not the words — not just the words — but the restraint inside them.

She had meant every syllable. And still, she’d pulled back at the edge of every sentence. As if she’d written it with one hand and held herself still with the other.

Roman sat very still.

One knee drawn up to his chest, arm looped around it, chin resting in the hollow. The couch was cold beneath him. The blanket had slipped halfway down and pooled in the bend of his hip.

He read the line about not wanting a reply. The one about kindness. The one about presence.

His stomach turned in on itself.

He didn’t cry. But his face ached like he might. Like his muscles remembered how.

A little knot pulsed at the corner of his jaw — tight, clenched from days of biting down on things that wanted out. His throat felt raw, like he’d been shouting in dreams.

He closed the laptop.

Not in rejection. Just in defense.

Just to give himself a second to breathe.

His hand lingered on the lid. His knuckles pale.

He stared at the mug of tea he hadn’t touched. Watched steam spiral up from it, slow and unbothered.

He thought about how she used to hold her cup with both hands. Even at work. Even in a boardroom. Not because she needed to. Just because she did. Like it grounded her. Like she needed that small ritual to keep from drifting away in a sea of incompetent men and poorly timed acquisitions.

He pressed his fingers to his lips. Not a kiss. Not grief. Just pressure.

Then opened the laptop again and sat with the blank reply window.

The cursor blinked. Steady. Waiting.

He didn’t mean to start writing then. Not consciously at least.

It wasn’t like he sat down with intent, or even with hope. There was no moment of clarity, no swell of cinematic resolve, no background music rising under a decisive inhale. It happened the way something small happens inside the body before it becomes a decision. Like a twitch before a shiver. A flicker of movement before meaning arrives.

One second he was sitting in silence, elbows on the counter, fingertips resting lightly on the keyboard, his left foot tucked under his thigh and the other bouncing slowly — not nervously, just rhythmically, like his body was trying to keep a beat he couldn’t hear.

The next, the cursor moved. And he didn’t look away.

He didn’t start with her name.
Didn’t start with “Hey.”
Didn’t start with “I got your email.”
Didn’t start with apology, or clarity, or defense.

He just started.

“I don’t know what this is.”

He blinked. Hands hovered.

Then typed again.

“Or what it should be. Or whether it’s already too late to make a sound that doesn’t echo.”

He sat with that.

Stared at it for a whole minute..

His breath was tight — not shallow, not panicked, just…short. Measured. Like his lungs were trying not to get in the way. He let his hands drift slightly above the keys. As if they might fall back down. As if touching again would mean the words were real.

“I think I was waiting for something to shift before I responded. Maybe time. Maybe courage. Maybe whatever has to happen inside a person before they admit that silence isn’t neutrality.”

His spine ached from how he was sitting, hunched forward like the words needed to be pulled from the keyboard with his entire body.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t want to answer you. It was that I didn’t know what kind of person I’d be if I did.”

He stopped.

Exhaled.

Rubbed his palms over his face and felt the drag of stubble under his hands. His temples were hot. His throat was tight again, but lower this time — like someone had wedged a thumb beneath his sternum and pressed upward.

He pressed the heel of his hand there. Hard.

It didn’t help.

“You said ‘presence.’”

He paused. Let himself breathe again.

“That word’s been in my head for days. The shape of it. The weight. The way it feels like a promise and a withdrawal at the same time.

I don’t know what my presence means anymore. If it’s something you want, or something you were offering to make the silence easier.

But I guess this is mine.”

His hands fell away from the keyboard again. Rested palms down on the edge of the counter. His posture collapsed a little. He bent forward, forehead almost to the cool metal, just breathing. He stayed there for a long time.

Then lifted his head again.

Wrote:

“I haven’t forgotten anything. Not the villa. Not the hallway. Not what it felt like to say nothing and watch you go.

I wanted to call your name. I didn’t. That’s mine.”

He was trembling now, but it was subtle. Not dramatic. Just an undercurrent in his fingers, his ribs, his spine. The kind of tremble that lives somewhere between fear and release.

“You were in the city yesterday. Or you weren’t. I saw you three times and none of them were you, and that still did something to me I don’t have a name for. 

I didn’t know how much of my life had your shape in it until I kept tripping over the absence.”

That line sat like a weight.

He leaned back. The chair creaked slightly. He ran a hand through his hair. It stuck up. He didn’t smooth it down. He stared at the last line. Didn’t delete it.

Let it live.

He hadn’t read the message in full yet. Hadn’t dared to if he was being honest with himself.

He wasn’t ready for what it might do to him to see the whole thing.

Not yet.

But he’d written something.

And it was still there.

That had to mean something.

He didn’t know when it changed — when the half-draft in front of him stopped being a loose spill of feeling and started to become something shaped. A letter. A reply. A presence.

It was like turning a corner in the dark and realizing your hand had already found the light switch. He hadn’t meant to write this far. Hadn’t meant to build something. But now it was there. And it didn’t feel accidental.

He hadn’t reread it yet. Still couldn’t. The words were too raw. Not in the sense of melodrama — not bleeding, not desperate — but raw like skin healing slowly under a bandage. Raw like something real , in a way he didn’t know if he could survive twice.

But it was his. That much he knew.

The body of the message wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t clever. It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone would print out and read again in twenty years.

But it was clear. Quiet and alive. And honest in a way he rarely let himself be.

He reread only the last line:

“I didn’t know how much of my life had your shape in it until I kept tripping over the absence.”

His hands were warm now, sweaty. His neck burned slightly, like his skin didn’t know how to hold this kind of exposure.

He hovered his thumb over the trackpad.

Paused.

Not because he doubted the message. Not even because he feared the reply.

But because the moment before doing something mattered.

He’d learned that.

There was a breath, always, before it all changed.

He let himself feel it. That breath. The weight in his chest. The ghost of her voice echoing in the word presence .

He closed his eyes.

Pressed Send.

Didn’t flinch. Just kept breathing.

There was no music swelling. No cinematic lift.

The apartment looked exactly the same as it had two seconds before. The tea was cold now. The window was still fogged.

But something had shifted. Not in the world.

Just in him. A fraction. But enough to feel.

He sat back then, his hands limp now in his lap.

He didn’t know what he wanted. A reply? Silence? A knock at the door? He didn’t know.

He didn’t know what he expected.

But for the first time in weeks, he didn’t feel crushed under the not-knowing. He didn’t feel better. Not lighter. But he felt real.

And that was more than he’d had in a long time.

He didn’t open his inbox again that night — not because he’d made a decision not to, and not because he had trained himself out of the compulsion, but because, for the first time in a long stretch of endlessly circling thoughts, the silence that followed the message felt like something he could live inside for a little while.

He didn’t pace the room. Didn’t refresh anything. Didn’t hover over the sent folder or scroll through texts he’d never answered. He didn’t open a draft only to close it again before the first word formed. He didn’t calculate the hour in her time zone, didn’t imagine her phone lighting up, didn’t try to predict what kind of quiet she might be keeping in return.

He just sat there for a long time — on the edge of the bed, spine slackened, knees spread, hands hanging loosely between them like they had given up trying to be useful. His shoulders were rounded forward, not in defeat but in release, like the weight he’d been bracing against had finally, impossibly, shifted its position.

The apartment was still cold, but he didn’t feel it the same way. He could hear the radiator clunk once in the corner, water humming somewhere in the walls, and the far-off sound of traffic scraping against snow a few stories below.

He looked across the room, past the folds of his own jacket slung over the chair he never sat in, to the framed print she had once mentioned — casually, in a hallway conversation, years ago, something about the composition feeling “quiet but assertive,” a phrase he hadn’t understood then but had remembered anyway, written down in a note he never deleted, bought the print weeks later without ever telling her why.

It hung opposite the bed now, subtle, precise. A small piece of her in the room long after the rest had gone.

He lay down. Not on the couch this time. Not curled up in some apologetic corner of his life. Not halfway between leaving and staying.

He lay down in the bed.

No ceremony. No thought. Just the body giving in to gravity.

The sheets were cool but not sharp. The pillow held his head like it had been waiting. The blanket felt heavier than he remembered. He didn’t pull it all the way up, just enough.

His hands lay open on the mattress beside him. Palms up. Unused to stillness. His breathing was slow. The kind that didn’t rush to be over. The kind that let the air in without asking it to mean anything.

And the silence — for once — didn’t accuse him. Didn’t demand anything. It just settled. Wrapped itself around him like fog in the hollow of a mountain.

Not peace. He wouldn’t call it that. But a hush.

A pause.

Something between presence and absence.

And for now, that was enough.

Chapter Text

Part I - “The Absence Has Weight"

(Mid January) 

It was the third day in a row that Gerri hadn’t opened her inbox.

Not deliberately. Not dramatically. There was no defiant gesture, no decision carved out in silence. It was just that each day had its own quiet weight, its own set of small, resistible distractions, and she had stopped marking time by the arrival or absence of a reply.

Stopped, maybe, was the wrong word.

She had dulled it. Turned the sharp edge of hope into something flat, something domestic — like the back of a knife resting against her palm.

She still thought of him. That hadn’t changed.

But not in the urgent, nervous intervals of early December. That constant flicker behind the sternum, that habitual refreshing, that raw anticipation that would curdle into ache by sundown — it had softened.

Now, the absence was something else. Less active. More atmospheric.

She moved through it like humidity.

She was in the kitchen when she noticed she’d run out of fresh ginger again.

She wasn’t cooking anything special - just rice and a little tamari, some frozen peas, the end of a scallion - but she paused there, hand on the spice rack, and looked blankly at the empty spot where the ginger should’ve been. It took her a full five seconds to decide not to write it down.

She didn’t need to remember the small absences.

She was living in one.

Outside, the city was caught in a wind tunnel. Every pane of the apartment shivered faintly in its frame. A low mechanical hum from the radiator clicked twice, then stopped. She’d left her office sweater draped over the back of the kitchen chair, but didn’t reach for it.

The kitchen light was off. The overheads too. Only the dim under-cabinet strip was on, casting everything in a strange, half-shadowed glow. She liked it that way.

It made the apartment feel further from itself.

She carried the bowl to the window and sat on the low armchair beneath the pane. She didn’t turn on the news. Didn’t play music. The candle on the windowsill had burned down to almost nothing - a wide, shallow disk of wax with the wick curled into itself like thread left out in the rain. It hadn’t been lit in days. Maybe longer. She couldn’t remember when she last struck the match.

Still, she hadn’t thrown it out.

Not because she was sentimental. At least, not in any way she’d admit out loud. It wasn’t grief, not exactly, or nostalgia. It was smaller than that. Quieter.

The glass was frosted at the edges, still holding the faint ghost of fingerprints - his, maybe. Hers, certainly.

She leaned forward now and traced one fingertip around the rim.

The scent had all but disappeared. It used to be stronger - cardamom, bergamot, cedar - something Baird had once offhandedly called “grown-up without being funereal.” She’d laughed at the time and said she’d never known him to care about candles, and he’d just shrugged and said, “I don’t, but you like them.”

He’d bought that one for her. Not on any occasion. Just once, in early December, decades ago, from a boutique she always passed on her walk to the subway but never entered.

She hadn’t lit it for months after. Then one night, after a fight - something stupid, something about schedules or silence or who had forgotten to pick up the dry cleaning - she’d lit it instead of speaking. And he’d said nothing. Just came into the room, placed a glass of wine in front of her, and sat down beside her on the floor.

They hadn’t talked. But it had helped.

She stared at the candle now and felt nothing sharp. Just the dull, tired pressure of something long-decayed still insisting on being known.

She hadn’t replaced it. She couldn’t bring herself to.

The idea of buying a new scent - something fresh, something citrusy or clean - felt treasonous in a way she didn’t know how to justify.

So the wax remained, cool and unlit. Holding a shape it no longer gave off.

When she arrived at the office the next morning, the glass doors didn’t open quite right.

There was a pause - half a second, maybe less - but she noticed.

It wasn’t the doors themselves. It was the scanner. It had always caught hers just slightly off center. Even now, after all these years, she still had to swipe her badge twice.

The doors slid open anyway. But something about the delay made her feel like she’d been forgotten.

She walked into the Waystar lobby with her coat still buttoned and her gloves in one hand. Her heels made the right kind of sound - clean, professional, unmistakable.

But the floor felt a little different beneath them.

She nodded at the security desk. They didn’t look up.

Upstairs, the atmosphere was thick with something she couldn’t name. Not tension. Not quite. It was more like static. The kind of air you walk through when a storm is nearby but hasn’t hit yet.

She passed an intern carrying three coffees, none for her. He didn’t make eye contact.

Good. She didn’t want small talk. She wanted silence.

And Matsson, of course, was already pacing.

The meeting was scheduled for ten.

At 9:47, he was already barefoot.

Something about the hem of his shirt was coming untucked as if by design. He had one AirPod in and was talking - not to her, not to anyone in the room, just into the air, like the rest of them were props in a late-stage performance art piece titled How to Dismantle a Corporation While Still Feeling Fun .

She sat down at the far end of the table. Karolina glanced at her, then away again. No one asked her anything and she didn’t offer.

Halfway through the presentation - if it could be called that - Matsson interrupted a junior counsel mid-sentence, rolled his eyes, and said, “Jesus, do we need the legal disclaimer again? Come on. Just drop it. They know. They all know.”

No one responded.

Gerri folded her hands. She didn’t speak.

But her jaw clicked faintly as she clenched it, and she was suddenly aware of the fact that the room had grown hot. Not warm - hot .

The kind of heat that made your scalp sweat under perfect hair. The kind of heat that told you you were not supposed to be here anymore.

There was no official announcement. Of course not. That wasn’t Matsson’s style.

There were just gestures. Omissions. The removal of her name from two threads she should have been on. The quiet redirection of a question she’d normally fielded to someone with less tenure and more enthusiasm.

And the tone.

His tone - when he did speak to her - had shifted.

She’d once been useful to him. Sharp. Necessary. Now she was just…background.

A holdover. 

The past in heels.

She left the meeting before it even ended. No one stopped her.

When the elevator doors closed, she closed her eyes for the first time all day.

They burned, not with tears, just tiredness.

Just too much time spent pretending her skin didn’t feel thinner than it used to.

That day she got home just after six, though it definitely felt later. The sky had already slipped into that dull, metallic blue - not quite night, not still day - the kind that never fully arrived or left.

She peeled off her coat by the door, hung it on the hook without thinking. Kicked off her heels, not even delicately. They thudded onto the hardwood with a sound that might have echoed if the apartment weren’t so overfurnished.

She stood there for a moment, in the hush, fingertips still on the collar of her coat.

Then turned toward the kitchen. There was leftover lentil soup in the fridge, the kind she used to make from scratch when she was younger, when she had more time and less income. She didn’t bother heating it - just opened the container, tasted a spoonful cold, and set it aside. Instead, she made herself a tea. 

The air inside was still, and slightly stale. She cracked the window by the sink an inch, just enough to hear the city if it wanted to be heard.

A siren in the distance. A dog barked. A horn blared, then cut short.

She didn’t listen closely. She never did.

It wasn’t about sound. It was about remembering the world was still out there.

She walked back into the living room slowly, like the space might have changed while she was gone.
It hadn’t. Of course it hadn’t. But she moved as if it might have - a careful kind of motion, not anxious, just…deliberate. Like one step too fast might cause something to shift out of alignment.

The standing lamp by the armchair clicked on with a soft sound, the old kind, the kind you turned with your fingers instead of an app. The light was warm but shallow, a circle that didn’t quite reach the edges of the room. She didn’t adjust it. Just stood there for a second with her hand still resting on the pole, eyes narrowed slightly, gaze drifting across the furniture as though checking for absence.

Everything was exactly where it had been this morning - the pillow she’d nudged aside, the folded throw blanket she hadn’t used, the half-read novel still lying spine-up on the side table like it had passed out mid-sentence.

The news flickered across the TV screen, muted. Headlines crawled along the ticker like ants. A glossy anchor smiled with her mouth only. Gerri watched her lips move for a moment, then looked away.

She crossed the room with a mug in one hand, fingers wrapped around the handle like it was something that could tether her. The tea inside had cooled. She hadn’t meant to make tea. Couldn’t remember doing it, even. But there it was, lukewarm and inert.

She set it down on the coffee table without a coaster, then caught herself and adjusted it half an inch to the right.

Her hand lingered there. Still.

The candle was waiting on the sill.

She didn’t light it. Just sat down beside it and placed one hand around the glass, letting her thumb slide slowly up the frosted side. The wax was low now, curled in at the center like a breath drawn in but never released.

She turned the candle gently, once, twice. Let it face away from her. Then turned it back.

The smell was barely present anymore, but she still knew it by heart. Bergamot. Cedar. A whisper of something warm and slightly bitter. Something that belonged to a version of winter that hadn’t required her to survive it alone.

Her eyes drifted toward the books on the shelf.
There were two she hadn’t read yet. One she’d started and abandoned. The rest were old friends, their spines softened by time, their corners dulled by movement - boxed, unboxed, shelved and reshelved across apartments, years, lives.

She didn’t reach for any of them.

Instead she leaned back into the armchair and let her body sink slightly. Not collapse. Just yield.

Outside, traffic moved like a sigh.

Inside, the apartment held its breath.

Part II - “Inbox (1) - Reverberation” 

The water was still running in the tub when she saw it.

The air in the bathroom had thickened. Steam curled upward from the water and clung to the mirror like breath, softening her reflection until it didn’t look quite like her. Just the outline of a body - one arm reaching past the basin for a folded towel, one shoulder bare. Her skin had flushed faintly from the heat, but the pink was uneven - a patch across her collarbone, a faint bloom at the bend of her elbow. The silk robe she’d pulled on just after stepping out of the tub stuck slightly to her spine.

She reached for her phone almost absently. Not with intention. Not out of need. Just that tired, twitchy impulse that didn’t belong to thought anymore. Her thumb brushed the edge of the case. She glanced at the screen.

The moment was so small it barely registered. The kind of glance you’d forget before the next breath. But her eyes caught it - a notification. Just one. Quiet. Unassuming.

And then -
Roman Roy.

No subject line. No preview.

Her thumb stopped midair. The rest of her stilled with it.

It was like walking into a room and hearing your name spoken when no one’s supposed to know you’re there.

For a few seconds, she didn’t breathe.

The steam kept rising behind her and curled closer to her neck, but she didn’t move.

It wasn’t shock, exactly. She’d never allowed herself that. Not from him. Not anymore.

But something inside her had paused. Not just paused - folded. Quietly. Like paper in a drawer, something unfinished.

She lowered the phone. Placed it face-down on the edge of the counter. Her hand lingered near it, not touching.

Her chest felt tight - not alarmed, not afraid. Just compressed. Like something had narrowed inside her ribcage. She glanced at the tub and realized the water was still rising. She stepped forward slowly and turned the tap off.

The silence came back, quick and complete. It filled the room like it had been waiting.

She didn’t open the message.

She dried herself mechanically. Patting, not rubbing. The towel smelled faintly like lavender, but she barely noticed. Pulled on her robe again. Moved through the motions of brushing her hair, twisting it up, pinning it in place. Her hands were steady. Her face was calm.

But something in the room had shifted.

Or maybe not in the room. Maybe only in her.

Her pulse was in her mouth now - not fast, but wide. She could feel it against her upper lip, the space behind her teeth, like her body had quietly decided to prepare for something her mind wasn’t ready to admit.

She stepped out into the hallway barefoot, towel still in one hand, and flicked off the light. The rest of the apartment was dim. The soft lamp glow in the living room cast long shadows into the kitchen. The television was still on - muted, a talk show looping replays - but the soundlessness made it feel unreal.

She made tea, and didn’t taste it. Set it down on the counter and walked away from it entirely. She moved from room to room like someone looking for something she didn’t want to find.

She picked up a sweater from the back of the chair and folded it too carefully. Rearranged the pillows on the couch. Closed a cabinet that wasn’t quite latched. Pulled the throw blanket tighter across the foot of the bed, even though she wouldn’t sleep yet.

The phone stayed where she’d left it. Still facedown. Still unread.

The message had already arrived. It didn’t need to be read to be felt.

And still, she felt it in the room. The way you feel an open window in another part of the house.

By the time she lay down, the room had cooled.

Her hair was still a little damp, spread unevenly across the pillow. One arm bent under it. The other rested lightly over her chest, as though trying to measure her own heartbeat.

She couldn’t sleep.

Not because she was restless. But because her body had entered that soft, suspended state where sleep was possible in theory, but the mind refused to hand over control.

She closed her eyes. Opened them again and watched the ceiling fade darker.

At 12:42 a.m., she got up.

The floor was cold. She didn’t put on slippers. She walked barefoot into the living room.

The candle on the sill was untouched. The wine glass from the day before still sat with a trace of red at the bottom. Her phone was on the side table, screen dark, waiting.

She was seated on the far end of the couch now, knees drawn up, blanket across her lap but not over her shoulders. The room had settled into its last shape of the day - dim, still, not quite warm. Outside, the traffic had thinned to a low, occasional murmur. Inside, the silence breathed like it belonged to someone else.

She picked up the phone without thinking, and unlocked it. And this time, she opened the email. 

Just like that. No ceremony. No bracing breath. Just the message.

Roman Roy.
No subject.

The body of the email was longer than she’d expected. Not dramatically - but more than a line, more than a joke or a placeholder or a half-sentence he’d send just to interrupt her sleep.

No greeting. No “Gerri.”

No “hey.”

Just:

I don’t know what this is.

She stared at it. A sentence like a held breath. Like an admission spoken against the mouth of a glass.

Or what it should be. Or whether it’s already too late to make a sound that doesn’t echo.

Her chest shifted. Not with emotion, not yet. With breath. The kind she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Her left hand curled around the edge of the phone. Not tight, not tense. But firmer than before. Like her fingers had decided they needed to feel the shape of something. There was a hush around her body now - not externally, but inside, like every internal mechanism had slowed to accommodate the weight of this voice.

She read the next lines without blinking.

I think I was waiting for something to shift before I responded.
Maybe time. Maybe courage.
Maybe whatever has to happen inside a person before they admit that silence isn’t neutrality.

Her mouth parted slightly. Just air. It came out too fast. She coughed once, like her body was remembering itself. 

She shifted slightly, knees drawing up. Her spine curled forward without her noticing. Her phone tilted in her hands, closer to her chest.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to answer you.
It was that I didn’t know what kind of person I’d be if I did.

Her hand moved to her face before she noticed. Fingertips brushing over her cheekbone, then down, pressing into the space just beside her nose. A familiar pressure point. A private habit. Something she did sometimes when reading depositions, or reviewing language that wasn’t quite legal but wasn’t quite innocent either.

The next paragraph began with her name. Just once. No honorific. No affectation.

Gerri.

The shape of it startled her more than she’d admit. She stared at it for a beat too long, as if reading it written out had changed the sound of it in her memory.

He went on. Carefully. Not emotionally - but not cold either. There was restraint in the cadence. But the kind that trembles at the edge of something real.

You said “presence.”
That word’s been in my head for days.
The shape of it. The weight. The way it feels like a promise and a withdrawal at the same time.

Her throat closed, gently. A soft constriction, like trying to swallow past the wrong kind of air.

I haven’t forgotten anything.
Not the villa. Not the hallway.
Not what it felt like to say nothing and watch you go.

That line - Her stomach contracted. Not pain. Just a twist. Deep and slow, like the body remembering a movement it hadn’t meant to repeat.

I wanted to call your name. I didn’t. That’s mine.

The words blurred slightly. She blinked hard, exhaled through her nose and pressed her palm flat to her thigh. Her skin felt warmer than the room.

You were in the city yesterday. Or you weren’t.
I saw you three times and none of them were you,
and that still did something to me I don’t have a name for.

I didn’t know how much of my life had your shape in it
until I kept tripping over the absence.

That was where it ended. No closing. No sign-off. No expectation.

Just the absence of further explanation. A message shaped like a breath held between them.

Gerri sat completely still.

The screen dimmed.

She tapped it once. Let the message reappear. Reread the final three lines. Then the two above them.

The phrases were sparse, restrained but not evasive. He hadn’t deflected. He hadn’t hidden behind his usual armor. She kept waiting for a joke. A detour. A dig. Something to undercut the weight.

But it never came.

What was there instead was…presence.

The same word she’d used. Reflected back to her. Not as a mirror, but as a shape that had been there in both of them, unspoken.

Her hand had risen again - resting just under her chin now, two fingers lightly touching her throat, like her body had decided on its own that it needed to protect something soft. She didn’t speak. Didn’t make a sound.

But something inside her dropped. Not shattered. Not even broken. Just…lowered. Quietly. Carefully. Like a weight being set down in the center of her chest.

She stood slowly. The blanket slid from her lap.

The room felt wider than before.

She carried the phone with her into the kitchen. Set it on the counter. Opened the cabinet. Took out a glass. Poured water. Didn’t drink it.

Just stood there, one hand on the edge of the counter, the other loosely holding the rim of the glass, as if to anchor herself to a version of the present that hadn’t shifted entirely.

The wine glass from earlier still sat near the sink. Half-full. Untouched.

She stared at it. Then turned away.

The next morning, the apartment felt different. Not dramatically. Not visually. Nothing had moved. But she sensed it the way you sense someone has stood in a room after you’ve left it - a shift in the quality of silence.

She didn’t reread the message and didn't delete it either.

It lived in her now. That was enough.

At the office, she walked through the lobby with a pace that was marginally too even. Her coat was buttoned to the top. Hair smooth. Nails immaculate. No one stopped her. No one spoke. Her heels struck the floor with a rhythm she trusted.

In the elevator, she pressed the button with her knuckle.

She remembered the line about the villa. About the hallway.

The stainless steel doors slid shut with a sigh.

She kept the day moving, meeting to meeting, briefings, email chains. Her own voice sounded fine to her - maybe a little lower, more clipped than usual, but no one commented. She caught herself once mid-sentence, staring too long at a paragraph on her screen. She blinked. Refocused. Kept talking.

By five, she’d forgotten to eat. She didn’t correct it.

There was a dinner that night, one of those vaguely “informal” gatherings where informality was precisely measured and staged. A venue just expensive enough to be forgettable, seating just awkward enough to keep everyone in proximity but not in trust.

She changed in her office. She wore black. Something that fit, understated, impeccable.
The same color as silence. Switched to lower heels. Dabbed concealer under one eye. Brushed a fleck of mascara from her cheekbone. Checked her teeth.

Roman’s name flickered at the base of her reflection and vanished again.

She arrived late on purpose.

The table was already full. The first round of drinks had arrived. Matsson was holding court from the head seat, posture loose, shirt open one button too many.

He acknowledged her with a grin that didn’t reach his eyes.

“Ah. The conscience of the empire,” he said. “Or is it the last suit standing?”

She smiled — that soft, unbothered press of lips she’d perfected in rooms like this. “Neither,” she replied, sliding into her seat. “Just hungry.”

He laughed. She didn’t.

The evening passed in a blur of too-rich food and too-loud opinions. A younger executive tried to explain data sovereignty to her in real time, as if she hadn’t written a white paper on it six years ago. She let him finish, sipping her wine. Did not correct him.

Matsson leaned toward her once and muttered something half-insulting about shareholder risk and institutional nerves. She let it pass.

It was easier to let things pass now.

Her body was present. Her face did its work. But her mind was elsewhere. Not drifting. Not dissociating. Just…moving underground.

When Karolina met her eye across the table, she held the look just long enough to acknowledge it. No longer.

She left before dessert.

No one stopped her. Not even Karolina.

But Gerri felt her watching as she stood.

The apartment was cold when she returned.

She didn’t take her coat off right away - just stood in the doorway, one gloved hand still on the lock, her other resting at her side like she might turn around again.

Eventually, she stepped inside. Hung up her coat. Kicked off her shoes. Turned on the hallway lamp. 

She moved like someone walking through a version of herself from a previous life.

The wine glass was still on the counter. The message still on her phone.

Neither had changed.

She called Karolina from the hallway, still dressed, shoes off, phone against her ear as she leaned against the doorframe.

Karolina answered in a tone that was both familiar and careful. “Hey. Is everything okay?”

“Yes,” Gerri said automatically. Then softened. “I just…needed to hear a voice that wasn’t trying to outmaneuver mine.”

A pause. Then Karolina said gently, “You don’t usually call when you’re unraveling.”

“I’m not unraveling.”

“No?”

“Not yet.”

Another pause.

“You want to talk about it?” Karolina asked.

Gerri hesitated. Then said, “Not tonight.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll…tell me if I start disappearing, won’t you?”

Karolina’s voice dropped. “You’re not disappearing.”

“I feel like wallpaper.”

“Then I’ll peel you off and put you in a better room.”

That made Gerri smile. It caught her off guard. She pressed her fingers to her lips.

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

“Call me sooner next time.”

“I might not.”

“I’ll call you.”

Gerri didn’t say goodbye. Just let the silence end it.

She stood there for a long time afterward. Phone still in hand. After a moment, Gerri set the phone down slowly. Let it rest face-up this time.

Didn’t check her email again. Didn’t open his message.

Just stood in the kitchen for a long moment with both hands flat on the counter, her head bowed slightly, her breathing shallow but even.

The silence that followed was thick. Not empty. Just…full of everything she hadn’t said.

She didn’t go to bed right away.

The bedroom door was open, the bed neatly made - corners tucked, throw folded, nothing disturbed. She looked at it from the hallway like a stranger might: a suggestion of rest, not a promise.

Instead, she crossed back into the living room and sat down on the armchair near the window. Not the couch, not the desk, not the bed. This spot - narrow, upright, small enough to contain her.

Her knees bent, hands resting against the arms of the chair, not gripping - just placed. Like she’d folded herself in half and decided not to move again. The light in the room had dimmed by now. The floor lamp was off. Only the glow from the city remained, scattering across the ceiling like noise through glass. She listened to the radiator hum. To the soft mechanical breath of a building too old to be quiet.

The phone was across the room. Still unlocked. The screen had dimmed, but she hadn’t turned it off. 

She could still feel the words behind her ribs. The shape of them, anyway. Not specific lines. Just the echo.

Presence.

That was the word he’d used. Or borrowed. Or returned.

She didn’t know what it meant anymore. Not really. Not coming from him. Not after this long. But she knew how it felt.

Like heat in the hollow of her spine.
Like being seen by someone who didn’t know how not to look at you.

Like the hush between the end of a sentence and the moment you decide whether to answer.

She shifted slightly. One leg tucked beneath her. Arms crossing over her chest, then falling again. She was cold but didn’t get a blanket. She was tired but didn’t stand. She closed her eyes for a moment. Just one. A long, shallow blink. The kind that doesn’t want to end. And when she opened them again, she didn’t move. Didn’t speak.

Just let the room hold her the way it knew how.

Without question. Without warmth.

Just presence.

And for now -
Not peace. Not clarity. 

But that. That was enough.

Part III - “What We Leave Unsaid"

The cursor blinked for the third time before she typed anything.

She wasn’t even sure what had brought her to the draft window again. It wasn’t an impulse. It wasn’t a sense of timing. She’d simply opened her inbox to flag a contract addendum and found herself, five minutes later, staring at his name in the corner of the screen, breath held like a fingertip pressed to a bruise.

Reply

It was so stupidly easy. One click. One white screen. The weight of silence already broken.

And still-

She sat. One hand resting lightly on the keyboard, not moving. The other curled loosely around the edge of the desk, thumb pressing faintly into the woodgrain. She blinked once, not slowly, just deliberately.

Then, finally-

“I read it.”

She paused.

“I read it. I’m-”

She backspaced.

“I read it. I don’t know what to say.”

She sat with that line for a while. Her lips parted slightly. Her chest rose, shallow.

Then:
Delete

Cursor blinking again.

She rested her forehead against the heel of her hand, elbow braced on the desk, and closed her eyes.

She hadn’t realized she was holding tension in her jaw until it released, aching down the hinge of her face. Her fingers slipped to the corner of her mouth and stayed there. She let her thumb drag lightly across the line of her chin, then lowered her hand altogether and closed the laptop.

The screen went black and Roman’s name vanished.

She let her hand drop to her lap, fingers curling faintly into her robe. A quiet throb pulsed at the hinge of her jaw; she hadn’t realized she’d been holding it tight. She exhaled, lowered the laptop lid halfway - not fully closed - and rose from the chair.

The room shifted around her. Not visibly, just in the way air changes when the center of gravity moves.

She walked into the kitchen, then down the hall, restless. She caught sight of the laundry basket she’d left near the dryer two hours ago, a small mound of warm cotton and towels waiting. Something about the ordinary weight of it felt almost merciful.

So she folded.

Not with attention, not with care, just with movement. Her hands smoothed fabric, stacked shirts, matched socks with a mechanical rhythm, as though the neatness of each crease could stop the echo of his words.

I didn’t call your name. That’s mine.

The phrase slipped in uninvited. Her fingers faltered on a towel, refolded it twice before she was satisfied. She placed it in the basket like setting down a thought too heavy to carry.

Most of grief, she thought absently, is just the failure of language to hold shape inside the body.

Later, twilight seeped in through the windows, dulling the edges of the room. She stood in the kitchen without turning on the light, watching the streetlamps blink awake in their uneven rhythm. The reflection of her own face ghosted back at her from the glass, faint and pale.

The kettle had boiled earlier, but she’d forgotten to pour it.

The mug on the counter had cooled, its surface dull. She traced a finger along the ceramic rim, not really feeling its chill.

The line about “presence” drifted through her again - less a word now than a sensation, like something hovering in the room just out of reach.

Catherine arrived unannounced at eight.

The lock turned, the familiar sound of her boots thudding once against the floor, and then: “Mom?” Her voice carried easily down the hall, bright but with a careful edge.

Gerri stepped out of the kitchen. “In here,” she called, her tone even.

Catherine appeared holding a Trader Joe’s bag, her cheeks pink from the cold. “I brought those freezer meals you like,” she said, her tone halfway between brisk and teasing. “The spinach ones, and the lentil stew. And don’t argue - I know you haven’t cooked this week.”

“I cooked last night,” Gerri replied, arching one brow faintly.

“Was it edible?” Catherine asked with a smirk.

“No promises,” Gerri said, her mouth tightening at the corners in what passed for a smile.

Catherine laughed - quick, light - and stepped forward to press a brief kiss to her mother’s cheek. Gerri didn’t lean away, but she also didn’t move toward it. Some habits never rewrote themselves.

“You already ate?” Catherine asked as she shrugged off her coat.

“Not hungry,” Gerri replied.

“Not hungry or didn’t bother?”

“Both,” Gerri said softly, but there was no irritation in her tone.

They moved into the kitchen. Catherine unpacked containers, the sound of plastic lids and freezer paper filling the silence. Gerri stood by the counter, arms loosely crossed, watching.

“Work’s still a mess?” Catherine asked, glancing up with an expression that looked both curious and faintly tired.

Gerri nodded. “It’s like walking through a room while someone rearranges the furniture in the dark,” she said, her voice flat. “You keep bumping into corners you didn’t know existed.”

Catherine tilted her head. “That’s poetic,” she said. Then, after a beat: “Or ominous.”

Gerri said nothing, just reached for a drawer and closed it again with no reason.

Catherine paused mid-unpacking, watching her mother more openly now. “You okay, Mom?” she asked, her voice quieter, testing.

“I’m fine,” Gerri replied.

“You don’t look fine,” Catherine said, not unkindly.

“That’s because I’m tired,” Gerri said, setting her hand against the countertop like she needed to feel something solid. “And I’m-” She cut herself off, then sighed. “Just tired,” she finished.

Catherine studied her for a second longer, as though trying to parse what was missing. “I don’t have to stay,” she said softly. “But I could.”

“I know,” Gerri replied, her voice still even.

There was a pause, long enough for the quiet hum of the refrigerator to fill it.

“Insomnia again?” Catherine asked, her tone gentler now.

Gerri nodded once. “Some nights.”

“What do you do when you can’t sleep?”

“Laundry,” Gerri said simply.

Catherine gave her a look that hovered between amused and sad. “That’s bleak.”

“It helps,” Gerri said, her tone matter-of-fact.

Catherine stepped closer then, hesitating just a fraction before wrapping her arms around her mother. It was not a tight embrace, not the kind that folded one into the other, but Gerri let herself stand still within it.

“You don’t have to carry everything alone,” Catherine said quietly, her breath brushing Gerri’s shoulder.

“I know,” Gerri murmured, almost automatically. She meant it, in part. Or wanted to at least.

But some distance couldn’t be bridged by freezer meals and hugs. Not when years of late-night conference calls and missed school plays had hardened that distance into shape. She wondered if Catherine remembered the exact number of Christmas mornings where she’d been in the office before noon.

The thought ached. She didn’t say it.

When Catherine left, the apartment seemed larger. And quieter.

Gerri stood at the door a moment longer than necessary, one hand on the frame, staring at the shadowed hallway like the outline of her daughter might still be there.

She didn’t cry. She didn’t move quickly. She turned back into the apartment with a kind of slow inevitability.

Her laptop still waited on the desk. Roman’s email sat there, bolded, untouched. She didn’t open it.

She just let the glow of the screen light her face while she sat perfectly still.

Somewhere past midnight, she gave in to the weight of exhaustion. She didn’t brush her teeth or change her clothes. She simply lay down on the bed, head tilted toward the nightstand.

The laptop screen had dimmed but not gone dark, Roman’s name still visible like a low pulse.

She didn’t close it. She didn’t need to.

She let sleep take her with the quiet hum of his presence still threaded through the room.

Part IV - “The Letter And The Ghost"

The scent caught her off guard.

She had been in the back hallway closet, reaching for a scarf, when her hand brushed against an old bottle of cologne she didn’t remember owning - one of Baird’s, probably, forgotten on the upper shelf. A clean, slightly sharp scent, citrus buried beneath cedar, something that had once clung to his jackets in winter. She lifted the bottle without thinking, thumb grazing the worn label, and held it closer to her face.

It wasn’t Roman’s scent. Not exactly. But something in it - the warm, dry bite of it - slipped across her memory like a hand on bare skin.

The way Roman had leaned too close once, murmuring something ridiculous at a shareholder’s meeting just under his breath, his tie brushing her shoulder as he bent forward. She had caught the faintest trace of his cologne then - newer, brighter, more modern - but it had the same undertone: a sharpness softened by something warm.

The ghost of that moment rose up with startling clarity now, as if the years between then and this dim hallway had folded on themselves.

She set the bottle down carefully.

It was impossible to remember him without remembering motion.

The way he fidgeted - rings turning, knuckles cracking, foot bouncing under a conference table. The way his presence carried its own kind of static, an alertness that could collapse into silence without warning.

She leaned against the doorframe, one hand still on the edge of the shelf, and let herself stay there longer than necessary. The smell faded slowly, but the memory held.

The phone call came back to her next.

It hadn’t been long after Logan’s death - a time when grief was raw and feral, not yet dulled into routine. The apartment had been dark except for the pool of light from the desk lamp, casting long shadows across the paperwork she couldn’t bring herself to read. The city outside was unnervingly bright in patches - headlights pooling across her blinds, the buzz of a siren cutting off mid-street.

She remembered hearing the first vibration before she saw the screen. Her phone sat on the corner of the desk, face down. When it lit up, it cast a faint glow against the wood. She turned it over - and there it was: Roman Roy.

Her breath had stilled.

For a second, she considered letting it ring just once, as if to confirm it was real, and then answering. But her hand didn’t move. She watched it instead. The name glowing up at her.

The vibration rattled faintly, like a pulse she could feel in her fingertips.

The memory was strangely physical now, mid-January…nearly half a year later. She could remember how her hand had hovered just above the phone - not touching it, not rejecting it - and how she’d told herself she wasn’t ready. Not for his voice, not for the rawness she might hear there.

She had imagined him on the other end: drunk, probably, his words half-slurred, sliding between aggression and something too close to pain. She’d imagined him sitting alone in a hotel room or his apartment, the television on mute, a half-empty bottle nearby. His fingers pressing against his forehead. His voice a low rasp: “Ger, are you there? I don’t - I don’t know what to do, Ger. I don’t know how to…exist in this.”

She wondered now if he had actually said anything before hanging up. Maybe he’d waited for her voice, hearing only the static silence, and then given up.

She would never know.

After the ringing stopped, she had stared at the darkened screen for a long time, feeling the weight of the missed call like something alive. She hadn’t deleted it. But hadn’t called back either.

She’d placed the phone down on the desk, face up this time, as though the empty black screen might keep her accountable for the choice she’d made.

Now, sitting here months later, she let the memory play out differently.

What if she had answered?

She imagined the brittle pause before he spoke, the sound of his breath filling the line. She imagined his voice cracking, low and unsteady, reaching for her in that quiet, sideways way of his. She would have softened, she knew. She would have let him speak. She might have even said his name - carefully, just once.

Roman.

The thought lodged in her chest like a stone.

She returned to the living room and sat on the edge of the couch, the bottle of cologne still faint on her wrist. The laptop waited on the table.

Roman’s email was open again - she didn’t even remember when she’d clicked it.

She read the first paragraph once. Then again.

Each time, the words shifted slightly, not in meaning but in tone, like a photograph developing under water. The vulnerability was there, quiet, unpolished, but there was also the restraint. The edges where he’d pulled back, not letting himself fall too far in.

She traced the words with her eyes, as if memorizing the curve of each letter could make her understand him better.

The line about the hallway made her stop breathing for a moment.

I wanted to call your name. I didn’t. That’s mine.

She imagined it - the villa, that sharp summer light, the silence between them that had felt heavier than any shouting. She saw herself walking away, not turning, her spine rigid with both defiance and fear.

What would she have done, if he had said her name then?

She didn’t know that either.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.

She opened a new draft.

“Roman—”

She stopped. Deleted his name. Tried again.

“I read your email.”

It looked sterile. Too formal. She deleted it.

She sat for a long time, staring at the blank page, hearing nothing but the faint hum of the radiator.

Then she typed, slower this time:

“You’re not wrong. About the absence.”

Her thumb lingered on the spacebar.

“I’ve felt it too. Maybe longer than I care to admit.”

She read the line three times. It looked too soft, too exposed. She pressed the delete key until the screen was empty again. She shifted, tucking one leg under herself on the couch. Her hands felt cold. She rubbed them together once, then set them back on the keyboard.

Another line appeared:

“I’m not sure I know how to be present either. But I’m here.”

She stared at it for a long moment.

This one, she didn’t delete. Not yet at least.

The room darkened as the sun dropped beyond the skyline. She didn’t turn on the lights. She sat in the growing gray, the laptop screen casting her face in a faint glow, as if the whole world had narrowed down to this one quiet point of contact.

Her drafts folder was still open - all the unsent fragments, the Christmas note, the scraps of half-letters that had never left her screen. She clicked on the old draft, skimmed the first few lines, and felt that ache again, the one that came from trying too hard to be measured when what she wanted was to say too much.

She moved the other draft to a separate folder: Personal.

Not deleted. Not archived. Just put somewhere she could find it when the silence became too heavy.

She read Roman’s email again before she closed her laptop.

Her eyes lingered on the last line, like the words themselves had heat.

I didn’t know how much of my life had your shape in it until I kept tripping over the absence.

She whispered it under her breath, just once. Not as an echo, but as a way of holding it.

Then she closed the screen, the room falling into its natural dark, the faint scent of cologne still ghosting her skin.

Part V - “Pending"

She didn’t open his email again for three days.

Not deliberately. Not as a punishment to him, or to herself. She simply let the days move past her like water over glass, her attention skimming across the surface of tasks and meetings, all while something quiet and heavy remained lodged at the bottom.

It was there every time she opened her inbox — his name, Roman Roy, bold and unwavering in the list of subject lines. She avoided it the way you avoid looking at your own reflection when you’re not ready to face yourself.

The first day she left it alone, she was at the office.

The morning had unfolded with grim predictability - Matsson in one of his moods, flinging out vague insults masked as ideas, Karolina and the PR team scrambling to decode the chaos. Gerri stood at the edge of it all, her phone in hand, checking updates, moving like someone who still carried weight but had no leverage.

By noon, she’d already fielded two terse calls about legal exposure and one tone-deaf suggestion from a board member about “reassuring the markets with a friendly tweet.” She’d smiled tightly at that, the kind of smile that only showed her teeth, and said, “Perhaps not,” before excusing herself to her office.

When the door closed behind her, she exhaled.

Her laptop sat waiting on her desk, screen lit, his name visible at the top of her inbox.

She didn’t open it. Not yet. She couldn’t.

Instead, she clicked through three contracts she’d already reviewed twice, marking comments that felt like overkill. Her body carried the tension of the unacknowledged email - shoulders slightly higher, neck stiff, one hand unconsciously rubbing her ring finger.

By the second day, the guilt had shifted into something else.

She thought of him on the car ride home - not actively, but in a way that crept in when she wasn’t paying attention. A phrase from his email flickered through her head like a half-remembered lyric:

I didn’t know how much of my life had your shape in it until I kept tripping over the absence.

The driver opened the door for her, the cold air rushing in. She stood still, hand on a pole, and imagined him saying that aloud. Not with the quiet clarity of the email, but with his usual sideways inflection, maybe laughing after, as if to soften it.

She wondered how many drafts he’d written before sending the one she had.

That night, she made herself a drink — neat whiskey, something warm that didn’t require ceremony — and sat at her dining table with the glass between her hands. The apartment was silent except for the faint hum of the radiator.

She didn’t read the email. She stared at the black screen of her laptop, fingers tracing condensation on the glass, and let the thought live there, unspoken:

You should answer him.

The thought didn’t move. It just sat, quiet and patient, like a stone at the bottom of a pool.

By the third day, something had shifted.

She noticed it while washing a plate, of all things. A small, ordinary domestic moment - her hands in warm water, the slick surface of ceramic under her fingertips. She realized she wasn’t avoiding the email anymore. Not consciously. It was just there, steady and unrelenting, like an object on a table she had to walk around each time she crossed the room.

She dried her hands on a dish towel, then stood for a moment, watching the steam curl upward from the sink.

She could still feel his words pressing lightly against her ribs.

That evening, Karolina called.

The ringtone startled her — she hadn’t realized how silent the apartment had been until sound split it open. She picked up on the second ring.

“Gerri,” Karolina said, her tone brisk but not cold. “Do you have a minute?”

“Yes,” Gerri replied. Her voice was even, calm, as though she hadn’t spent the past three days circling one unread message like a skittish animal.

“Just checking in about Thursday. Matsson wants to run through messaging again. I told him we don’t need to, but…” Karolina trailed off, the exasperation threading through her words.

“He doesn’t trust that the ground is solid,” Gerri finished for her.

“Exactly,” Karolina said.

There was a pause. Then, more quietly, “How are you holding up?”

“I’m fine,” Gerri said automatically.

“Fine,” Karolina repeated, as though testing the word.

Gerri adjusted her grip on the phone, her thumb pressing faintly into the case. “I’m tired,” she admitted.

“You’ve been tired for months,” Karolina replied, her tone gentler now.

Gerri didn’t answer.

“Look, if you need to-” Karolina began, but Gerri cut her off softly: “I’ll see you Thursday.”

There was a silence on the line, not tense, just aware. Karolina exhaled, then said, “Alright. Try to get some rest, okay?”

“I will,” Gerri said.

When the call ended, she set the phone down slowly, the silence rushing back in like water.

She opened her laptop.

Roman’s name waited.

This time, she clicked.

The email felt different now. Not because the words had changed, they obviously hadn’t, but because she had.

She read the opening line slowly, tracing the cadence of it like she was listening for his voice. The vulnerability she’d noticed before was still there, but now she could also hear the hesitation beneath it - the pauses where he might have stopped, stared at the screen, unsure if the next line was too much.

She reread the paragraph about presence, and this time it hit differently. It wasn’t just an offering. It was a question.

She opened the draft window.

The white screen glared back at her, empty.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard for a long moment, her reflection faintly visible in the black bezel of the laptop screen - her face calm but not unmarked, a faint line between her brows.

Finally, she typed:

“I read it.”

The cursor blinked. She added:

“I’m still here.”

She stared at those words for a long time.

There was no poetry in them. No cleverness. Nothing to hide behind.

Just a simple fact.

Her hand hovered over the trackpad, the “Send” button glowing faintly in the corner of the screen.

She didn’t click it.

The silence of the apartment was sharp, as though even the walls were waiting. She exhaled slowly, her shoulders falling by half an inch.

She whispered the words out loud, as if testing their weight. “I’m still here.”

It sounded different in her own voice - less certain, but more real.

She closed the draft, the words saving automatically into the drafts folder, and leaned back in her chair. Her hands rested palm-down on her thighs, fingers flexing slightly.

The email window stayed open, Roman’s name still bolded at the top of the thread.

She stood and crossed to the window. The city lights blurred through the glass - a wash of pale gold and steel blue. Somewhere down there, life kept moving. People crossed streets, hailed cabs, and held conversations in the cold.

She touched the glass with her fingertips, the chill grounding her.

She thought of him.

I’m still here.

The words felt both too small and exactly right. She didn’t send them. Not yet.

Part VI - “Closing the Window"

The apartment was still when she returned home that night, still in the way a room is after someone leaves, even though she had been the only one there all day. A jacket draped over the back of a chair. Shoes kicked off by the door. A half-finished cup of tea with its teabag slumped, cold, in the bottom. There was nothing inherently lonely about any of it, but the sight of her own things left where she had last dropped them made her chest tighten. It was as if the apartment were holding a conversation she had walked out of hours ago and was reluctant to resume.

She set her keys on the sideboard with more force than necessary, the metallic clink scattering through the silence. Her laptop bag landed next, followed by the gloves she had stuffed into her coat pocket. She loosened her scarf as she moved through the hallway, fingers trailing briefly along the wall, a habit from years ago, when Baird had once teased her about always needing to feel something solid as she walked.

The living room lamp gave a low, honeyed light when she switched it on. She did not yet go to the desk. Instead, she stood for a moment in the middle of the room, coat still on, just taking in the quiet. The city outside was muffled tonight. No sirens, no music floating up from passing cars, just the faint sound of wind pushing through the gaps in the old windows. The kind of cold night that made everything feel wrapped in cotton.

Her eyes went to the far corner of the room, to the narrow bookshelf where the Personal folder sat in digital form on her laptop. She didn’t move toward it yet. The thought of opening it felt like an intrusion into her own defenses.

The Christmas draft.

She knew it was there, waiting like an unopened letter that had been addressed to someone who no longer existed. She had written it in late December, Christmas Eve to be exact, when the season had felt like something distant and strange - all bright lights and noise outside while she sat at her desk just having been reminded of Roman’s christmas card from years ago, trying to compress her thoughts into something she could send without bleeding.

When she finally shrugged out of her coat and sat at her desk now, she opened the folder and saw the date stamped beside the file: Dec. 25, 11:47 p.m. A night she remembered with an almost painful clarity.

The file opened in a clean window. The first line stared back at her:

I hope this finds you well.

She almost laughed. The phrase felt wrong now, wrong in its politeness, wrong in its restraint. Neither of them had been “well,” not then and not now. She could imagine Roman reading it, rolling his eyes, muttering something under his breath about lawyers and their sanitized language.

Her eyes slid down to the next paragraph:

I don’t know if writing to you is wise, or necessary, or even kind. But you’re in my head tonight, and I don’t have another outlet for it.

She paused, her fingers curling faintly against the edge of the desk. There was something raw about that admission, and she wasn’t sure if it embarrassed her or if she missed the version of herself who could say it without worrying how it would be received.

By the third paragraph, she felt herself cringe. She had written about the villa - too much, too openly, naming the silence that had stretched between them like a wound neither of them could touch.

Her throat tightened. She closed the draft, then reopened it, as though the act of shutting it had been too final.

The words weren’t bad, exactly. They were just…not who she was anymore. Not after his email. Not after the weight of everything that had shifted in the past forty-three days.

She closed the laptop briefly and stood, her chair pushing back with a soft scrape against the floor. She crossed to the sideboard and pulled open the bottom drawer. Inside were the small remnants of a life shared: a photo frame, a couple of Baird’s old cufflinks, and another candle he had once picked out on a whim. White wax, smooth glass, a faint scent of sandalwood and smoke that had somehow survived the years.

Her hand lingered on it before lifting it free. She set it on the desk, struck a match, and lit the wick. The flame caught with a small hiss, curling smoke upward before settling into a steady glow.

The scent filled the air slowly, and with it came memory. A winter night years ago - Baird in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, a glass of red wine on the counter while something simmered on the stove. That same candle burning nearby. Music playing low, a vinyl record crackling with warmth. He’d looked over his shoulder at her and smiled, a soft, unguarded smile that had stayed with her long after he was gone.

She sat with that memory for a moment, letting it expand in her chest until it felt like it might break her. Then she exhaled, slow and deliberate, and turned back to the desk.

She needed a drink.

Not for the taste,  though the crisp edge of a dry martini always felt clean, almost medicinal,  but for the ritual. She moved into the kitchen, took a chilled glass from the freezer, and poured the clear liquid with practiced precision. It caught the low light like polished silver, gleaming faintly against the dim room. She held the stem for a moment, fingertips tracing the cold surface, before taking a measured sip.

The first taste was sharp, bracing. But it cleared something in her,a small corner of hesitation, maybe. A layer of static.

She stood at the kitchen counter for a while, leaning against it, glass in hand, staring at the window where the reflection of her own figure stared back.

The martini glass was still cool against her fingertips when she crossed to the window. She didn’t think - not in words, not in anything structured - just unlatched it with a small twist and pushed it open, enough for the January air to slip inside like a sharp breath.

The cold startled her skin, brushing against the warmth of her face and collarbones. It felt almost surgical, as though it could carve through the static that had been sitting under her ribs for days. She rested her free hand on the window frame, fingers splaying slightly against the chipped paint, and leaned into the edge just enough to feel its solidity.

The city outside was subdued but alive, headlights sliding across the glossy black pavement, a pedestrian hurrying with a scarf wound tightly around their neck, a cab idling at the far corner, exhaust curling like smoke into the night. The sounds were faint, distant enough that they might have belonged to someone else’s life entirely.

She took another slow sip of the martini, the cold of the glass biting against the cold of the air, and glanced sideways at the candle on her desk. Its flame flickered each time the draft found its way in, trembling but not going out.

For a moment, she thought of Roman, not in any concrete image but as a presence, the way his voice sometimes carried a rough, restless energy that felt like it could knock something over if he wasn’t careful. She wondered if he ever stood at a window like this, just letting the night spill in, trying to feel the world moving past him.

Her breath became visible, curling into small clouds before vanishing. The simple proof of being alive - exhale, disappear, exhale again. She stayed there, letting the cold creep up her arms, until it was almost too much.

When she turned back to the desk, she didn’t hesitate.

Roman’s email waited.

She opened it again.

The words felt alive now, as though they carried a pulse. She traced the line about the villa with her eyes, her chest tightening at the simplicity of it:

I wanted to call your name. I didn’t. That’s mine.

Her breath caught. She had read this line before, of course, but tonight it pressed against her in a different way, like a confession she hadn’t been ready to hear until now.

She opened the Drafts folder slowly, like lifting the lid on something she wasn’t sure was dead or breathing. The message waited, exactly where she’d left it, its subject line blank, the body short.

She clicked it open.

“I read it.
I’m here.”

The words were as she remembered, but they looked different now, steadier, maybe. Or just quieter. She sat back in her chair, spine loose for a moment, then leaned forward again, rereading it as if for the first time.

Her lips parted slightly, breath catching. She whispered the second line aloud, her voice barely more than a breath: “I’m here.”

It didn’t feel like enough. It felt both too small and somehow too wide open, as if it exposed more of her than she intended while still saying far less than she wanted.

She leaned back in her chair, running a hand slowly through her hair, then leaned forward again, elbows on the desk, fingers hovering over the keys…not to type, but to feel the shape of action, the proximity to choice. She didn’t change a word. She didn’t add anything. She just sat with it, the cursor blinking in the corner like it, too, was waiting for permission to move forward.

The candle flickered in the corner of her vision.

She glanced at it, remembering Baird’s voice - “You don’t have to say everything to be heard, Ger.” He had said that once, years ago, when she’d been trying too hard to fill a silence.

Maybe Roman would understand this. Maybe he didn’t need a monologue. Maybe just this small, steady acknowledgment would be enough.

She hovered over the Send button. Her hand was still, but her heart thudded in her chest, as though anticipating the weight of whatever came next.

Then, without overthinking, she clicked.

The email sent.

The screen flashed its confirmation, simple and unceremonious.

For a long moment, she just sat there, staring at the now-empty draft window, her breath coming in slow, measured pulls. Something in her chest eased, but only slightly. It was not a relief. Not exactly. More like a subtle loosening of the knot that had lived under her ribs for weeks.

She closed the laptop gently, like she was setting down a fragile object.

The window was still half-open, and she crossed back to it, this time with both hands empty. She leaned her palms flat on the sill, letting the cold air bite at her knuckles, and looked out at the city. The candle’s reflection flickered faintly on the glass beside her face, a second version of her standing there in silence.

For a second, the urge to claw it back almost overwhelmed her - as though she could reverse time with a keystroke. But the message was gone now, flying into the quiet night between them, carrying her name on it whether she liked it or not.

Instead, she let herself breathe deeply, one, two, three slow breaths, the air sharp enough to sting as it filled her lungs. Her fingers tingled with the chill, but she didn’t move.

This wasn't a resolution. It wasn’t peace. But it was something. A pause. A place to stand, even if just for a moment.

The candle’s flame trembled behind her. She didn’t blow it out. She just stayed there, watching the city blur beneath her, the night holding its breath with her.

Chapter Text

Part I - “The Reply"

(Late January)

It arrived when he wasn’t looking.

Roman had fallen asleep on the couch again, sprawled sideways with one arm dangling over the edge, still in yesterday’s T-shirt, the blanket twisted somewhere around his ankles like it had been fighting him in the night. The room was half-lit by the gray wash of a winter morning, and his phone was facedown on the floor where it had slid after midnight.

He woke with the kind of slow, sticky disorientation that came from bad sleep and unprocessed thoughts. It wasn’t until he reached for the phone, fingers fumbling over the cool surface, that he noticed the notification bar glowing.

Roman Roy — Inbox (1)

He blinked at it, not fully processing. It didn’t land immediately. There was a second where the words didn’t make sense together, like they belonged to someone else’s life. And then his chest constricted, his stomach folding tight.

Her.

He sat up too fast, the blanket tangling around his knees. His heart thudded, not in the neat, rhythmic way it was supposed to, but in that sharp, uneven staccato that made his breath catch.

The email preview was just a sliver of text:

I read it. I’m here.

That was it. No “Hi.” No punctuation beyond the full stop. Just those six words, flat on the screen, and his entire body felt like it had been slammed with something he hadn’t braced for.

He didn’t open it right away.

Not because he didn’t want to - because he was terrified to. What if that was all there was? What if he opened it and there was nothing more, just that cold, neutral acknowledgment?

His thumb hovered over the screen while his other hand tightened into the blanket, knuckles whitening against the coarse weave.

When he finally clicked it open, the message unfolded in its unadorned entirety.

I read it. I’m here.

Two sentences. If you could call them that.

It wasn’t nothing. But it wasn’t enough. Or maybe it was too much. His head tilted slightly as he stared at the words, like looking at them from another angle would give them context.

He read it again.

I read it.

Which meant she’d read his email, all of it. Every line he’d agonized over, every word he’d deleted and retyped and nearly abandoned. She’d read it and chosen not to address anything he’d said. No reassurance. No anger. No explanation. Just acknowledgement.

And then: I’m here.

What the fuck did that mean? Here in the city? Here in this conversation? Here for him? Or was it just a polite way of saying she existed, nothing more?

His throat felt dry. He read it a third time, his thumb scrolling up and down as if the words might rearrange themselves if he looked long enough.

He stood abruptly, the phone clutched loosely in his hand as though it had burned him, blanket sliding off his knees in a heavy slump to the floor. His legs felt stiff from the awkward position he’d slept in, and for a second he wavered, caught between the dizziness of standing too quickly and the sharp awareness that her name - her words - were still glowing on his screen. He crossed the room in quick, uneven strides, moving toward the window like something there might explain this, his bare feet sticking slightly to the cold wood floor with each step.

The glass was icy against his forehead when he leaned on it, both palms flattening out on either side, breath fogging the surface with shallow clouds that disappeared before they even formed. “She’s here,” he muttered, low and hoarse, like the words might sound different out loud, like he might get some clarity if he heard his own voice say it. The syllables didn’t make sense, not in the way he wanted them to. He turned, panning the apartment with his eyes like the answer might be hidden among the clutter of his own mess, the empty takeout container on the counter, the crumpled hoodie by the door, the blanket on the floor that still held the shape of his legs.

There was a beat of stillness, but his body wouldn’t let him stay in it. He started pacing, sharp turns from the window to the couch, from the couch to the kitchen, his free hand pushing through his hair until it stood up in uneven tufts. He read the line again on his phone, thumb swiping down and back up like maybe another word would appear if he just refreshed it enough.

I read it. I’m here.

Again, what did she mean by that? Here, as in what - the city? The same timezone? Not gone? It sounded so deceptively simple, and yet it cracked open something in him that had been calcified for weeks. He couldn’t tell if it was a comfort or a threat.

He sank onto the arm of the couch, balancing the phone on his knee as his other hand rubbed at the back of his neck. He needed to respond. Something. Anything. But his head was already crowding with possible words, all of them wrong.

Draft 1:

Hey.

Just that. He stared at it like it might rearrange itself into something clever, but it just sat there, bare and stupid, like he’d accidentally texted her as if nothing had happened, as if forty-three days of silence weren’t between them. He erased it with one decisive swipe, jaw tightening.

He stood again, couldn’t sit still. Moved toward the kitchen, only to pivot halfway there, phone still glowing in his hand. The air felt too heavy to breathe.

Draft 2:

Thanks for…being here?

The question mark mocked him. It read like something a confused child would write. His thumb hit the backspace repeatedly, erasing every letter until the screen was blank again.

This time when he sat, he didn’t slump — he perched on the edge of the couch, elbows on his knees, leaning forward with the kind of tension that makes your shoulders ache. The phone balanced in both hands now, like he was holding something fragile and dangerous at once. The silence between him and the glowing screen felt unbearable, like he was bracing for a conversation that hadn’t even started.

Draft 3:

You didn’t have to answer, but I’m glad you did.

He stared at it for longer than the others, rolling the words around in his head, imagining her reading them. Too formal. Too self-conscious. Like he was narrating his feelings rather than just…saying something. He deleted it, thumb slower this time, like even erasing her from his screen felt wrong.

He tossed the phone onto the cushion beside him but couldn’t stop his eyes from sliding back to it, watching as the screen dimmed and went dark. A few seconds passed. Then he picked it up again, fingers clumsy, scrolling back to the email as though her words had shifted in the time it took for him to look away.

I read it. I’m here.

Each time he read it, it felt different. Sometimes like a gesture,  like she’d reached out a hand to steady him. Other times like a test, like she was waiting for him to prove he was capable of responding without breaking everything open again.

When he turned back to the couch, the phone lit up again with the screen saver, Gerri’s email still open. He picked it up, thumb brushing over her name like it was some fragile thing.

Draft 4:

What does “here” mean?

He smirked bitterly at that one. Way too desperate. Deleted.

He sat heavily on the couch next, elbows on his knees, and let his head drop into his hands. He could feel the tension buzzing under his skin, like every muscle was braced for something - impact, rejection, silence.

She’d written back. That should have been a win. But the simplicity of her reply left him scrambling, trying to decode meaning in two short sentences that said everything and nothing.

He tried again.

Draft 5:

I thought about not emailing you at all. But I’m glad I did, if it got this response.

He groaned out loud and backspaced. His tone sounded wrong, too confessional, like he was narrating a bad therapy session.

Roman stood up again and crossed to the kitchen. He grabbed a glass from the cabinet and filled it with water, gulping it down like it might flush out his thoughts. The water was cold and flat, but it helped. Barely.

He leaned against the counter, staring at the phone on the couch across the room.

What did I’m here mean?

It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t an invitation. It wasn’t even a clear acknowledgment of what he’d said to her. But it was something.

It was more than silence. And maybe that was the part that terrified him most that she hadn’t stayed silent.

Draft 6:

I keep reading your two lines like they’ll grow teeth and bite me. Or maybe hug me. I don’t know anymore.

He huffed out a bitter laugh - short, low, barely a sound. It caught in his throat like something had turned sharp on the way out. He stared at the words for a second longer, then erased them, slowly this time, not because he was unsure but because deleting them felt like trying to sweep broken glass off the floor with bare hands.

The phone slipped from his fingers onto the counter with a dull clack. He didn’t flinch.

His head dropped back against the wall behind him. He closed his eyes, trying to regulate his breathing, but it came shallow, uneven. His chest ached - not in a dramatic, poetic way, but like he’d been holding his breath for too long and forgotten how to let it out.

She was here.

She’d said so. In her way. It wasn’t much, but it wasn’t nothing.

It wasn’t silence.

And maybe that was the most terrifying part. That she hadn’t just left it. That after everything - the silence, the disaster of Italy, the endless and ugly aftermath of Logan - she’d still typed something and hit send.

His mind didn’t know what to do with that.

Roman opened his eyes and walked slowly back to the couch. He picked up the phone again, almost reluctantly, as if afraid the message would have vanished that maybe he’d hallucinated it, conjured it up out of sleep deprivation and loneliness. But it was still there, unchanged, those same six words staring up at him.

I read it. I’m here.

He sat down. Then lay back, slowly, stretching out across the couch, one arm flung across his stomach, the other cradling the phone against his chest like he was shielding it from the air. The screen dimmed after a few seconds, but he didn’t turn it off.

He just lay there.

The silence in the room was no longer empty. It was heavy. It pressed in. It made everything too loud, the tick of the clock, the thrum in his ears, the whisper of the city beyond the window.

He blinked up at the ceiling, something sharp and restless behind his eyes that didn’t quite become tears. He wasn’t going to cry. That wasn’t the kind of ache this was.

But her voice - or at least the ghost of it - echoed somewhere in his head. Not in those words. Just the sense of her. The weight of her. That careful distance she always kept, and the way even now, she could say the most devastating thing by saying almost nothing at all.

He let out another breath. Slower this time.

She’s here.

And he didn’t know what the fuck to do with that.

Part II - "Static and Noise"

The city had a kind of silence that wasn’t silence at all. It was the buzz of low traffic and wind splitting between buildings, the distant whir of something mechanical failing under its own weight - scaffolding, signage, the groan of a delivery truck idling on the wrong street. Roman hadn’t stepped outside in three, maybe four days, and now the air hit his face like a dare.

The door shut behind him harder than he meant it to. He flinched. Stood still.

His hands were in his coat pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold, and yet he didn’t move. Not for several seconds. The street was mostly empty. Mid-evening, mid-winter, mid-nothing. But the cold wasn’t bracing. It was numbing. Exactly right.

She had said: I’m here.

Roman exhaled into the wind like it could carry something off of him.

He didn’t know where he was going. He didn't plan to know either.

By the second block, he was already looping.
Not just mentally, but physically. Slowing at every intersection like he’d misremembered the purpose of walking in a straight line, like his body was programmed to turn left at randomness, right at memory.

Her words kept cycling. I read it. I’m here.
They repeated with a clarity that felt almost cruel. They didn’t fade, didn’t blur,  no matter how many headlights streaked across the sidewalk or how many strangers brushed past with their own timelines, their own oblivious noise.

He crossed the street without really seeing it, the faint echo of a siren in the distance rising like a bad thought, and caught his reflection in a dark window just a smear of himself, distorted, blinking. He looked like someone who hadn’t spoken out loud in days.
Which was true.

He turned the collar of his coat up, not for warmth but for something else - something between hiding and holding himself in. His fingers curled in his pockets. He imagined her typing it again. He couldn’t stop.

Had she hesitated over that second line?
Had she thought of deleting it? Had she almost said more?

Had she wanted to say more and then pulled back?
Because that was worse. That was the kind of silence that had teeth.

He could almost see it; the soft light of her apartment, maybe early morning or maybe after midnight, the edge of her reading glasses perched low, her hands still - the way they only were when she was about to say something she didn’t want to regret.
Her finger hovering over “Send.”

Was she scared? Calm? Tired?

He hated not knowing.
He hated that he could still imagine it in such granular detail.
That he could still remember how she used to look when she was holding something back,  the shift in her mouth, the tilt of her head, the way she would smooth her hair even if it didn’t need smoothing.

He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, stopped walking.
Stood still on the corner like an idiot. People passed him on either side like water around a stone.

The stoplight blinked red across his face.

He reread the line again, in his head.

“I’m here.”

Here where ? Here as in - emotionally present? Here in the city? Here on this planet? Here in this email chain from hell?

There were infinite interpretations, and every one of them made him feel too much or not enough.

He passed a pharmacy, a pizza place, the corner where a woman in a rust-red coat brushed past him. The coat looked soft,  not hers, but close enough to remind him of her hands, of how she used to adjust her sleeves before meetings, precise and automatic, like she was centering herself in silence. His stomach curled in response.

He’d expected silence. Or maybe no response at all. That would’ve been easier, cleaner. She had emailed him back and now he didn’t know where to put his body.

He turned left without thinking. Another block. Another question. Another echo.

“I’m here.”

There was no warmth in the punctuation. No exclamation mark, no ellipsis. Just a period. Firm. Factual. Like she was reporting from a distance.

Roman walked faster.

He found himself outside a café he didn’t recognize. The lights were too warm, the inside too full. But the windows were fogged and the hum of conversation inside was low and forgiving. He pushed the door open anyway.

The heat hit him immediately - false, humid, too much. He stood awkwardly near the door, letting the chill evaporate from his coat. No one looked up. A girl with curly hair was reading at the bar. A couple sat too close together by the wall, laughing into their coffee.

He sat. He shouldn’t have. But he did.

A barista asked if he wanted something. Roman didn’t answer at first. His throat worked around the air like he had to remember how speech functioned. “Uh. Tea,” he said finally, like it was a foreign word. “Just - yeah.”

When the cup arrived, he didn’t touch it. Just stared at it. Steam rose and curled and disappeared.

He opened his phone again. Scrolled to the message.

I read it. I’m here.

He stared until the letters blurred. Tried to imagine her typing it,  tried to guess what her face had looked like when she hit send. Calm? Sad? Annoyed?

He imagined her in another scenario, backlit in her apartment, wearing those reading glasses she hated to be seen in, fingers pausing over the keyboard before she allowed those two short lines to leave her. He imagined her deleting something longer to send only that.

What had she deleted? What had she wanted to say that she didn’t?

He sipped the tea. It tasted like water with intentions. 

Roman left the café five minutes later. The cup was still half full. The door clicked shut behind him and the wind caught his jacket again, tugging at the edges like a reminder.

Somewhere around East 50th, Roman realized he wasn’t really choosing his direction anymore. His feet were doing the work, pushing him forward with a kind of instinct that had nothing to do with logic. He wasn't walking to get anywhere. He was walking because the alternative was stopping. And if he stopped, he might look too long at that message again, and if he looked too long, he might start inventing meanings he couldn’t undo.

You’re walking, he thought then. Congratulations. Big boy. Putting one foot in front of the other. And look - no visible collapse.

The sidewalk here was slick with a sheen of salt-streaked slush, and the air smelled like overcooked onions from the halal cart near the corner, mingled with the metallic bite of taxi exhaust and snowmelt. The city was doing what it always did: moving. Grinding on without permission. And Roman was just another figure walking too fast, too slow, too crooked down its spine.

He turned up his coat collar again. The wind shot between the buildings like a whispered dare.

I’m here.

The words repeated again, uninvited. They weren’t gentle now. They pressed at his temples, behind his eyes. The more he tried to leave them alone, the more they followed,  a tap on the shoulder he couldn’t turn fast enough to face.

What did “here” mean?

It wasn’t with you . It wasn’t I miss you . It wasn’t anything that gave him permission to feel what he was feeling.

It was a breadcrumb. And it was driving him insane.

“I’m here.”

That could mean: I got your email. This is polite acknowledgement. This is the bare minimum.
Or it could mean: I’m still thinking about you too. I haven’t disappeared.
Or worse, worse than anything really, it could mean: I don’t know what to say either.

Roman shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and ducked his head, as if the sentence itself had weight and the only way to keep it off his chest was to press forward into the wind.

He thought about punctuation again.

Why a period? Why not an ellipsis? Why not something looser, more vulnerable?

But then…this was Gerri . If she’d used an ellipsis, he would’ve read it as a trailing off, uncertainty. And a question mark would’ve unspooled him completely.

No, the period was worse because it was intentional.

He passed a liquor store. The bottles in the window glinted like teeth. A street performer was setting up across from it, not music, but some sort of puppet show. Roman didn’t stop walking. His legs ached a little. His phone buzzed once in his pocket - not her. He didn’t check.

Somewhere above, a woman on a fire escape lit a cigarette and tilted her face upward toward the sky. Her silhouette was all collarbones and stillness. Roman looked away fast.

He kept seeing her. In coats. In the shadows. In the way a woman laughed behind him. In the absence of her voice every time he remembered how little she’d said.

It had been six words.

Six.

And they’d cracked something open in him that had held through funerals and eulogies and months of nothing. That was the thing - the wrong thing. He hadn’t wanted hope. Not really. Hope was fucking dangerous. Hope made everything worse.

He passed a street vendor packing up. The guy was dragging a tarp over a rack of scarves, and for a second Roman pictured Gerri wearing one of them, some elegant, impersonal gray thing that she'd loop twice around her neck before tightening it without thinking. It shouldn’t have made him ache, but it did. He didn’t even know if she wore scarves. Maybe she hated them. Maybe he’d made all of it up.

He crossed the street again without looking.

There was no plan. No end point. Just this movement, city block after city block, streetlight after streetlight, as if maybe if he kept going, he could outpace the six words chasing him through his own skull.

Later, much later, after too many wrong turns and a stretch of empty sidewalk that made him feel like the last person alive in a city designed for someone else, Roman ended up in a convenience store.

Fluorescent lights, bad music, a row of wine bottles behind dusty glass, none of which Gerri would ever drink. But still, he walked the aisles like he was looking for something.

He paused at a shelf of bath salts, eyeing the names - lavender serenity , deep relief , rose sea glow . Did she still like that rose one? Or had that been someone else? Had he imagined it?

He picked it up. Put it back.

He lingered at the cold drinks. Bottled sparkling water, the kind she used to keep in her office, crisp, unflavored. He bought it once just to match. She never noticed.

He hovered near the chocolate, the gum, the lip balm rack with fifteen options she probably wouldn’t like. He could hear her voice in his head - dry, skeptical, amused. I don’t need any of that.

And wasn’t that the whole problem? He didn’t know what she needed anymore.

Maybe he never did.

Roman stood in the middle of the store, motionless, his fingers resting lightly on the edge of the counter. The clerk looked up but said nothing. He must’ve looked like someone who didn’t belong to any particular scene.

He didn’t buy anything. He walked out into the cold again, slower now. Numb.

He ended up at the waterfront. Not on purpose. The breeze off the river snapped at his coat, pressed against his legs. He stared out at the black chop of the water, lights skimming its surface, and tried to feel something.

He thought about the drafts he didn’t send. About the words he hadn’t said. About the way her reply had both steadied him and knocked him off balance in the same breath.

The phone in his hand felt heavier than it should.

He read her message again.

I’m here.

He exhaled. Finally.

Then he whispered it aloud, this time for no one.

“I know.”

Part III - “Drafts (Again)"

The apartment was still when he came back. 

Not quiet, exactly - the radiator hissed in short, angry bursts and the fridge made a mechanical clunk every twenty-three minutes - but still in that unoccupied way. Like no one had really been living here, just passing through. Roman stepped inside and shut the door too gently, as though anything louder might startle the calm he didn’t feel.

The coat stayed on. He stood there in the hallway, phone still in hand, thumb hovering over her name.

He didn’t open the message again.

Not yet.

 Eventually he moved, not because he wanted to but because standing still too long made it worse. He dropped his keys on the counter, took off the coat and laid it across the back of the couch, deliberately neat, like he was setting a stage. The city was still under his skin - the cold in his shoulders, the streetlight shapes still printed behind his eyes, her words still repeating like breath.

I read it. I’m here.

He crossed the room and sat. The leather groaned under him. He pulled his legs up, knees tucked loosely toward his chest, the phone cradled in one hand like it might overheat or detonate.

Then he opened the message. And read it again.

I read it.
I’m here.

He stared at the screen. Nothing new. Same two sentences, same flat period at the end. But it felt different now…heavier. He’d walked miles with it looping in his head, worn it like a stone in his shoe, and somehow it had still retained its sharpness.

He unlocked his laptop. The screen lit up too bright in the dark room. He opened his sent mail.

There it was - his message to her.

And now, reading it through the lens of her reply, it struck him differently. Worse.

What he’d written hadn’t felt excessive at the time. Measured, even. He had kept things clipped, layered, distanced. No direct plea, no meltdown, just a perfectly Roman Roy sort of offering: cracked open, but dressed like he wasn’t.

But side by side with hers, it read like a spasm.

His lines had loops in them. Revisions built into the syntax. Parentheticals, hesitations, self-corrections, all of it there like scar tissue under the skin. He hadn’t said he missed her, not outright, but it was in the language. It leaked. The restraint only made the longing more visible.

And then hers, below it:

I read it. I’m here.

Six words.

And they hit harder than his entire paragraph.

Because they didn’t try. Because they didn’t explain. Because they didn’t reach for him, and somehow that was worse than if they had.

He reread his opening line. The one he’d agonized over for three days. How formal it sounded now, how carefully distressed. He hadn’t begged, but it had begging energy.
She hadn’t matched it. Not even close.

Roman leaned back, letting the full imbalance of it hit him. He’d offered vulnerability wrapped in a disclaimer. She’d given him presence wrapped in silence.

It made his stomach turn. Not because he resented her. But because he understood it.
She had always known how to communicate with precision. She’d always been better at saying nothing and meaning everything.

And now, now - the part that made him sweat under his skin - he didn’t know what to do with that space she’d opened and immediately stopped short of walking into.

It was an invitation.
Or a refusal. Or both. Or neither.

He opened a blank reply.

The screen glared at him, too bright in the dim apartment, a flat white void with a blinking cursor that already felt like judgment. The draft box was empty and waiting. And so was he. Sitting there, one leg curled beneath him, hunched over as though protecting something invisible in his chest.

He cracked his knuckles. Stretched his fingers. Typed:

Thanks for being here.

Stared.

He read it aloud under his breath, barely audible, barely real: “Thanks for being here.”

It didn’t sound like him.

It sounded like the kind of thing you say when someone shows up at your father’s funeral with a bland expression and a casserole. It sounded like a post-it note from someone who had already packed up their half of the apartment.

He hated how safe it was. How performatively grateful. He didn’t want to perform.
Not now. Not for her.

Backspace. Gone.

He stood up, too fast. Pushed off the couch with both hands like he’d been burned. Crossed the apartment in six uneven strides, then circled back again, rubbing the heel of his palm across his forehead.

The cursor blinked behind him. Mocking him.

He grabbed a glass from the counter, filled it with cold water. Drank half in one go. Set it down and stared at it like it might refill with something smarter.

Went back to the laptop.

Draft 1:

I keep thinking about what you said. Or didn’t say. That second line.

His hand hovered. Then continued.

I don’t know what “here” means. But I keep hearing it in my head. Like it’s echoing.

He paused. Scanned it. It looked…fragile.

Too fragile.
He hated how much it sounded like he was waiting - for her to define it, for her to give it shape, for her to say what he couldn’t bring himself to.

Delete.

He exhaled, sharp and shaky. Leaned forward again, this time resting his elbows on his knees. The screen was just at eye level now. Eye to eye with his own cowardice.

Draft 2:

Didn’t think I’d hear anything. Almost didn’t write. But I’m weirdly glad I did.

He read it twice. A third time.

It sounded like therapy-speak. Like something he'd rehearsed in a mirror with a life coach. Like he was giving a TED Talk called “How to Sound Emotionally Stable When You’re Absolutely Fucked.”

He groaned and deleted it in one breath.

The radiator hissed behind him. One long, metallic exhale like it was annoyed by all of this too. Roman sat back. Closed the laptop, just for a second. Then he opened it again.

Draft 3:

I don’t want to fuck this up. Whatever this is.

He stared.
No, too direct. Too obvious. It sounded like a line from a breakup conversation that happened five scenes ago in a show where the audience already knew the ending.

He rested his fingers on the keys.

Added:

But maybe I already did. That’s the thing…I’m always late to whatever I’m supposed to say.

He sat still. His face burned. It felt like pulling his ribs apart and asking someone to comment on the arrangement.

Delete.

The silence wrapped tighter around him now. He rubbed his thumb along the laptop’s edge, head tilted just slightly to one side. His reflection in the black window across the room was faint and skeletal - all jawline and ghosted posture.

He didn’t look like someone who could write the right thing. He didn’t look like someone she’d wait for.

Draft 4:

I’m not asking for anything. I just wanted to be honest.

He shook his head before even finishing the sentence. That wasn’t true. He was asking.
For acknowledgement. For clarity. For a continuation.

He backspaced.

The next one he didn’t even finish.

He started a line. Backspaced. Started another. Sat with his fingers hovering, then dropped them flat against the keys without pressing anything. Typed half a sentence. Stopped. Deleted it before the thought was resolved. It wasn’t just that it didn’t sound right - it didn’t feel safe. Nothing did.

There were fragments. Phrases circling in his head like anxious birds:

You didn’t have to reply. But you did.

He typed that one, then paused with his thumb pressed to the space bar like he might need to escape quickly. It looked needy. He erased it.

Then:
I keep reading it like it’s a full paragraph.

He stared at that line. It was true, her words had taken up residence in his skull, playing on loop like a song that changed meaning each time. He tried to write more. The cursor blinked, unimpressed. He deleted that too then.

He leaned back, exhaled. Closed his eyes for a second.

Then typed again, softly:

I don’t know what it means that you’re here.

And beneath it, barely a whisper on the keyboard:

Do you want me to write back? Do you want me to disappear?

His finger hovered over the period. He didn’t press it. The whole thing stared back at him like it belonged to someone younger, someone exposed, a version of himself he was supposed to have grown out of.

It didn’t look right on the page. None of it did.

It all felt like too much and not enough at once like handing someone a broken lock and asking them to find the key.

He sighed, long and low. Held the delete key down and watched the lines vanish, one character at a time. 

Moments later, he ran both hands down his face and looked at the ceiling, as if God might beam down an edit.

No such luck.

Draft 5:

I keep writing drafts that don’t feel right. This one probably doesn’t either.

That one was honest. But he knew how it would read, desperate, self-conscious. Trying too hard not to try too hard. He hated the way his own honesty clung to the edges of the screen like sweat.

Deleted.

He stood again, this time slower and walked to the window. Looked out. Nothing but sodium-lit stillness. A delivery bike gliding silently down the street. Someone with a dog. The dog looked cold.

His forehead pressed lightly to the glass. The city was the same. But he wasn’t. He went back to the couch. Not because he had anything to say, but because not saying something was starting to hurt more than the risk.

Draft 6:

I meant what I said.

He added:

Even the parts I didn’t say.

And then stopped.
It felt like something. It felt close.

But the nearness of it made him flinch.

He let his hands fall away from the keyboard. The screen glowed. He didn’t move.

Ten minutes passed. Maybe twenty. The cursor still blinked.

He didn’t move, he didn’t continue the reply. Not because he didn’t want to. But because the wanting felt like a risk.

And he didn’t know if she’d catch it…or let it fall.

His fingers hovered over the keys one last time, not to type, just… to remember the shape of wanting. That impulse. That edge. And then he closed the laptop, slowly. Like sealing something alive inside.

It wasn’t resignation, not exactly. It was more like stalling the crash.

He pressed his palms to his knees and stayed like that for a while, spine curved forward, head bowed like he was waiting for a verdict from some silent, invisible jury that would never speak. The apartment felt smaller than it had that morning. Shrunk by possibility. Or by the illusion of it. He reached for the phone again.

Opened her message once more, though he could’ve recited it from memory now.

I read it. I’m here.

He blinked slowly, as though the words might shift if he softened his gaze. He reread them the way you might study a photograph of someone who used to look at you differently.

“I’m here.”

Here could mean so many things.

Still in New York. Still working. Still breathing. Still angry. Still curious. Still hers.

Or not.

Here could mean not gone , but also not coming closer .

He wondered if she’d known exactly what she was doing with that line - that economy of language that pressed all the weight onto him , left him to carry the interpretation, the reaction, the silence.

And he would. He always would. He would carry it and fold it into himself and let it crack his ribs from the inside. Roman let the phone fall back to the cushion beside him. He didn’t trust himself to hold it anymore.

He stood again, restless, the kind of agitation that started under the skin and radiated outward - not enough to scream, too much to stay still.

He moved through the apartment like he might find an answer in the hall closet or under the sink. But there was nothing. 

Just himself and a blinking cursor that didn’t blink anymore because he’d shut the screen. Still, it pulsed behind his eyes.

He wandered to the bookshelf. Not to read. Just to touch something. He trailed a finger along the spines…books he hadn’t opened in years, books she’d once recommended. One still had the dog-eared page she’d marked, back when she used to send him articles and say “you might actually finish this one.”

He picked that one up. Didn’t open it. Set it back down.

He didn’t need metaphors. He needed air.

And maybe less of himself.

Part IV - “The Days Between"

The days didn’t blur. That would have been easier.

Instead, they landed - distinct, dense, ungiving. Thursday was cold and sharp-edged, the kind of weather that made his fingertips sting even inside. Friday tasted like dust. Saturday stretched out like it might never end and then collapsed into a single blink.

He was functioning. Technically. Getting dressed, most days. Answering two emails, maybe three. He’d started cooking again, or, more accurately, standing in the kitchen long enough to burn something on purpose and throw it away.

She hadn’t written again. Not that she’d said she would.

But she hadn’t not said it either.

The line kept playing in his head - I’m here - like it had lodged behind his ribs and was now part of his circulatory system. A refrain. A static hum. Not a promise, just…a presence. But it kept him on edge, more than silence had. Silence had been expected. Safe in its finality.

This was worse.

It suggested the possibility, and he didn’t know how to live in that.

On Sunday he sat on the floor of his apartment for nearly two hours without moving. Just leaned against the couch with his knees bent and stared at the baseboard where the paint chipped. It looked like a map if he tilted his head. A country he didn’t recognize. Maybe her.

He thought of calling her. Actually doing it.

He thought about actually picking up the phone. Just…dialing. Her number still lived in his contacts, untouched but never unloved, buried under a name he hadn’t been able to delete - Gerri Kellman - as if formal distance might buffer whatever still lived between them.

He imagined pressing the screen, waiting through the rings. Imagined her answering, or not. Imagined the pause, her voice catching just slightly when she heard it was him. Or not catching at all. Maybe she'd sound the same. Maybe she'd sound different. Maybe she’d hang up. Maybe she wouldn’t.

He imagined himself saying her name out loud, into the small space between his mouth and the phone. Gerri. Just that. Nothing rehearsed. No witty deflection. Just her name, raw and exposed.

But even in imagination, his throat closed. Because she hadn’t opened that door.

Not in those two lines. Not even a crack. She hadn’t said call me . She hadn’t said let’s talk . She hadn’t asked him a question. She’d given him presence without path…an offering without a next step.

And he couldn’t risk turning that here into gone.

Because she was still there,wherever here was, and that liminal space, that fragile almost-but-not-quite, was more than he’d expected and somehow less than he could hold.

And if he called?

If he said something wrong, or too much, or too soon - if he asked for something she wasn’t ready to give - then maybe she would retreat. Fold back into that silence that had nearly gutted him the first time.

So he didn’t call.

He sat with the urge instead. Let it run laps in his bloodstream. Let it settle behind his sternum and scratch.

It felt like holding your breath at the edge of a pool, knowing the water is cold, but not being able to move.

He called Shiv instead.

Or maybe she called him, he couldn’t remember. It was Monday afternoon, and he was standing at the window, watching a pigeon struggle with a chunk of bagel twice its size, wings twitching with purpose and indignity, when her name lit up his screen.

He answered without thinking.

“Hey,” he said, voice flat but not unkind, a scratchy low tone like he hadn’t spoken to another human being in a while and wasn’t sure how it would come out.

“Roman,” she replied, her voice a little hoarse, like she’d just woken up or maybe hadn’t stopped talking all day. There was warmth there, but it was buried, dulled by something heavier.

She paused. “You alive?”

“Define alive,” he muttered. Then, after a beat, “My heart’s technically doing something.”

“Good to know,” she said, dryly, but it didn’t quite land. Another pause. “You sound…weird.”

He flinched at the word, not visibly, but it landed like a cough behind his ribs. “Wow. Thanks.”

“No, I mean-” she sighed, the exhale brushing against the mic, frustrated but fond. “Just not your usual self. Not cracking jokes. Not, I don’t know…insulting me with charm.”

He smiled faintly, without conviction. “I’ll work on my tone for next time.”

There was a stretch of quiet - not strained, but soft, tentative.

“Is something going on?” she asked, this time more gently. Her voice dropped, careful now, like she was lowering herself to a place where he might meet her.

He could hear the faint rustle of fabric, maybe she was shifting on the couch, or standing, pacing the room like she always did when she didn’t know what to do with her hands.

“Nope,” he said quickly, too easily.

“Roman,” she said again, firmer now, low and skeptical.

“Nothing’s going on, Shiv,” he said, sharper than before. Then softened, like he regretted the edge. “Just…a weird week. Month. Year. Pick a unit.”

She didn’t laugh, but he heard her settle back into her breath. “Did you talk to Kendall?”

“No.” The answer snapped out of him. Immediate. Clipped. “Why would I?”

“He asked about you,” she said, tone lighter now, but still holding something.

“That’s rich.” He sank down to the floor, letting his back rest against the wall, the cold hardwood pressing through his jeans and into the back of his knees. “Tell him I said hi and that the trauma still fits.”

“You’re not alone, you know,” she said, quietly like it cost her something to say it. Not accusatory, just present.

He didn’t respond.

She let the silence stretch. “You eating?”

“Yeah.”

“Liar.”

That earned a short, breathy laugh from him, barely there, but real. “You’re six months pregnant and trying to parent me from a thousand miles away.”

“Somebody has to,” she replied, but there was no bite in it. Just fatigue and something resembling care.

Another beat of silence. He could almost hear the shape of her hand resting over her stomach.

“I miss you,” she added, her voice dropping even further, like she didn’t want to admit it but needed him to know.

He swallowed. “Yeah. Same.”

They didn’t say goodbye. Just drifted out of the call like two people walking away from each other in different directions, neither one turning around.

The flashback hit on Tuesday.

It wasn’t dramatic. It never was.

He’d been looking for a charger and pulled open the drawer in the hallway, the one where all the meaningless objects lived: expired gum, a battery from a remote he didn’t use anymore, a takeout menu with Gerri’s handwriting in the corner. He froze.

It wasn’t her number. Just a note; “no cilantro in mine.” A joke, probably. But her handwriting was distinct: deliberate, clean, efficient.

And suddenly he was back sometime in August - or late July maybe - the weeks after Logan’s death had bled into each other, sleepless and misshapen. The air then had felt like soup. Everyone had moved like they were underwater. Kendall had been holding the reins too tightly. Shiv was burning from the inside out and pretending she was fine. And he—

He’d picked up the phone before he thought about it. Thumb hovering over her name. Gerri Kellman - still formal in his contacts, always had been, as though calling her anything else might suggest something too close to the bone. Her contact photo was still the one she hadn’t known he’d saved; profile, head turned, mid-laugh at a joke he probably didn’t finish.

He remembered the way the light in the room looked; blue-gray, the kind of filtered city dusk that makes everything feel untethered. The television had been on but silent, casting a flicker across the ceiling like it was trying to signal something from another life.

The bottle on the table was half-empty. Not dramatic. Not tragic. Just tired.

He didn’t have a script. He didn’t know what he was going to say. Just knew that the weight had gotten too loud inside his chest and her name was the only thing that made any sense.

The ring tone felt endless.

He imagined her across town, maybe at her desk, maybe reading. Maybe already asleep, though she never used to go to bed early. Maybe she was out. Maybe she saw his name and let it ring.

He pictured her doing exactly that: letting the phone buzz once, twice, holding her breath with her hand near the screen but not touching it. He saw her mouth set in that calm, unreadable line. Her eyes narrowed slightly. Not angry. Just…still. He almost said something before it connected. Just to the open air. “Ger?” - a whisper, no bite to it. But the line hadn’t picked up. There was nothing. No breath, no static. Just the absence of her.

He pictured her voice, the version of it he missed, not the clipped professional one but the version he’d only ever really heard once or twice: quiet, private, slightly broken. Ger, are you there? I don’t - I don’t know what to do, Ger. I don’t know how to…exist in this.

But he didn’t say it. Couldn’t. The words dissolved in his throat. The call rang out and went to voicemail. He hung up. Didn’t leave a message. Just stared at the screen like it had betrayed him somehow.

Later, he wouldn’t even remember if he’d been hoping she would answer. Maybe just the possibility had been enough. Maybe the silence had felt safer than her voice.

But now, months later, in the dry choke of late-January, the memory came back sharp. Not dramatic, not devastating, just close. Like a splinter under the skin he hadn’t pulled out. He still didn’t know what he would’ve said if she had answered. But he knew exactly how her voice would’ve sounded if she had.

He folded the menu and put it back. Then he closed the drawer too hard, the noise echoed. He didn’t open his email that day. Didn’t check for new messages. Didn’t draft anything. He just sat with the version of himself who had almost reached out and hadn’t, and felt the weight of it settle into the bones like it had always been there.

Part V - “Compulsion (Again)"

He told himself it was just walking. Getting out of the apartment, moving his limbs and letting the cold do something to his system that a space heater and stale silence couldn’t.
But Roman had never really been good at lying to himself, not when it mattered.

It started small. An urge to go somewhere, nowhere in particular, just out. The city was grey in that uniquely mean way,  not picturesque, not even dramatic, just tired. Sidewalk slush gathered in hostile ridges at the curbs. People moved like they were bracing for more than weather. He liked that. It made his own restlessness feel less specific.

He didn’t dress for anything. Black hoodie, coat, scarf loose around his neck like a half-thought. Gloves he didn’t wear. He left his apartment without locking it, then went back and did. Then he stood in the hallway for a full twenty seconds, just staring at the door.

He had no destination. But his feet, traitorous things, seemed to.

The subway was barely occupied,  a few slouched passengers, eyes flicking up like they resented being perceived. He stood rather than sit, swaying slightly with each lurch, one hand gripping the metal pole that felt colder than bone. He didn’t wear earbuds. Let the screech of the train drown out whatever was knocking around in his head. He got off two stops past where he’d meant to.

He wasn’t far from her building. Not close either,  not too close at least, but near enough that it lodged behind his ribs like a whisper. That street was three blocks east. He didn’t go down it. He told himself that was restraint. Instead, he walked. Crossed into Midtown, turned down side streets lined with buildings that all looked like they were holding their breath. Some part of him catalogued the windows, the light inside them, half-wondering if one might be hers even though he knew where she lived, even though he had absolutely no intention of going there, even though he didn’t even know if she was home.

It wasn’t about going anywhere…it was about being where she might be, where memory might bloom.

He passed a restaurant she once mentioned in passing -  not to him directly, but on a call he’d overheard. She’d laughed at the name, something absurdly French. He slowed near the door. Didn’t look in and then kept going. 

A man brushed past him on the sidewalk, the edge of his coat catching Roman’s wrist. For a second, the scent was familiar. Not identical but close enough to trigger something sharp. Sandalwood, maybe. That edge of citrus she always wore, subtle and expensive, like a secret she wasn’t telling.

His stomach turned. Not because it was painful. But because it wasn’t.

He stopped at the corner of 50th and 3rd and just stood there. Cars idled at the red light, casting their headlights in long, restless lines over his shoes. He didn’t move, he wanted to, he wanted to turn, cross, vanish into a direction he couldn’t name. But the stillness held.

And somewhere under that: the pull .

The stupid, impossible, unbearable desire to just see her. Not speak. Not ask for anything. Not say sorry or explain. Just…see. Proof of life.

He imagined walking past her. Not bumping into her, not dramatic. Just parallel. Her coat cinched, maybe earbuds in, her mouth set in that private line she wore when she was thinking three steps ahead. Her eyes sweeping past him, not in avoidance, but because she didn’t see him. Because he didn’t exist in that version of her day.

The thought made his chest hollow and he kept walking.

His hands were cold inside his pockets, the kind of cold that made you feel everything too vividly, not really numb, just very sensitive. The backs of his knuckles felt bruised from clenching. He flexed them, trying to shake it out.

A deli was open on the next block, one of those twenty-four-hour places that sold aspirin and birthday balloons in the same aisle. He stepped in, not to buy anything, just to stand, to pretend. The warmth inside hit him like a question he couldn’t answer. He wandered the aisles like someone looking for something he’d forgotten to write down, passed the freezer, the candy shelves, the sad plastic-wrapped sandwiches. And then he stopped and looked at a bottle of mineral water, looked at a row of ginger teas, and looked at a box of those crackers he vaguely remembered Gerri keeping in her office once -  neat, rectangular, plain.

He stared at them like they might give him something. A signal. A clue. Did she still like those? Would she laugh at him for even wondering?

His hands stayed at his sides. He walked out without buying anything. Back into the cold, into the night, into the version of the city that always felt half-haunted in late January. The sky was colorless. The sidewalks were wet and everything smelled like heat and rot and rain.

Only later faintly remembered how just days or maybe weeks ago he stood in this random convenience store and wondered about the same questions…

He didn’t walk toward her neighborhood again however. Not directly but he circled near enough that it burned.

Back home, the elevator felt claustrophobic. His reflection in the metal door looked unfamiliar… gaunt, distracted, like he’d been running from something invisible. He didn’t open her message again that night and he didn't draft a new one either. Just sat on the couch in the dark, one hand curled into his sleeve, the city humming outside like a thing with teeth.

He was tired. But not enough to sleep, not enough to forget the compulsion - still there, still humming under his skin like static. The want didn’t go away but he didn’t act on it. And somehow, that restraint ached worse than the risk.

Part VI - “Almost"

The apartment was dark again. Roman hadn’t turned on any lights when he came back, not out of intentional mood-setting, just inertia. The faint spill of light through the window was enough. It pooled across the hardwood like something waiting. Shadows hovered in the corners, patient and undemanding. He didn’t sit right away. Just stood by the door for a long minute, coat still on, like his body hadn’t quite made it all the way inside. The city still clung to his skin - concrete wind in his hair, the grain of subway grit on his cuffs, a phantom buzz of fluorescent lights behind his eyes. He felt overstimulated and underfed at the same time.

When he finally moved, it was without hurry. He shrugged off the coat and dropped it on the arm of the couch, then crossed to the kitchen for a glass of water, more out of ritual than thirst. He drank in slow swallows, the glass balanced loosely in his hand like a fragile object he hadn’t decided whether to keep or smash. The room around him was still;  no TV, no music. Just the building noises: radiator ticks, an occasional screech from the cars outside, wind shifting against the windows like it wanted inside.

Roman set the glass down and turned toward the desk. He stood there for a second, just looking at the closed laptop like it might ask something of him. Then he opened it. The screen came to life with that too-bright wash that felt almost surgical.

Inbox. Still open.

Her message:
I read it. I’m here.

He’d read it a hundred times. Maybe more. It had imprinted itself somewhere just behind his ribs, where breath turned into something harder. The words didn’t change. But the space around them did. Her silence had taken on texture. And it made him want - more .

Not answers. Not forgiveness. Just something to place next to that silence. Something that might move it forward a single inch.

His cursor blinked in the reply box. He didn’t move.

Not yet.

Roman leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees, shoulders curled in like a held breath. The apartment felt smaller than usual, like the walls had edged in while he was out. He watched the cursor blink like it was daring him.

And then, slowly, his fingers found the keys. He started to type.

Draft (maybe more?):

I don’t really know how to say this right. But I’m trying, so…that counts, I guess.

Your reply - I keep reading it like it’s going to change, like the words will rearrange themselves if I look hard enough. They don’t. But something about them keeps shifting in my chest anyway.

I don’t know what “here” means. Or who I am in relation to that anymore. But I know it mattered that you said it.

I didn’t write to you expecting anything. I mean, okay…maybe I did. Not in the demanding sense, just in the part-of-me-hoping-you-still-think-about-it sense. I didn’t want to beg. I didn’t want to make it worse. I just wanted you to know that I hadn’t forgotten.

Because I haven’t.

I don’t even mean the big dramatic stuff. I mean the smaller things. The sound of your voice when you were tired but still sharp. The way you said my name when you didn’t trust me to behave. That look. The one that said “don’t do it” even before I opened my mouth.

I think about all of that. And not because I’m stuck. Or not just because of that. But because those things mattered more than I let on. More than I ever said.

You don’t have to reply again. I get it. I do. If “I’m here” is all I ever get, I’ll take it. I’ll carry it. Just…

I guess I wanted you to know that I’m still here too.

That’s all.

He stared at the screen. The words sat there, inert. Peaceful, almost. Like they had finally found their shape and settled into it. Roman didn’t move.

His hands hovered near the keyboard, not touching. His posture was hunched, but not with tension,  more like reverence. Like if he shifted too much, the balance would tip and the moment would scatter.

He read the message again. And again. Each time, it sounded a little different. Not better. Not worse. Just…different.

The cursor hovered over Send .

He didn’t click it. Not yet at least.

Because sending it meant pushing the moment forward, meant inviting something he couldn’t control. It meant risking the fragile balance - the rare, careful stillness that had settled between them. It meant wanting something out loud.

And he wasn’t sure he could bear that yet. Instead, he hit Save as Draft .

The screen flickered. The message folded itself quietly into the “Drafts” folder. Tucked away. Held, but not offered.

Roman sat back and let his head fall against the back of the chair. Closed his eyes.

Exhaled.

It wasn't a resolution, not even close. But something inside him had shifted. The paralysis had cracked, just a little. And in the quiet of that small movement, he let himself believe - just for a second - that this might be enough.

For now.

Chapter Text

Part I - “February Light"

The first morning of February arrived thin and gray, a sheet of diluted sun stretched weakly over the skyline. It didn’t feel like the beginning of anything. It felt like a pause that had settled too deep into her bones to be dislodged by something as arbitrary as a calendar date.

The light was blue that morning.

Not cold, exactly, but diffused,  the kind of pale, indifferent light that filtered through the floor-to-ceiling windows like it had no particular urgency. It stretched across the hardwood, across the edges of a wool rug in need of cleaning, and finally across the fabric of Gerri’s robe as she moved through the quiet of her apartment. The heating was on, but inconsistently. There was a faint chill in the corners of the room, near the windows, near the walls.

She touched her arm without thinking. A dull ache nestled somewhere between the outer edge of her shoulder and the tendon that ran along her upper bicep. Not sharp, nothing pulled,  but enough to make her pause mid-reach. She rolled her shoulder back. It had probably happened yesterday, or the day before. A bruise, invisible under skin that still looked smooth in the mirror but which ached more readily now, more often. She pulled her sleeve down over it.

In the kitchen, she reached for the kettle with her left hand instead of the right. The ache lingered, but she didn’t give it language. Just noted it, moved past it. Like most things lately.

Gerri stood barefoot in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. The floor was cold beneath her feet. Her robe, charcoal wool, heavier than it looked,  hung off one shoulder where it had slipped. She didn’t fix it. She didn’t move much at all, only watched the kettle from a distance, as if staring would hurry it along. The window above the sink reflected back a faint silhouette of her face, vague and unfamiliar in the low light.

When the water finally hissed, she moved automatically, pouring it over the tea bag, setting the cup on the counter, adding nothing to it. She didn’t drink it. Not right away. Just held the mug between both hands and let the warmth sink in, the way she used to grip hand-warmers at her daughters’ winter soccer games, letting heat replace expression.

It had been days,  maybe five, maybe seven,  since she’d last checked her personal inbox. She used to check it every morning, then every few hours, then compulsively after midnight like someone waiting for a ghost to write back. But she’d stopped, quietly. Not in protest, and not in surrender either. It had just slipped out of her hands like everything else.

Work remained constant in the way only untenable things could be. Matsson was erratic, all bluster and bluff, veering between provocateur and child genius with the attention span of a cracked iPhone screen. In meetings, he interrupted constantly, asked for data he didn’t understand, made jokes that weren’t jokes and laughed too hard at his own deflections.

He didn’t direct insults at her, not exactly,  but the air around him was charged with a kind of dismissiveness she could feel vibrating beneath her skin. He had grown bolder with it, like the power balance had calcified now and didn’t need to be disguised with civility. She was still on the masthead. Still in the group chats. Still invited to functions. But there was a rumor she was leaving, and it no longer felt like a rumor.

Gerri moved through those spaces with the precision of habit. Legal meetings, compliance summaries, high-level press strategy calls where she nodded just enough to indicate presence and not an inch more. She’d learned to smile in the exact measure required to disarm without promising access. That muscle memory hadn’t left her.

But everything was louder now. Not externally -  not the office, not the meetings -  but inside. Her mind took in detail differently, like the volume of the world had dropped and all she could hear was the echo of her own restraint.

She’d begun taking the long way home again. Not to avoid anyone…just to walk. To move. Her therapist, when she still had one, used to say movement was vital -  that forward motion helped

regulate grief, even if the direction didn’t matter. Gerri had smiled at the time and said, “So does a martini.”

She hadn’t been sleeping well.

The apartment held onto silence like a second skin. She’d been lighting a candle in the evenings,  the same brand Baird used to buy. Cedarwood and clove, with a finish that smelled faintly like tobacco and library stacks. The scent reached her before memory did.

Last night, she’d lit it again without thinking. The match flared, then dimmed. The wax softened slowly. She’d left it burning on the coffee table while she read a section of a book twice without retaining a word. When she finally stood to blow it out, something in the warmth of the glass pulled her back, something old, low in her ribs, the kind of ache that comes not from loss but from remembering love was once easy.

She didn’t cry. Hadn’t in weeks. Maybe months. There were tears in the body, yes, but she’d forgotten how to give them permission. Instead, she just breathed through it. Deep, unassuming breaths that rose and fell like nodding.

Later that night, she’d gone to bed and stared at the ceiling for an hour, then two. Sleep had become a negotiation she rarely won. She would shift, readjust the blanket, close her eyes for ten minutes and open them again to the exact same silence. No dreams, no vivid scenes, just the dull white noise of thoughts that wouldn’t let go.

And yet, she still got up. Still brushed her teeth, packed her bag, answered emails. No one would know the difference.

This morning, she padded back to the living room, cup still untouched. Outside the window, the sky looked like paper, the cheap kind that blurred when it got wet. Across the street, someone was walking a dog in a sweater two sizes too big. She watched them for longer than necessary. It felt like something solid, something to hang her attention on.

She finally took a sip of tea. Lukewarm now. The bitterness had settled in.

Her phone sat on the edge of the coffee table, screen black. She didn’t reach for it. But she would. Later. When the quiet got too wide.

A soft sound from near her, the radiator clicking probably, made her glance over her shoulder as though expecting something else. She shook the thought away.

Roman hadn’t been in her thoughts directly that morning. Not like he had been, obsessively, in the first days after his message. But she could feel the outline of him anyway, as if he were a watermark pressed beneath the surface of things: in the way she paused before opening her inbox, in the tone she took on calls, in the very shape of the silence around her.

The bruise on her shoulder seemed to hum with it.

She dressed slowly, her movements economical. Ivory blouse, charcoal skirt, a pair of earrings she hadn’t worn in weeks. Her hands lingered on the clasp longer than necessary, then dropped. In the hallway mirror, she looked exactly as she was supposed to: brisk, neutral, composed. But the light had changed. And she could see it even if no one else could.

By ten-thirty, she was seated in the glass-walled conference room at Waystar, her tablet balanced on her knee, stylus poised. The others were already talking, Matsson leaning back with one booted foot resting on the edge of the table, arms folded, performing casual disinterest with his usual edge of volatility.

Gerri listened. Or rather, she looked like she was listening. She tracked the thread of the conversation the way you might trace the perimeter of a room you no longer lived in.

Matsson was speaking in that faux-casual cadence he used when he was testing how far he could push people. “We don’t need another layer of legalese gumming up the gears, okay? I want something lean. Something sharp. Not another ten-page memo that makes my teeth hurt.”

There was laughter, too quick, from someone younger, newer. Gerri didn’t bother looking to see who. She waited a beat. Then spoke, evenly. “You’re discussing a regulatory filing that has implications across multiple jurisdictions. There’s no such thing as lean when you’re avoiding litigation.”

Matsson made a sound - a half-scoff, half-snort - and turned toward the window like the skyline had more to offer than her words. “Sure. But maybe we take some risks for once. You know? The fun kind.”

More laughter. This time from two people. Neither looked at her. 

She glanced at Karolina, who met her eyes for only a second. Something flickered there, sympathy, maybe, or apology, and then it was gone.

She didn’t push. Not here. Not today. The meeting continued without her, even though she was still in the room.

Someone mentioned a rumor in passing, phrased lightly, casually, like a joke not quite shaped into a punchline: “I mean, if Gerri’s on her way out anyway…”

It was said without malice, but it landed with precision. She smiled. Tilted her head just slightly. “You’ll be the first to know,” she said, tone airless, “if I ever decide to hand you my resignation personally.”

A few scattered chuckles. A few lowered eyes. The conversation moved on again.

She didn’t. Not immediately.

Instead, she sat there for another twenty minutes, contributing little, her stylus unmoving. When the meeting ended, Matsson didn’t look at her as he left. One of his assistants did, a young man with a sharp suit and a too-tight collar who offered her a quick nod, as though reassuring himself that she was still real.

Later, in the elevator down, Gerri stood facing the mirrored wall and didn’t look at herself. When she stepped onto the street, the sky had turned that late-winter grey,  the kind that blurred buildings together and made the air feel less like weather and more like noise.

She pulled her coat closer and walked three blocks before she realized she hadn’t decided where she was going next.

The sidewalk was wet, not from fresh rain, but the dull residue of something earlier, sleet or thaw or runoff. It clung to the soles of her heels, darkened the cuffs of her trousers. Traffic was slow, honking without purpose. The city felt slow in that mid-season way - too cold for comfort, too warm for snow, caught between post-holiday fatigue and the dread of another quarter.

Gerri walked.

Not with any destination in mind just enough movement to convince herself she still had momentum. A few paces down 8th, then east, then another shift south without intention. The cold stung, but not enough to make her stop. She didn’t check her phone. She didn’t return the messages waiting from her office, or the one from Karolina that had simply read “You okay?”

She wasn’t, exactly. But it was the kind of not-okay that settled beneath the skin,  a slow erosion rather than a wound. She could still move. Still function. Still show up in the room, even if no one looked twice.

Her thoughts weren’t exactly on Roman. Not fully. But they circled the place where he had left her. That message she sent. Those two lines. The silence since. She hadn’t expected more. But the not-knowing had carved something inside her anyway,  a small, aching cavern where certainty used to live.

What if that had been it? The last transmission.

She reached the end of a block and paused at the curb. A delivery truck passed, sloshing water toward the gutter. Her reflection trembled in the storefront beside her,  barely visible in the tinted glass, just enough to mark the shape of her posture.

There was a time, not long ago, when being unseen was a power. Now, it felt like erasure.

A man brushed past her, muttering an apology. She didn’t answer.

She crossed the street instead.

There was a coffee shop ahead, one of the newer ones, all matte black signage and minimalist interiors, the kind of place that served seven-dollar cortados in ceramic cups with no handles. She didn’t go in. Just paused outside the window, watching the flicker of strangers at their laptops, conversations muted by glass and steam.

A younger woman was seated near the back,  sharp blazer, wide mouth, long fingers wrapped around her phone like it was the most urgent thing in the world. She was laughing at something. The movement of her face stirred something in Gerri’s memory she couldn’t quite name - the electric ambition of her twenties, maybe. The easy elasticity of her thirties. A version of herself that had once leaned toward the future.

Now, her shoulders hurt before noon. Her inbox was quieter than it should be. Her name floated in rooms as a rumor instead of an anchor.

She stepped back from the glass.

The sky had darkened slightly. Not enough to be evening, but enough to remind her how short the days still were. She pulled her coat tighter at the collar and turned away, folding herself back into the crowd.

There was nothing left to say at that moment. Nothing left to do, either. Just the rhythm of her heels against the pavement. The city at her back. The cold.

Part II - “Stillness, Then Sound"

It was a Wednesday evening, though the days had begun to blend lately, their edges softened by sameness. Outside, February exhaled a dry wind against the glass. The apartment was dim, softened by the hour, late, but not yet late enough to dissolve into sleep. A low piano piece played from the small Bluetooth speaker perched on her bookshelf, something slow and spacious. She wasn’t really listening. It filled the air like warm breath on glass, an ambient fog she let linger because the silence beneath it felt too sharp.

Gerri stood at the kitchen counter, barefoot, rolling the stem of her martini glass slowly between her fingers. Her hair was down, slightly damp from the shower, tucked behind one ear. She wore an old navy t-shirt under her robe and had changed into soft drawstring pants, not for comfort exactly, but to signal the day was over. It hadn’t been a bad day. Just full. Just long.

She was coming down from it slowly now, the residual hum of meetings and emails still clinging to her body like static. She sipped the martini - dry, familiar - and felt the evening stretch out ahead of her. Her phone buzzed once, face down on the dining table. She ignored it.

Across the room, her laptop sat open on the dining table, half-buried under a stack of printed reports and drafts she wasn’t invested in. She had skimmed three pages before losing focus. She thought about the articles she’d been meaning to read, the notes she hadn’t yet compiled. The cursor still blinking behind a dormant document.

Instead, she padded across the floor to the couch and sat, legs tucked beneath her. The robe fell open slightly at the collar, exposing the skin of her collarbone. She reached for her iPad on the end table, not with urgency, but with the slow reflex of routine. Opened her email.

A loose thread at the hem of her sleeve caught between her fingers before she took a look at her emails. She pulled it gently, absentminded, before reaching to scroll through her inbox. Mostly noise. Invites. Internal memos. A forwarded calendar adjustment from someone she didn’t recognize. Her gaze moved dully through the list until-

She stopped.

Roman Roy.

The name stared up from the screen like it had weight. Like it had mass. Not bolded. No urgent flag or subject line begging attention. Just the name, casual and self-contained, like it hadn’t been a blade pressed into her thoughts for weeks.

Gerri’s breath halted.

There was a moment, longer than a breath but shorter than a full thought, where she didn’t move at all. Just looked at the subject line. No subject. Just his name. A timestamp from earlier that day. She’d missed it somehow. Or maybe she hadn’t wanted to see it.

Her throat tightened. She didn’t click.

Her finger hovered, then dropped to the trackpad. She minimized the window and stood slowly, crossing the room with practiced detachment. 

The glass stilled in her hand. She blinked once, as though the name might vanish if she looked too hard at it. But it stayed. Quiet. Waiting. Her breath caught in her throat. Not painfully, more like a skip, a subtle jolt in her chest. Her thumb hovered above the screen. She didn’t press. Not yet.

Instead, she let her gaze drift up from the tablet, toward the far corner of the room, where the piano music was still playing, faint now. Sparse notes suspended in air, like something lost.

She hadn’t thought about him today. Not in any sharp or direct way. He hadn’t been in her bloodstream like he was before. But now-

Her body knew before her mind could decide.

Gerri set the martini down on the coffee table without looking. She stood, moved to the kitchen without thinking, needing the motion. The cool tile steadied her. She braced both hands on the edge of the counter, leaning slightly, staring down at the sink as though it might offer her guidance.

When she finally turned back, she didn’t open the email. She slid the iPad aside like it had asked something indecent of her. The previous message, the one he’d sent in January, hovered in her mind, unbidden. How she’d read it at midnight, her fingers trembling against the trackpad. How she’d responded weeks later with just two lines. Not even sentences, really. Barely enough to call a reply.

But he had answered. And now she was here again. Caught in the silence before it spoke.

The tablet screen dimmed.

She walked slowly back to the couch and sat again. Her hands smoothed the hem of her robe. She adjusted the cushion under her spine and stared at the dark screen, waiting for her breath to settle.

Then she tapped the screen. Opened the email.

No attachments. No formatting. Just words, loose and unfinished.

She read the first line. Stopped. Read it again.

It didn’t begin with her name.

Of course it didn’t. That was too formal, too weighted. But something in her chest still ached at its absence, like she’d prepared for something and then found it missing.

His words unfolded slowly. Paragraphs. Not short. Not clipped. They had rhythm, but no polish. No spin. Roman in lowercase. Roman without his showman’s voice. The first lines caught her.

I don’t really know how to say this right. But I’m trying, so…that counts, I guess.

She read it again. And again.

Her throat caught on a breath. Not a gasp, not anything near a sob, but a small blockage, like her body hadn’t planned for the intake. Her eyes moved down the screen. Her hand moved to her mouth, one knuckle resting against her lip.

Your reply - I keep reading it like it’s going to change, like the words will rearrange themselves if I look hard enough.

God.

It was softer than she expected. Not quite exposed, but gentler. Like someone speaking through a door they weren’t sure would open.

Her throat tightened. She set the iPad down again, not even fully through the message. Her palm pressed flat against her sternum as if to anchor herself there.

The martini sat forgotten. She leaned forward slightly, elbows resting on her knees, and closed her eyes. She didn’t want to read it all at once.

Not because she couldn’t, but because she already felt what it was doing to her.

She swallowed. Her other hand, the one not touching her face, tightened slightly around the edge of the table. Her martini glass sat nearby. She reached for it automatically, then stopped. Let it stay. Her stomach twisted at the idea of swallowing anything.

I didn’t write to you expecting anything. I mean, okay…maybe I did. Not in the demanding sense, just in the part-of-me-hoping-you-still-think-about-it sense.

Gerri inhaled through her nose, trying to keep her breath quiet and steady. Her body, however, betrayed her, her shoulders were tight, her neck sore, the muscles at the base of her spine tensed as though bracing for impact. She wanted to pace. She didn’t.

I just wanted you to know that I hadn’t forgotten.

She closed her eyes. Her lashes fluttered against her cheekbones. Her mouth parted slightly.

Because I haven’t.

Her hand dropped to her side. She backed away from the table. Sat slowly on the edge of the couch. The music continued, now barely audible. She wasn’t sure how long the email was, only that she was reading it slower and slower.

I think about all of that. And not because I’m stuck. Or not just because of that. But because those things mattered more than I let on. More than I ever said.

Her hands trembled, subtly, like a breeze across still water. Enough that she noticed and placed them flat against her knee.

She read it through once more. All of it. Then a third time.

No crying. No outward break. But her ribs felt too close together, like her breath didn’t have space to expand. Her mouth was dry. She reached for the martini, took a sip, and set it down halfway through. The taste had turned.

She stood again, this time slowly, and moved toward the window. Opened it slightly, just enough to let the February air kiss her face. The cold was sharp, clean. She closed her eyes and leaned against the frame.

“I’m here,” she had told him. And now, this was what he gave back.

Not presence. Not certainty. But something close to it. Something fragile and human.

Her pulse tapped at her throat. She thought, absurdly, about how she might sound if she read the words aloud.

She didn’t. Instead, she walked back to the couch, sat down again, and drew her knees to her chest.

The tablet was still glowing. She reread the message one last time. Her hands were still shaking. Not from fear. Not from joy.

From something deeper than both. Something like grief.

She didn’t reply. Not yet. She didn’t reply.

She didn’t know how and that terrified her.

But she didn’t close the email either.

She had a work dinner two nights later. One of those quiet power gatherings, where the company was ostentatiously casual and the seating arrangements spoke louder than the menu. Gerri wore a dark suit, sharp and precise. Her hair pulled back in a knot that made her jaw look stronger. She looked good. She always did.

Matsson was there.

He was loud. Insistent. Two drinks in before the starters, speaking across her, making a joke about retirement that landed just wrong enough to draw glances. Someone said, diplomatically, that Gerri had been around a long time. Matsson grinned. Said something like, "Still kicking."

She smiled. Sipped her wine. Did not blink.

Later, in the bathroom, she stared at her reflection under the cool LED lights and saw the ache in her own posture. Not tired, exactly. Just worn. Like a suit folded too many times.

There was talk, still, of her departure. She deflected with a perfect blend of amusement and plausible vagueness. No one pushed.

She went home alone, unwound. Removed her earrings with slow fingers. Kicked off her shoes and lay back on the couch.

Her phone buzzed. Karolina. She answered, voice low, "Hey."

"You sound weird," Karolina said, no preamble.

Gerri exhaled, half a laugh. "Define weird."

"Distant. And like you’re trying not to be."

"I’m fine. Just a long dinner."

Karolina didn’t buy it. Gerri could hear her thinking. "Do you want me to ask what’s going on?"

"Not tonight."

A pause. Then, "Alright. But I’m here."

Gerri blinked.

The echo of Roman’s words.

She ended the call shortly after. Sat in silence.

The apartment felt too big again. And she could still feel the tremor in her hand.

Part III - “Interpretation"

She read it again the next morning. And then again at lunch, when the office was loud enough to make her absence unnoticeable. By the third reading, the cadence of it had changed, like the message was shifting under her, as though the words were never fixed, only placeholders for the weight behind them. There was something in the pacing. In the fact that he’d said he didn’t expect anything and still, somehow, seemed to want everything.

The restraint made it worse. More dangerous. More real.

She hadn’t replied - not yet - and that in itself had begun to feel like a presence in the room. A silence with its own posture. A decision she was pretending wasn’t one.

That night, she sat on the edge of her bed with the lights low and the screen glowing softly in her hands, the message open like a wound. She reread the lines slowly, mouthing some of them under her breath, not to hear them out loud but to taste them. To feel what they might’ve sounded like if he’d said them. If he’d sat across from her and tried to speak with that same fractured honesty.

“Your reply - I keep reading it like it’s going to change…”

A pause in her mind, a breath she hadn’t meant to take.

“I don’t know what ‘here’ means. Or who I am in relation to that anymore. But I know it mattered that you said it.”

There. That was the part that hurt. Not because it was cruel, but because it wasn’t. Because it was so plainspoken and inward, like he’d said it half to himself and then decided to share it anyway.

She closed her eyes. Let the screen dim slightly. And in the dark behind her eyelids, there was a memory she hadn’t let herself return to in months.

They were in the hallway outside a Waystar boardroom, the one with the heavy glass doors that always swung too slowly, letting conversations leak out even after they’d supposedly ended. It had been late, somewhere in the long, elastic stretch of days before Logan’s death and after the disaster that happened in Italy, when time didn’t behave normally. An earnings call had run over; the sun had already dipped below the midtown skyline, and most of the building had emptied itself out like a lung.

She had stayed too long at the desk, reading the same page of a report without processing a word. When she finally left the conference room, her head hurt in that dull way that came with too much fluorescent light and not enough food. Her heels clicked against the tile as she stepped into the hallway, and stopped.

Roman was already there.

Leaning against the wall with one shoulder, arms crossed, his tie loose and collar askew. His suit looked slept in. His eyes had that over-bright glaze she recognized instantly, the kind that came from either too little sleep or one drink too many chased by nothing to eat. She couldn’t tell if he was waiting for her or just waiting. But his gaze had been downcast, heavy-lidded, his expression somewhere between guarded and bruised.

She had seen him like this before. Not often, not like this. He’d always preferred performance to vulnerability - loudness over silence. But there’d been something collapsed in his posture that night, something breathless and off-rhythm. Like he didn’t know how to stand up straight in the aftermath of being cut down.

She could’ve said his name. Could’ve stopped and stood beside him like she used to, close but never touching. Could’ve asked him if he was okay and meant it in a way that might’ve reached him. But she didn’t. She hesitated, just long enough for him to notice.

And when he looked up, just looked, her breath caught. 

It was a glance, nothing more. But his eyes landed on her like a question he didn’t trust himself to ask. Something deep-set behind them, almost scared. And then quickly masked.

She remembered the flicker. That flash of recognition, like he hadn’t been sure she was real until he saw her. And she’d kept walking.

Her heels didn’t falter. Her spine had stayed straight. She walked past him like it was just another hallway, another night, another collapse she didn’t have the bandwidth to witness.

But she remembered the moment after, when she turned the corner and stopped short behind the next door. Her hand had hovered over the handle of her office, her throat tight in a way she couldn’t swallow down. The silence he left behind had been fuller than most conversations.

And now, months later, she felt it again. A delayed ache.

Back then, she had told herself she was being smart. That nothing good would’ve come from acknowledging that look. That if she’d stopped beside him, if she’d said even one word, the lines between them would’ve liquefied and neither of them would’ve known how to step back. She was protecting something - her job, her dignity, his ability to survive without her.

But really, she had been afraid. Of being needed. Of needing back.

She opened her eyes, slowly. The message was still on the screen. The glow of it too soft to be comforting.

Her throat felt thick.

It wasn’t that the moment had been large. That was what made it dangerous. It had been small. Barely anything at all. But she had felt everything in it. And so had he.

And now she was holding this message, months later, as though it had grown from that look.

Later, in bed beside her laptop, she stared at the draft window. Typed:

I didn’t expect your message to feel like this.

Deleted it.

Typed again:

You sound more like yourself. And less like the self you used to show me.

Deleted that too.

It wasn’t that she didn’t know what she wanted to say, it was that everything she wanted to say required a courage she hadn’t used in years.

So she pulled open the drawer beside the bed and found the small, soft-covered notepad she used for lists she didn’t want to forget. It wasn’t elegant. It had a crease down the middle and a faint coffee stain on the back page. But it was private. It couldn’t be sent by accident.

She clicked the lamp on. Picked up a pen.

Her handwriting was slower than it used to be - deliberate, slightly cramped. She began writing not to reply but to understand.

Roman,
I’ve read your message more times than I should probably admit.
The thing is, I’m not sure what to do with it.
Not because it wasn’t honest. But because it was.
I’m used to questions I can answer. Problems I can fix. You’ve never let yourself be either.

She stopped. Let the pen hang in midair. She thought about how he used to hover in her office doorway like he was waiting for something he’d already decided not to ask. How she’d learned, over time, to answer the silence instead. How that kind of communication had become its own twisted comfort.

And now she wondered if that comfort had cost them everything.

She turned the page and kept writing.

I used to pride myself on being able to say nothing and still be heard. That was the job. The armor.
But now I think maybe that skill - what I once called restraint - might’ve been cowardice too.
Because now I don’t know how to answer you without using it.
And that feels…
That feels like something I shouldn’t be admitting. But here we are.

The words looked raw on the page. Not exposed, she wasn’t giving him anything overt, but vulnerable in the way that only half-finished thoughts could be.

She capped the pen. Sat back. Her breath was tight in her chest, not anxiety, not quite, but a kind of emotional tinnitus. Like his voice was echoing in a part of her she didn’t know how to quiet.

“I’m still here too,” he’d said.

And it haunted her.

Because she was the one who’d taught him not to say things like that. And now that he had, now that he’d learned to say it in the tone she used to use for everything, she didn’t know what to do with the echo.

The page was still there in front of her, ink glistening faintly under the lamp. She didn’t fold it. She didn’t hide it. She just let it sit there.

Unsent.

The page seemed to hum with the weight of its own stillness, a held breath in blue-black ink. The letters, shaped by her own hand, looked unfamiliar now that they were anchored in full sentences, no longer thoughts circling in her head, no longer ghosts. Her handwriting had always been neat but sharp, the kind that left little room for misinterpretation. And yet what she’d written now felt porous, slippery, vulnerable in a way that made her skin prickle.

A part of her wanted to destroy it.

Another part - older and quieter - wanted to keep it exactly where it was. Proof that she’d let herself say something. Even if no one heard it.

She leaned back slightly, her elbow grazing the edge of the desk. The apartment around her was silent except for the subtle creak of the old heating system, a low-bellied groan that moved through the floorboards like a memory. Outside, the wind shifted against the windows, rattling faintly. The candle by the far end of the room, the one she’d lit earlier, almost without thinking, shivered in its glass, its flame bent sideways for a moment before steadying again.

She followed its movement, eyes unfocused. Her breathing had slowed, but her body still felt taut, like her muscles hadn’t received the message that the storm had passed, or maybe that it never arrived at all. Just air pressure and unsettled sky.

On the page in front of her, the last line stared up with a kind of gentle finality. She ran a finger just under the bottom edge of the paper, not smudging the ink, just tracing the shape of her own silence.

Somewhere in her chest, the ache reasserted itself, not sharp, not screaming, but persistent. It had lived there for so long that she sometimes mistook it for normalcy. But tonight it felt newly exposed. The ache of being spoken to in a language she had taught someone, only to find herself mute in response.

Gerri glanced at her laptop, still open on the far end of the desk, the inbox tab glowing faintly in the dark. She could type something now. Translate what she’d written into words that would fit inside a digital frame. Controlled, legible, void of handwriting’s warmth. She could reduce it to something practical - brief, understated. She could pretend none of this had touched her.

Or she could wait.

Let the letter sit. Let the wanting stretch.

Her eyes moved back to the handwritten page. The letters had dried, but the meaning still felt wet in her hands like it might smear if she wasn’t careful.

She didn’t move to stand. Didn’t exhale dramatically. Didn’t say his name aloud like someone rehearsing their regret.

She just stayed there. Still. Listening to the room settle around her. Feeling the unspent reply vibrate quietly between her ribs.

And outside, the wind kept shifting.

Part IV - “Functioning"

At work, Gerri performed like she always had,  clean lines, clear eyes, measured phrases. Her voice had the familiar precision that cut through chaos, but lately, she’d begun to notice the delay between the words and her body - how her smile took a fraction too long to reach her face, how her laughter, once sharp and timely, now lingered half a second late like a shadow rounding a corner.

The boardroom was bright with artificial clarity. Matsson was talking too much again, bouncing from quip to provocation, skimming the edge of insult like it was part of the presentation.

“Gerri, thoughts?” he asked suddenly, turning toward her with the ease of someone confident she was listening.

She was, in the way one listens to static.“Yes,” she said, folding one hand over the other on the table. “I’d recommend we walk back the tone by ten percent and the projections by twenty. And maybe resist the temptation to condescend to our own investors while we’re at it.”

A few quiet coughs passed for laughter. Matsson blinked. “Noted.”

But the moment passed too fast. There were others at the table now - hungrier, louder. Gerri wasn’t being excluded, not exactly. Just...skimmed over. Her edge wasn’t dulled, but the shape of the table had shifted. And it was beginning to show.

After the meeting, Gerri didn’t linger in the conference room. The moment Matsson leaned back in his chair with that insufferably smug grin, turning toward Tom to launch into another pitch-perfect display of chaotic charm, she slid her tablet under her arm and stood. Her spine was straight, her stride clipped, heels striking the polished floor with practiced finality.

She didn’t look back.

Her office was waiting,  glass-walled, impersonal, the kind of room designed for authority without warmth. She stepped inside, shut the door behind her more softly than usual, and let the quiet click of it closing seal her in.

The hum of the building’s ventilation system filled the silence, as faint and constant as her thoughts. Gerri moved to her desk, placed her tablet down with careful precision, then pulled out the chair but didn’t sit. Instead, she stood for a long moment beside it, fingers resting on the high back, her breath caught somewhere between presence and absence.

Then came the knock. Three fingers against glass, polite, controlled. She knew the cadence before she turned.

Karolina stood outside, holding a folder she didn’t seem to be reading.

Gerri tilted her head, signaling. “Come in.”

Karolina entered, closing the door behind her. Her steps were quieter than Gerri’s. She didn’t sit either. “I won’t stay long,” she said. Her voice was light, but not weightless. “I just wanted to check in.”

“I’m fine,” Gerri said, with the reflex of someone who had said it enough times to believe she could will it into being.

Karolina studied her, not unkindly. She leaned her hip against the side table near the window, the sunlight catching on her watch. “You’re…performing fine,” she said slowly. “But that’s not what I asked.”

Gerri exhaled through her nose and finally moved to sit. She crossed one leg over the other, adjusted the hem of her sleeve, as if that might recalibrate the conversation into something more manageable. “Is this concern coming from comms, or from you personally?”

“Both,” Karolina replied without missing a beat. “But mostly me.”

A beat passed.

“You’ve looked tired, lately,” she added, softer. “Not the kind of tired that makeup covers.”

Gerri let her eyes drift to the skyline outside her window. Manhattan in early February, sharp lines and brittle air. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

“Because of work?”

“No.” She glanced back. “Yes. Depends on the hour.”

Karolina hesitated. Then; “If this is about…everything, you know you can-”

“It’s not,” Gerri interrupted, too quickly. Then she caught herself. “I mean…it’s not anything specific.”

Karolina nodded slowly. “But it’s something.”

The sunlight moved a fraction on the floor between them. A cloud passing. A shift.

“You know,” Gerri said, her voice thinner now, “I used to think being emotionally unavailable was an asset in this place.”

Karolina raised an eyebrow. “You’re not emotionally unavailable. You’re…restrained.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Depends who you ask.” Karolina stepped forward then, just one pace, her tone changing,  less professional, more human. “You don’t have to tell me what it is, Gerri. I just think maybe you shouldn’t keep carrying it like a secret.”

Gerri blinked. For a moment, it looked like she might say something more. Something real.

But then she smiled, small, wry. “I’ll schedule a breakdown for next quarter.”

Karolina didn’t smile back right away. “Don’t wait that long.”

The silence between them wasn’t empty. It was full of things not said. Then Karolina nodded once and stepped back, her hand brushing the door handle. “You know where to find me.”

And just like that, she was gone.

Gerri sat alone for a long moment afterward, one hand still resting on the armrest, the other curled slightly, thumb grazing the edge of her ring finger, an old habit from stressful depositions.

The office felt colder than before. Not from the temperature. From the exposure. And still, she hadn’t opened Roman’s message again. Not yet.

It was nearly ten when the call came. Gerri had just poured herself a second glass of wine,  not because the first had done anything, but because the ritual of it gave her something to do with her hands. The apartment was too quiet again. She hadn’t turned on the TV. The stereo was off. There was only the faint hum of the refrigerator and the distant, irregular buzz of traffic several floors below.

The phone buzzed once. Her screen lit up.

Peti.

Gerri took a slow breath, then picked up. “Hi, sweetheart.”

“Hey, Mom.” Peti’s voice came through with its usual brisk warmth,  always a little faster than necessary, the words tumbling over each other like she didn’t quite trust silence not to say something worse.

Gerri moved to the couch and sat down, glass in hand. “You’re up late.”

“Yeah, couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d check on my favorite ice queen.”

Gerri gave a quiet huff of amusement. “That title’s contested. Pretty sure Karolina’s gunning for it.”

“True. You both terrify men and age like expensive whiskey. Maybe you should team up.”

A pause. Gerri swirled the wine in her glass. “Are you alright?”

Peti was quiet for a beat too long,“I’m fine. Tired. Deadlines. One of my clients decided to go full disaster mode and post an Instagram story from his ex’s dog’s account. Long story.”

“That’s…modern.”

“Yeah, and stupid.”

There was a soft sound,  Peti shifting, maybe onto her other side, the rustle of a blanket. “Anyway. I wanted to hear your voice.”

That landed. Gerri blinked once. She didn’t answer immediately.

“Did I say something wrong?” Peti asked.

“No,” Gerri said. Her voice was calm, but lower now. “I just…wasn’t expecting that.”

“Well. Don’t have a heart attack about it.”

Another pause. Gerri leaned back slightly in her chair, letting the silence open just enough for her daughter to speak first.

“I talked to Catherine earlier,” Peti said eventually.

“Oh?” Gerri replied, tone careful. “How is she?”

“She’s fine. You know. Controlled. Professional…she was being impossible,” Peti said. “Per usual. I had to pull it out of her like a bad tooth.”

“Pull what out?” Gerri asked.

Peti exhaled, “She mentioned someone. Kind of. Not by name, obviously - Catherine wouldn’t give it up that easily. But she said something about ‘this arrogant French woman who thinks she knows what’s best for everyone,’ then immediately changed the subject.”

Gerri blinked. “Arrogant French woman?”

“Yeah,” Peti said dryly. “Apparently she’s brilliant and infuriating and probably older.”

“Older?” Gerri repeated, eyebrows raised.

“You know Catherine doesn’t do anyone under thirty-five,” Peti said. “She likes them sharp and terrifying. It’s all courtroom stares and emotional repression with her.”

Gerri gave a soft sound of acknowledgment. “Has she said anything else?”

“She didn’t need to. She looked like she wanted to throw her phone into the Hudson every time it buzzed.”

“So,” Gerri said slowly, “someone.”

“Definitely someone. She was acting like she wasn’t waiting for a message, which means she absolutely was.”

There was a quiet space on the line again, the kind they both had learned not to rush. 

“I think about when she came out,” Gerri said, not quite meaning to. “That night. She was seventeen. Home for break.”

“I remember,” Peti said.

“She sat me down. Said it all so precisely. ‘I’m gay,’ like a conclusion she’d come to after drafting an argument. She looked prepared. Prepared for rejection.”

Peti didn’t interrupt.

“And I said…” Gerri let the memory surface in full. “I said, ‘Okay.’ That’s all.”

“Yeah.”

“I thought staying calm would help. That if I didn’t make it emotional, it wouldn’t be painful.”

“But it was,” Peti said softly.

“Yes,” Gerri admitted. “Not because I disapproved. I didn’t. But because I made her feel like it didn’t matter.” There was a long pause. “She wanted more,” Gerri said after a moment. “Not permission. Not reassurance. Just something real.”

“She still wants that,” Peti replied. “She just doesn’t expect it anymore.”

Gerri closed her eyes. “I wish I could redo that moment.”

“I know.”

“She said I don’t know how to show it when it counts. She wasn’t wrong.”

“No,” Peti said, quiet but firm. “But you’re better now. Not perfect. But…warmer.”

Gerri gave a small, unsteady exhale. “Warmer,” she echoed. “High praise.”

Peti laughed. “From this family? It’s basically sainthood.”

They were both quiet for a moment. Then Peti added, “I think Catherine’s trying. In her way. And I think you could still meet her halfway.”

“I don’t know how.”

“You just call her. Or don’t. But when she calls you, maybe…don’t hold back.”

There was something so simple in the way Peti said it. Not prescriptive. Just human.

“I’ll try,” Gerri said.

“Good.”

Peti’s voice softened then. “She’s a lot like you, you know.”

“Terrifying?”

“Smart, proud. Hard to reach. But worth it.”

Gerri’s throat tightened. “I hope she thinks the same about me.”

“She does,” Peti replied. “Even when she’s furious with you.”

Another pause.

“You’re not a bad mother,” Peti added. “You’re just…a complicated one.”

“I’ll take it,” Gerri said, with a faint smile.

There was silence again, softer this time. Gerri exhaled. “Do you think this woman…the French one…might actually be good for her?”

Peti made a thoughtful sound. “She didn’t say much, but I swear to God, the way she said ‘she’s infuriating’ had more longing in it than an entire Nora Ephron screenplay.”

Gerri smiled, despite herself. “God help us,” 

“Too late,” Peti replied before adding, “I mean, enemies to lovers, It’s a lesbian classic for a reason. That trope built our entire generation.”

“I suppose Catherine always did like a fight.”

“Yeah, and this time I think she wants to lose.” Peti said, tone shifting lighter, “honestly, if this woman Catherine’s obsessed with ever shows up for dinner, I’m bringing popcorn. It’s going to be pure enemies-to-lovers chaos.”

Gerri chuckled, “I love you,” she said after a beat. 

“I know,” Peti replied softly. “I love you too.”

They didn’t hang up. Not yet. They stayed on the line - two women, mother and daughter - letting the silence between them be something other than absence.

Gerri didn’t move for a while after the call had ended. The room around her had gone still again. But her pulse felt different. Slightly louder. Slightly closer to something she hadn’t quite made peace with.

Yet.

Part V - “Displacement"

The morning had been glassy and cold, light sharp enough to make her eyes ache even through the tinted windows of the car. By late afternoon, the sky had flattened into that pale, uncertain grey that made the city feel both infinite and claustrophobic. She’d been at her desk for hours - emails, half-meetings, the practiced motions of someone fulfilling the expectations of her role without touching its substance. Matsson had been in one of his mercurial moods, tossing out ideas with the careless energy of someone who knew other people would sort them into something actionable. None of them were hers to sort anymore.

By six, she was walking without quite knowing why. Coat buttoned, scarf looped, her steps found a rhythm along Lexington, up toward the sharper wind that cut between the glass towers. She told herself it was air she wanted, cold, unmediated air, but there was another current underneath, one she didn’t want to name.

It happened near 54th. Just a figure ahead of her on the opposite side of the street. Shorter than most of the after-work crowd, shoulders canted in that particular way, as though braced for impact even while standing still. A dark coat, collar up, hands in pockets.

Her breath snagged before she could stop it. She slowed, eyes fixed on the back of his head, the precise tilt of it. The traffic light shifted, people surged forward, and the figure moved too, across the street, away from her. She tracked him as far as she could, her heart doing something unhelpful against her ribs. Then the wind shifted, pushing the coat flat against the man’s frame, and she saw the difference. Broader in the chest, heavier in step. Not him. Not even close, if she were honest.

The let-down was quiet, but it lingered. She pressed her hands deeper into her pockets and kept walking.

By the time she stepped into the hotel, she wasn’t sure if she’d chosen it for the warmth, the anonymity, or the way it existed outside her usual sphere. It was one of those newer places that leaned into soft lighting and deliberate quiet, the kind of space where everyone seemed to lower their voices automatically. 

The bar was half-empty. She took a seat toward the far end, where the mirror behind the shelves doubled the bottles and the faces of the people who weren’t looking at her.

When the bartender approached, she didn’t have to think about it, “Dry martini,” she said. “Extra dry.” The words came out like muscle memory, not indulgence.

He nodded, set to work. She watched without really watching - the measured pour, the cold gleam of the shaker, the frost beginning to bloom on its surface - the glass appeared in front of her a moment later, stem delicate between her fingers, the faint green shimmer of the liquid catching the low light. A single olive rested at the bottom, as if anchored there.

She didn’t drink right away though. The weight of the glass in her hand was grounding, the coolness a steady pressure against her skin. She turned it slightly, watching the surface ripple and settle again, the way you might study something fragile before deciding whether to keep it.

The first sip was bracing, dry enough to almost sting, and it made her jaw tighten in a way that was oddly satisfying. Not for the taste, exactly, it was the ritual. The certainty of it. The way the cold seemed to move up as much as down, settling somewhere between her throat and her chest.

In her coat pocket, her phone was a small, constant weight…she could feel the shape of it against her hip, the faint warmth from her walk. She pulled it out and opened her inbox.

His name.

She’d read it before - at home, at her desk - but here, in the muted light, the message felt different. Less about the words and more about the fact of him, sitting somewhere, composing them. She scrolled slowly, letting the sentences settle again:

I don’t really know how to say this right. But I’m trying, so…that counts, I guess.

She could picture him typing that, half-defensive even in admission.

I keep reading it like it’s going to change…

Her thumb paused. She could hear him saying it, low, almost to himself. And further down…

I just wanted you to know that I hadn’t forgotten.

She stared at that line until the bartender drifted into her periphery, asking if she wanted another. She shook her head, barely turning toward him.

For a moment, she thought about speaking, about telling this stranger behind the bar something small and unremarkable about the weight she was carrying. But the impulse withered before she’d even formed the words. There wasn’t a way to explain this without making it sound like something it wasn’t, or worse, making it sound like something smaller than it was.

She took a sip instead. The cold slid down her throat, almost bracing.

Somewhere behind her, someone laughed, a sharp, clean sound that didn’t belong to her world. She glanced toward it, then back at her phone and read the closing again; 

If “I’m here” is all I ever get, I’ll take it. I’ll carry it. Just…I’m still here too.

The ellipsis before the last line. The way it made space for everything unsaid.

She locked the phone, set it face down on the bar and let her fingertips rest lightly on its edge, as though keeping it from sliding away. 

No one else here would understand it. Not the man two seats over scrolling through market reports, not the couple trading business cards by the door. It wasn’t about romance in the way people liked to package it, or reconciliation in the way they liked to imagine it. It was about presence, and the terror of it, the fragility.

She stayed until the ice in her glass melted to thin crescents, the olive sitting in the bottom like something preserved. ​​When she finally stood, her reflection in the bar’s mirror looked composed enough, the faint suggestion of someone unbothered. The kind of woman people assumed was exactly where she meant to be.

Outside, the cold caught her at once, slipping under her collar, tightening along her spine. The street smelled faintly of exhaust and the metallic edge of winter, that almost-clean scent that promised snow without delivering it. She adjusted her gloves as she walked, more to keep her hands occupied than to ward off the chill. Her stride was even, deliberate, the way it always was when she didn’t want to appear like she was moving toward or away from anything in particular. But the phone in her pocket was a small, unyielding anchor.

She didn’t take it out again. She didn’t need to; the weight of it was enough to conjure the words again, unspooling in her head like she was reading them for the first time. She could see them in the pale blue light of the screen, hear the rhythm of them in her mind, the cadence unmistakably his - half-apology, half-deflection, entirely Roman.

The city carried on around her: a bus grumbling past, two women laughing too loudly into their scarves, a courier pedaling hard against the wind. None of them knew she was carrying someone else’s words like contraband. None of them would understand the weight of six paragraphs from a man who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say what he meant all at once.

She kept walking until the crowd thinned, the storefronts giving way to quieter stretches of street. Somewhere overhead, a neon sign buzzed faintly, casting intermittent light onto the sidewalk. She passed through it without looking up.

At the corner, she stopped. She could turn left toward the subway, or right toward the long way home. She chose right, letting the cold work its way deeper, as though it might blunt the sharp edges inside her. Her hand drifted to her pocket. She pressed her fingers against the phone, feeling the smooth outline through the wool. She didn’t take it out, not yet. But she let her thumb rest where the screen would light if she did. Just to feel the possibility.

And then she walked on, the city folding around her, every step both away from and toward him.

Part VI - “The Folder"

The apartment was dark when she returned. She moved through the silence the way one might through a museum after closing: slow and careful but aware that any sound would echo too loudly. The faint glow from the city filtered in through the windows, a pale, diluted light that traced over the furniture and left everything looking unfamiliar, as though it belonged to someone else.

Her coat slipped from her shoulders onto the arm of the chair by the door. She didn’t turn on the overheads, only the small lamp on her desk, a low amber glow that caught the edges of papers and cast her reflection in the darkened window like a ghost. She stood there for a long moment, still in her shoes, one hand braced lightly on the desk’s surface, before she sat. The laptop waited, folded and inert, precisely where she had left it that morning. The very presence of it seemed to hum with expectation, she opened it with a quiet click and the screen bloomed to life, too bright in the surrounding dim. She blinked against it, adjusted the angle, and typed in her password with fingers that felt both steady and entirely unreliable.

Her inbox loaded.

There it was. His name, no longer new, no longer a shock, but still carrying the kind of weight that pressed against her chest. She didn’t click it right away. She didn’t need to, she already knew what it contained. She’d read it before, in the bar, beneath the measured clink of glassware and the low rise of other people’s conversations. She’d carried it with her on the long walk home, the words printed so sharply into her memory that she could’ve recited them without the screen.

But now, in her own space, in the silence that she couldn’t disguise with background noise, she opened it again.

I don’t really know how to say this right. But I’m trying, so…that counts, I guess.

Her throat tightened. It wasn’t just the words themselves, but the rhythm of them, the falter, the hesitation, the self-correction. Roman’s voice was there, unpolished, too naked in its clumsiness. She could hear it as though he’d spoken it across a table, quick and defensive, then softening in the same breath.

She scrolled.

Your reply - I keep reading it like it’s going to change, like the words will rearrange themselves if I look hard enough.

She almost smiled at that, though there was nothing light in it. The irony didn’t escape her. She’d done the same thing with his email, scanning for nuance, for a hidden note beneath the phrasing. They were caught in the same compulsion; circling silence, holding it up to the light, convincing themselves there might be more if they looked closely enough.

And then- 

I guess I wanted you to know that I’m still here too.

She stopped there. Let her eyes rest on the sentence. A strange pressure coiled in her chest, something that was not relief, not grief, but a sharper amalgam of both.

She leaned back in her chair. The lamp hummed faintly, filling the silence with its small, electric presence. She closed her eyes, once, then opened them again. The “Personal” folder was there on the side of the screen, quietly waiting. She hovered the cursor over it, then clicked.

The collection of drafts opened in front of her, like opening a drawer she didn’t let anyone touch. Each file was an unfinished gesture, a version of herself that had almost spoken and then chosen not to.

There was the unsent Christmas draft, the one she had written late at night after finding Roman’s christmas card to her from years ago softening her restraint. She clicked it open, letting her eyes run down the lines, the words made her wince; not because they were wrong, but because they were too exposed, too clearly shaped by loneliness and guilt. She had written with a hand that wanted to reach and a mind that wanted to pull back, and the dissonance sat there in every sentence.

She closed it quickly.

Her gaze shifted to her own two-line message: I read it. I’m here. She read it now as though she hadn’t written it. Stripped of her intention, it looked colder than she remembered. Two lines, flat, declarative. She’d meant it as presence, as a restrained admission. But now it looked like a verdict. She wondered if he had read it that way.

And then his replies - both of them, sitting side by side. His words and her absence in between.

Her hand hovered over the keyboard. Then she opened a new draft, blank screen, blinking cursor. She stared at it long enough that the white burned into her vision. She typed, slowly, deliberately:

This time, I wanted you to know I saw it.

She sat back. Read it once. Twice. Three times.

The words looked too simple, too final. They risked being the period at the end of a sentence neither of them had finished. And yet - they were true. She had seen it. She had read every line, carried them in her chest, turned them over in her mind until they cut.

Her fingers rested against the keys, unmoving.

She thought of him, not in the abstract, but as he had been in those smaller, unguarded moments. The way his shoulders could curve inward when he thought no one was looking. The way he’d once caught her eye across a room, and for a fraction of a second all the noise and performance around them had fallen away. It had been there, in the silence between them, something neither of them had named.

She pressed her lips together, blinked once, hard.

The cursor still blinked, patient, unbothered by her hesitation. She didn’t fold the laptop shut, she didn’t send the draft and she didn’t delete it either. She just let it sit there, glowing in the dark apartment, while the city hummed faintly outside her windows.

Whether it would ever travel beyond this room, beyond her restraint, she didn’t know. Not yet.

For now, it was enough - barely - to know she had written it. To know the words existed.

Unsent.

Chapter Text

Part I – “The Send”

It was late when he did it. Not late in the sense of nightlife, not the city’s kind of late,  no thrum from the street, no muffled voices rising from the streets below. Just the dull, in-between hour where even Manhattan felt abandoned, and the only sound was the radiator coughing itself awake and the tap of his thumb against the laptop’s trackpad.

The draft had been sitting there for days. Open, closed, reopened. Each time Roman came back to it, the words looked slightly altered, like the letters had shifted position when he wasn’t looking. He’d memorized them anyway - could have recited them with his eyes shut - but seeing them in print made them both more and less real. The cursor hovered at the end of the last line, pulsing like a metronome. He kept his hand on the trackpad, his other hand curled tight against his thigh. His pulse had lodged itself in strange places: wrist, throat, the hollow of his stomach.

He’d thought there’d be a surge of something when the moment came,  adrenaline, maybe. Or dread thick enough to stop him. But it wasn’t either of those. It was a steady hum, like the sound of a light bulb about to burn out.

The draft itself wasn’t long. Just enough words to feel like risk, not enough to feel like safety. He knew that, he knew she’d see it. He knew she’d see him in it - the pauses, the circumlocutions, the sentences that swerved away from their own point. He knew it would be obvious. But he also knew that leaving it unsent was becoming worse than whatever humiliation waited on the other side.

His thumb hovered over the mouse. A click would send it. A single gesture, nothing. His body knew how to do it. But his chest didn’t. Exactly like the first time he sent a message to her, somehow his body didn’t get used to it though. 

Instead, he sat there for a long time, long enough that his legs began to ache from being folded beneath him on the couch, long enough that the glow of the screen seemed to burn his vision even when he looked away. He pressed his fingertips against his eyelids until he saw sparks.

Then, suddenly,  without planning it,  he did it. The small, sharp click.

The screen blinked. The message was gone, shuttled into the ether, logged in his “sent” folder like evidence of a crime.

He flinched, actually flinched, as though something might come shooting back at him immediately. His shoulders tensed, his jaw clenched. He glanced at the screen…nothing, just silence.

He closed the laptop halfway, the screen dimming into a sharp, accusing line of light before it collapsed into black. It was too much to look at;  the empty inbox, the sent folder waiting like a trap, the space where her reply might appear or might not. It was unbearable, the idea of staring at that emptiness, of watching the silence grow pixel by pixel until it filled the whole room.

The air felt different. Thick, unsettled, as though something invisible had been disturbed and was now circling overhead. He felt it in his skin, in the dampness at the back of his neck. Like he’d opened a window somewhere he couldn’t see and let in the weather, let in a draft that belonged to another season entirely.

Relief wasn’t the word, not really. It was too clean, too simple. But something inside him had shifted. The coil that had sat in his gut for days - maybe weeks - unspooled just enough to leave a raw ache in its place. An ache and a terror that didn’t know how to live side by side. His body couldn’t pick a lane. His chest expanded too quickly and then locked; his pulse stuttered in short, ragged bursts. His heart seemed to forget its own rhythm, slamming hard against the inside of his ribs as though it might break out and bolt for the door.

He stood up suddenly, almost violently, as if the act of sitting still had become impossible. The couch gave a low groan of protest, leather stretching as his knees cracked free. His balance faltered for a second, and he caught himself on the edge of the coffee table, fingers splayed, breath sharp. He crossed the room in jerky strides that didn’t match his intent, not really walking so much as fleeing.

At the window, he pressed his forehead to the glass. The cold shocked him, steadied him. His breath fogged in uneven bursts against the pane, marking time he didn’t want to measure.

Outside, the city moved on without him. Taxis slid through the intersection below, headlights cutting gold arcs across the wet asphalt. Neon reflected in the puddles, making the pavement look like it was bleeding light. A woman hurried past with her scarf yanked up, her face half-hidden from the night. He envied her, envied her anonymity, her freedom to walk without the weight of a sentence trailing her, without the sharp awareness of having revealed something that couldn’t be taken back.

Everyone out there was moving as if words had no consequences. As if what you said didn’t echo forever.

He couldn’t watch for her reply. Couldn’t sit with the possibility of seeing her name appear, or worse, never seeing it at all. The act of sending had gutted him, scraped something raw out of his chest and left him suspended in the gap between being seen and being invisible. He had no idea which it would be. He had no control over it now, and the lack of control made him feel feral, desperate.

He told himself he’d check later. That letting it sit was composure, patience, not cowardice. He built the story quickly, stacking it like scaffolding: this was strength, this was dignity. He wasn’t waiting, no, he was choosing. He told himself all of it in rapid succession, like mantras, but none of it held. Because the truth pressed in around him, heavy and merciless. He’d lobbed something fragile into the void, something that felt dangerously like his own pulse and the silence that followed was already shaping itself into a reply.

He walked back to his laptop and closed it fully this time. The sound was small, too small for what it felt like. His hand stayed on the lid, flat and tentative, as though the machine itself might rupture if he let go. His palm pressed down the way you press on a wound,  not to heal it, but to stop the bleeding.

The message was gone. Out of him, into the world. No longer his. And he was still here.

Still here, but the words in his chest, the ones he’d finally given away, felt like they weren’t. He was still here - and yet he had never felt so much like a ghost in his own apartment.

Part II – “The Week After”

The days blurred. Not seamlessly, not with the soft edges of calm, but with the jagged rhythm of a film reel skipping and catching on itself. Each one was distinct enough to sting, yet indistinguishable when he tried to count them back. A week had passed, then more…mid-February now.

Her name wasn’t there, not in the morning when he opened his laptop with the first shiver of caffeine still bitter in his throat, not in the late afternoon when the light turned the walls of his apartment a sickly yellow-grey, not in the middle of the night when he rolled over in a sweat and unlocked his phone, the glow casting him in a morgue’s palette.

No reply. At all.

He told himself he didn’t expect one. He told himself he hadn’t even wanted one once again…that the act of sending was the point, that the exposure itself was the end of it. But the compulsion betrayed him. The checking. The revisiting. The way he hovered over his inbox like it was a shrine or a crime scene. At odd hours he’d crack the lid of his laptop and refresh, over and over, until his eyes watered and his throat ached with the weight of silence. His pulse leapt every time the page reloaded, like the system itself might bend, like the machinery of the internet could cough up something just for him. But it never did. The emptiness was precise, surgical even.

He tried to trick himself with routines instead, a shower in the morning, hot enough to scald, eggs scrambled and scraped too roughly across a pan, push-ups on the floor until his arms trembled and his chest felt cracked open. He even went to the gym once, stood under the fluorescent lights while machines whirred around him, other men’s grunts punctuating the air. He lifted, sweated, stared at himself in the mirror until his own eyes blurred, then left without speaking to anyone.

Every action circled back. He’d towel himself off and wonder if she was asleep or awake, if she slept soundly or in fits like he did. He’d chew his eggs and think about whether she bothered with breakfast or just swallowed coffee until noon. He’d walk past a florist on Lexington and see couples pausing to choose arrangements, their hands brushing as they pointed, and his chest would cave in with something both familiar and alien.

Valentine’s Day loomed in the windows. Red. Pink. Heart-shaped things that looked like wounds. He couldn’t cross a block without some reminder; paper garlands in drugstore displays, champagne bottles on sale, perfume ads with entwined models. All grotesque…All impossible to avoid.

It made him think of her. Always her.

Not in the clichés, exactly. He couldn’t picture her holding a dozen roses with any sincerity, couldn’t imagine her tolerating the syrupy commercial theater of it. She would raise an eyebrow, maybe. Smirk and deflect.But he wondered if Baird had ever tried, back when he was alive. 

The image arrived uninvited - Gerri at a restaurant, the kind with white tablecloths and low lighting, rolling her eyes as a waiter set down a vase with a single long-stemmed rose, or a wrapped box on the kitchen counter, silver paper folded with care, Baird watching her from across the room with that quiet expectancy men wore when they wanted credit for trying. Would she have let herself be softened by it, for his sake? He could almost see her, that little lift of the chin she did when she was trying not to give herself away, her mouth curving in something between skepticism and indulgence. Maybe she’d have teased him first, called the gesture predictable, bourgeois even, and then, after a beat, reached out anyway. Taken the flower, the box, the champagne glass, whatever it was. Folded into the ritual despite herself, because love asks you to perform sometimes, even when the script feels clumsy.

The thought lodged like a splinter. He hated it, hated picturing her with someone else - her husband, the ghost who was both past and present. And yet he couldn’t look away from it because what cut deeper wasn’t the image of her softened for another man, but the question it raised: had anyone given her the kind of weight he wanted to? Not the gestures that wilted by morning, but the real thing. The unbearable thing.

Had anyone pressed their gaze so hard against her that she felt seen to the bone? Had anyone taken her sharpness, her precision, her endless control, and said: I see all of it, and I want you anyway?

He doubted it, or maybe - and this was worse - maybe she had been seen that way once, and it had only made her draw the curtains tighter. Maybe that was why she learned to let affection glance off her instead of sink in. And what did that leave for him? Standing here, imagining her in a life he’d never touched, gnawed by the possibility that he was too late, or worse, unnecessary.

On the ninth, he woke at 3 a.m. and sat at the edge of his bed, phone heavy in his palm. His inbox glared at him, unchanged. He felt ridiculous… a grown man clutching glass and metal like it was an oracle that might flicker and save him.

By the tenth, he tried to impose order. He wrote a list on a napkin: groceries, laundry, call Shiv back, clean the bathroom or apartment in general. He managed two out of four. When he looked at the list that night, her absence blotted through it, an invisible watermark: you are waiting, you are waiting, you are waiting.

On the eleventh, he left the apartment for longer than an hour. He walked uptown without a plan, past couples with shopping bags, past a child dragging a balloon that bumped helplessly against the wind. He thought he saw her once,  just the tilt of a head, the set of shoulders in a dark coat,  but when the woman turned, it was a stranger. His chest burned like he’d been caught stealing something.

By the twelfth, he felt wrung out. Not empty,  never fully empty, but caught in that taut, unbearable state between hunger and exhaustion, like his body couldn’t decide what it needed most. Rest? Contact? Punishment? Every nerve felt lit but dulled at once, like he was running on a current he couldn’t trace back to its source.

He stared at the day as it unfolded and thought: tomorrow will be worse. Tomorrow, with its flowers and chocolates and couples queued outside restaurants, the grotesque theater of love performed in window displays and in the checkout lines of drugstores. All of it loud, tacky, garish and underneath, the one truth: it was meant for other people. For people who weren’t waiting on a silence.

Tomorrow…and the fact that he had no idea what she’d be doing.

Did she go out? Did she stay home? Did someone sit across from her at a table, watching her tip her glass, listening to that precise, cutting voice soften in low conversation? Did someone else get the chance to hold her attention in a way he never had, not fully at least? The thought made his stomach tighten, like acid.

He wanted to stop asking, wanted to slam the door on the reel of questions before it burned him out completely. But the questions clung, sticky, parasitic and refusing to dissolve. His imagination filled in the gaps where her silence left space and her silence,  sharper than any answer, cut through them all. Because the silence wasn’t neutral. It was active, it hummed with possibility: maybe she was thinking, or maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was drafting a reply, or maybe she’d already deleted him. Maybe she read his words and shook her head, shut the laptop, and never opened it again. 

He couldn’t know. That was the terror, that he was suspended between hope and erasure, never allowed the relief of falling to either side.

And beneath it all, the darker fear: what if she wasn’t silent at all, but speaking - only to someone else? What if there was another name glowing on her phone, another thread of words holding her in place the way hers had held him? What if her “I’m here” belonged, quietly, to somebody else?

It made his skin crawl, the way he could want so much from her and know at the same time that she didn’t owe him anything. That wanting her didn’t entitle him to her voice, her presence, her gaze… and yet the wanting didn’t lessen. Instead, it sharpened, it pressed in harder.

Every time he refreshed his inbox and saw nothing, it was like swallowing a shard. And still, he kept checking. Because what if. Because maybe. Because he couldn’t not.

The fear wasn’t just that she wouldn’t answer. The fear was that she had already answered, with this silence,  and he was too cowardly to accept it.

Part III – “Residue”

Roman didn’t mean to think about it. He never really meant to think about anything, memories just slid in, uninvited, like water through cracks he’d stopped trying to seal. And yet, mid-February, the city looking gray, rain falling outside in big droplets and the air sharp with the smell of wet iron, the memory of Japan arrived. Not politely, not even gradually just there, all at once.

It came to him while he was lying on the couch with the television muted, laptop balanced precariously on his chest, inbox open like a wound he couldn’t stop prodding. The little empty space under Gerri’s name mocked him. Nothing…no reply. A week gone and still nothing.

He told himself not to spiral, but his brain ignored him the way it always did, circling back to the places where humiliation had burned itself in too deep to ever fade. And humiliation always brought her with it because she was there in the wreckage, every time. 

His mind reached for a memory the way a tongue prods an old cut. March, not February, though his body had blurred it into the same season: the Japan trip, the one after the rocket turned into a fireball.

It came back not in clean edges but in atmosphere first, the weird hush of Tokyo airport lounges, the low hum of businessmen on their phones, the smell of green tea and jet fuel. He remembered being strung out and restless, caught between shame and defiance, like a kid hauled into detention who thought if he smirked enough maybe no one would notice the red slip in his hand. The world had seen him blow it - literally, spectacularly. His rocket had been supposed to lift off like proof he was more than a walking punchline. Instead, it exploded. He’d rushed it so he could make Shiv’s wedding more “fun,” like failure could be timed for maximum comedic effect. And in the middle of the fallout - press calls, investors wanting blood, Logan not even looking at him - there had been Gerri. Assigned, ostensibly, to “help manage” him on the Japan trip, but really to keep him contained. Damage control in heels.

He’d hated it then, that she had to be the adult in the room, the one smoothing over his chaos with a few words and an arched brow. But sitting here now, years later, his chest tight with the echo of an unsent email, he understood the tether differently. Back then it had felt like a leash. Now, it looked more like something closer to rescue.

He could see her even before he slid fully back into the memory: during the flight to Tokyo…long, airless hours crammed in a seat too narrow, his knee jiggling until even he wanted to punch himself, her composed profile a calm silhouette in the dimmed cabin lights. She’d read through briefing packets, annotated margins in neat handwriting, while he’d fidgeted and pretended to nap. She hadn’t asked if he was okay. She’d just handed him a glass of water once, wordless, and somehow that had been worse. More intimate. Like she saw straight through the performance. She’d been calm in a way that seemed impossible. He remembered wanting to snap at her, to crack a joke about how “mommy lawyer” had come to babysit, but even through the buzzing in his skull he’d known better. Because if she left - even for a minute - he would’ve unraveled in public, and the sharks would have smelled blood. So he clung. Not physically, God forbid, but in orbit. Sticking close enough that her steadiness might blur onto him by proximity. 

That was the thing about her. She never had to say she was holding him together; she just did it. A glance, a measured word, the way she stood beside him so that when the cameras swung by, he didn’t look quite so small. She said little back then, almost nothing, just the necessary exchanges in her calm, precise voice: thank yous, pleasantries, instructions in that tone that always made people listen without realizing they were being managed.

And him, buzzing like a live wire, muttering jokes under his breath just to feel the edge of his own voice. She didn’t laugh, not really, but once her mouth curved in the barest acknowledgment, and that was enough to keep him from flying apart.

He’d resented it, then. Resented her being the leash on his collar, resented the way Logan had clearly dispatched her as handler. He was supposed to be a man who could launch rockets, build empires, and prove himself beyond his idiot siblings. Instead, he was the kid with the burned toy, walking through an airport under the watch of the company lawyer who might as well have been his guardian.

And still, he stayed close. Because the alternative was being exposed, and exposure meant collapse.

Even now, in February years later, the memory stung. The fact that she had been the one to keep him upright, and that he had hated and needed her in the same breath.

By the time they reached the car waiting outside, a black sedan, the driver holding a polite placard with “Waystar Royco” printed on it, he remembered wanting to climb in first, slam the door, make some crude joke to puncture the suffocating quiet. But he’d held back, let her slide in beside him, the smell of her perfume faint against the cold leather. He stared out the window the whole drive, Tokyo rushing by in neon and rain, pretending he didn’t notice how the silence only felt bearable because she was sitting there.

And that was how it always started. With her there.

And, just like that, he was fully back in it, the memory sharpening as though someone had dialed the lens into focus. Not the airport anymore but the table: a lacquered wood surface, too many little porcelain dishes, the blur of waitstaff bowing and refilling cups. The first corporate dinner. Him vibrating with humiliation under his skin, trying too hard to look like he belonged. And her, at his side, translating him into something almost credible.

It had been the first night in Tokyo after the explosion. The air itself felt tight, like it knew the headline that had traveled faster than their plane. Waystar Rocket Fails, Explodes Mid-Launch. He’d been living inside those words since the moment the grainy footage went public: a fireball streaking across the sky, blooming into smoke like some cartoon of failure. Roman Roy’s Big Fuck-Up. Roman Roy The Pretend Executive Who Couldn’t Even Babysit A Rocket. He could hear it in every polite bow, every delicate pause of translation. Even across language barriers, he could feel it: people were laughing at him.

The restaurant was too perfect, everything lacquer and screens and quiet arrangement, every dish arriving like it had been curated for the cover of a magazine. He hated how fragile it all looked, every little plate an invitation to break something. The executives - half a dozen Japanese men in dark suits, smooth hair, controlled movements - sat opposite him, smiling with courtesy sharp enough to cut. He had no idea what they were saying half the time, and even when he caught a word or two in English, he knew he was filling in the gaps wrong.

So he talked too much, cracked jokes, juggled his chopsticks like they were props and made an offhand remark about rockets being fireworks, haha, just for Shiv’s wedding, as though turning it into a punchline could erase the months of planning, the millions of dollars, the humiliation of the explosion. He could feel his own words bouncing back at him, thinner each time.

And beside him…steady, deliberate, fucking bulletproof was Gerri.

She didn’t contradict him. She didn’t correct him in front of anyone. She didn’t even glance at him like he was a child embarrassing her in a grocery store aisle. She just smoothed over the space he left jagged. She’d angle her head toward the executives, voice even, the kind of measured clarity that somehow made his sarcasm sound like strategy. If he quipped about rockets as fireworks, she folded it into a narrative about ambition and spectacle, about cultural symbolism, about reaching beyond conventional metrics of success. She spoke like he’d meant it, like he’d walked in with a plan.

Roman sat there, vibrating in his own skin, and half of him wanted to scream at her to stop, stop making it sound like he hadn’t just humiliated himself, stop giving them reasons to nod politely, stop rewriting him into someone tolerable. The other half wanted to crawl under the table and kiss her shoes for it. Because without her, he would’ve been torn apart in five minutes. With her, he looked like maybe, just maybe, he was salvageable.

Meanwhile, the waitstaff kept coming, little bowls of broth so clear they looked like glass, plates with curls of sashimi so precise it hurt to look at them, tiny bites he couldn’t name, each balanced in porcelain dishes no bigger than his palm. He picked things up and dropped them, made fun of himself for not knowing how to use chopsticks, exaggerated the clumsiness so they’d laugh with him instead of at him. Gerri didn’t scold him. She just demonstrated, once, quietly, the angle of her fingers on the sticks, and when he mimicked her, the food didn’t fall apart in his hands.

It was stupid, but he remembered that. The way his chopsticks held, finally, like he wasn’t a complete moron. The way she gave him that small, approving glance, quick, almost nothing, but it made his chest buzz like he’d just scored a touchdown.

He’d filled silence with chatter, about the wedding, about New York traffic, and how he couldn’t believe jet lag was still a thing, like, haven’t we invented pills for that? Anything to drown out the roar of failure in his head. The execs smiled politely while he couldn’t tell if they were humoring him or dissecting him like a frog.

But Gerri…she didn’t drown him out. She steadied him instead. Every time he teetered too close to mockery, she caught the thread and tugged it back to neutral. Every time he risked sounding juvenile, she reframed it in the tone of an adult. She wasn’t flattering him; she was containing him. And somehow, that containment didn’t feel like a cage. It felt like - God, he hated even thinking this - safety.

He’d leaned on her presence without meaning to. Every time the table’s attention felt like heat searing his skin, he’d look sideways at her, catch the tilt of her chin, the calm curve of her mouth, and he’d breathe again. She was there, she was keeping him from collapsing in public. He resented the fuck out of it and yet he couldn’t stop himself from drinking her steadiness like water. 

Meanwhile, the sake kept coming, small porcelain cups, refilled with a rhythm he couldn’t predict. The warmth in his chest blurred the edges of the table. He laughed too loud at his own jokes, but when she laughed once…actually laughed, low and brief, but real, he felt it like a hit to the ribs. Not indulgence, not mockery just…laughter. He hadn’t realized how starved he was for that sound. Roman remembered the dishes stacking up like evidence. He remembered watching her hand, the way she placed each cup back on its saucer with that careful efficiency, wrist steady, fingers unhurried. He remembered the way the light hit her hair when she bent her head toward the interpreter. Stupid details, stupid little things that stuck in his brain like burrs.

By the time the last of the executives excused themselves with polite bows, murmured goodnights, business cards exchanged with two hands, Roman felt like the inside of his skull had been scraped raw. He’d grinned until his face ached, nodded until his neck was a hinge. The interpreter had melted away, leaving a hush in the room that felt almost indecent after hours of courtesy.

And then it was just them. Him and her, side by side at the lacquered table, the spread reduced to empty saucers and two half-full cups of sake that no one had thought to clear.

The silence pressed in, thick and heavy with everything that hadn’t been said. Roman shifted in his seat, drummed his fingers against the wood, trying not to look like the kid left behind after the adults had gone home. He wanted to tell her, right then, he wanted to lean nearer to her and say: You’re the only thing between me and disaster. You’re the only one keeping me from falling through the floor. But he didn’t, he never did. 

Instead he said, “You were…” He gestured vaguely at the table, at the air where the executives had been. “…weirdly good back there. Like, ninja good. Diplomatic assassin shit.”

Gerri angled her head, a faint smile tugging at her mouth. “It’s called diplomacy, Roman. Some people practice it.”

He huffed a laugh, too sharp, but grateful for the sound. “Right, yeah. Well, congrats on making me sound like less of an idiot. Ten out of ten. Would humiliate myself again.”

She didn’t roll her eyes, she didn’t even sigh, she just lifted her sake cup, sipped, and said, “You weren’t as bad as you think.”

Roman blinked at her. “Okay, that’s literally the definition of a backhanded compliment. ‘You’re not the disaster you imagine yourself to be.’ Cool. Love that.”

Her eyes flicked to him, dry but not unkind. “You survived. That’s something.”

“Yeah, my bar is basically ‘didn’t die at the table,’ so…nailed it.” He picked up his own cup, sloshed the sake, took a too-fast gulp that burned down his throat. “Thanks, Mom.”

That earned him a look. A warning, but softened by the faintest curve at the corner of her mouth.

The room felt different now. Without the executives, the air wasn’t tight anymore; it sagged, loose and tired, like the city itself had exhaled. Roman leaned back in his chair, legs stretched, trying to look casual, trying to feel casual but every nerve was still buzzing from the night. “I don’t get how you do it,” he muttered, not looking at her. “Sit there all cool and unflappable, like - like none of it even touches you. Meanwhile I’m sweating through my fucking suit and making firework jokes about exploding rockets.”

“Practice,” she replied simply. “And not speeding up multi-million-dollar launches to fit a wedding schedule.”

Roman barked out a laugh, half-shame, half-relief. “Wow. There it is. The dagger.”

“Not a dagger.” She set her cup down with deliberate precision. “Just reality.”

“Yeah, well. Reality sucks.” He expected her to snap back, to scold, but she didn’t. Instead she looked at him for a long moment, eyes steady, assessing, like she was weighing whether to say something heavier. Then she just said, “Sometimes.”

The word hung there, softer than he’d expected, heavier than he wanted. He shifted again, rubbed the back of his neck, and muttered, “Sometimes. Right. Great.”

Silence again. The kind that wasn’t quite empty. Roman found himself staring at the way the light hit the rim of her glass. The line of her wrist when she reached for it. The clean, precise movements that had steadied the whole table hours ago now distilled into these small gestures, just for him. He wanted to say something - thank you, or fuck you, or don’t leave me alone with myself. Instead he let the silence stretch until it felt unbearable. 

“So,” he said abruptly, “do we clap or something? Like, congrats, we successfully pretended I’m not the clown prince of pyrotechnics?”

Her laugh - quiet and unexpected - slipped out before she caught it. Roman froze, staring. It wasn’t indulgent, it wasn't mocking just a brief, real sound, low in her throat. And fuck, he felt it everywhere. He covered it fast with another quip. “Careful. If you start laughing at my jokes, people are gonna think we’re, like, friends or something.”

“We’re colleagues,” she corrected, still with that ghost of a smile.

“Ouch.” He put a hand over his chest, mock-wounded. “Cold-blooded. Love it.”

But inside, his pulse skittered, erratic because it hadn’t felt cold. It had felt like…acknowledgment. Like something almost warm slipping through the cracks.

He tipped back the last of his sake, letting the burn distract him. When he set the cup down, his hand trembled faintly, he clenched it into a fist against his thigh, hoping she hadn’t noticed. “Colleagues,” he echoed, quieter this time. As if saying it again could pin down whatever was shifting loose inside him.

She didn’t answer, just reached for the bottle, poured another small measure into his cup with the same calm efficiency she’d used all evening like she was steadying him even here, in the hush after the performance.

Roman stared at the liquid, clear and sharp in the porcelain. He thought about thanking her, he thought about confessing - I can’t do any of this without you. I don’t know why you’re here, why you even bother, but if you weren’t, I’d be fucking ashes on the floor.

What came out instead was: “You’re, uh…not terrible company, you know.”

Gerri gave him a look, the kind that smoothed down all his edges without saying a word. Then, quietly: “Neither are you.”

And that - that was worse than any dagger because it sounded almost true.

A couple minutes later, the bill was settled without discussion, Gerri handling it with the same quiet decisiveness she had handled every executive that evening. Roman had half a mind to throw down his card, make some grand gesture about independence, but even he knew how that would look: another boyish attempt at control, another show he couldn’t pull off. So he shoved his hands into his pockets, watched her murmur something to the server in the careful, clipped English she used abroad, and followed her out. The door slid open to the night. Tokyo waited, alive and indifferent.

Neon signs stacked on top of each other, glowing kanji bleeding into the wet pavement, lanterns bobbed faintly in the breeze, strings of them outside izakayas where men in suits still huddled over bowls of steaming ramen. The air smelled like broth and soy, rain and electricity. Somewhere above, a billboard looped the same animated ad, colors flickering across the slick asphalt.

Roman blinked against it all. The noise, the lights, the city so alive it felt like it might swallow him whole and beside him…her. Coat buttoned, stride steady, as if none of it could touch her.

He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets. “So. That was fun. Dinner with people who secretly think I’m a fucking idiot.”

“They didn’t think that,” she replied, matter-of-factly.

“Oh, right. They thought it loudly and politely. Big difference.”

“They were respectful,” she said, eyes forward.

“Respectful like, ‘wow, you lit millions of dollars on fire but at least you wore a tie tonight’? That kind of respectful?”

She glanced sideways at him, the faintest crease at the corner of her mouth. “Roman.”

“Yeah?”

“Not everything is about humiliation.”

He snorted. “Sure. Just ninety percent. The other ten’s probably indigestion.”

For a beat, they walked in silence. The crowd pressed around them, salarymen with briefcases, couples in long coats, a woman pedaling a bicycle with plastic bags swinging from the handlebars. Roman stuck close without realizing it, his shoulder almost brushing hers. They passed a shop window with a display of chocolates wrapped in red foil, hearts printed on every box. Roman slowed, frowned at it. “Oh, Jesus. It’s like a diabetes bomb went off. Is it Valentine’s Day already or is this just Japan being aggressively festive?”

Gerri glanced at the display, her mouth curving in that restrained, private way she had when something amused her but she wasn’t about to encourage him. “It’s March,” she replied. “You’re seeing White Day leftovers. Different holiday. Roughly the same effect.”

“White Day?” he echoed, already leaning into the words like they were an inside joke he wasn’t yet part of. “What’s that - day you bleach your socks? National laundry fest?”

Her gaze shifted from the glass to him, one eyebrow raised. “It’s the day where the other partner returns the favor. Valentine’s here is when women give gifts. White Day is the reciprocal gesture.”

Roman blinked at her, then back at the avalanche of foil-wrapped sweetness behind the glass. “So what…you give a box of sugar hearts, and then you get one back like a month later? Efficient, transactional, very on brand for the human race.” He tilted his head, squinting. “Do you get, like, bonus points if your return gift is bigger? What if it’s not candy but, I don’t know, a car? Or a jet? Can I White Day someone with a rocket that doesn’t explode?”

Her lips twitched, almost a smile but not quite, the kind that flickered and then vanished as quickly as it came. “You’re in no position to be promising rockets right now.”

He groaned, throwing his hands out in mock defeat. “Wow. Harsh. Even after all this sake, you still twist the knife. Impressive, Gerri.”

“Not twisting. Reminding,” she said evenly, but the words carried a softness he didn’t expect. She started walking again, her heels clicking against the wet pavement, the rhythm steady and unhurried.

He fell into step beside her, shoving his hands deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched against the cool night air. Tokyo in March wasn’t brutal the way New York could be, but the dampness clung, rain on concrete, the faint tang of exhaust, a hint of blossoms from some unseen courtyard drifting in on the breeze. The neon signs painted their coats with color as they passed - greens, reds, soft pinks that caught in her hair when she moved beneath them.

Roman stole a glance at her, her profile lit in alternating washes of light. She looked so composed, so herself, even after hours of executives, bowing, politeness, and his own endless stream of deflection. Like none of it touched her, not really, like she was carved from something steadier.

“Did you ever get one?” he asked suddenly.

She looked over. “One what?”

“A Valentine. A White Day gift. Whatever.” He gestured vaguely at the window behind them, though they were already half a block away. “You know. From someone who—” He cut himself off, teeth clicking together on the words before they slipped too far. He shrugged instead. “Someone who mattered.”

Her eyes narrowed a little, considering him, not unkindly. Then she said, lightly, “I was married for thirty years, Roman. Of course I did.”

“Right. Yeah. Obvious answer, gold star for me.” He smirked thinly, but the joke tasted sour in his mouth. He didn’t want to picture her with anyone else, though of course he knew there had been someone. More than someone. A whole life. A life he could never touch. Still, the thought of her accepting chocolates, flowers, maybe something expensive and careful…that steadied, elegant posture softening for someone else, lit something raw and restless in him. He quickened his pace a step, then slowed again to stay beside her. “Bet you didn’t do the whole…giddy teenager thing, though. You probably got practical gifts. A new briefcase. A fountain pen. Matching suits.”

Her laugh was low, quick, and real this time, slipping out before she could stop it. “You’d be surprised,” she said.

He turned his head sharply, eyes narrowing. “Would I? What - roses and teddy bears? Heart-shaped balloons?”

“No,” she replied, tone smooth, but there was something private under it, something he couldn’t touch. “But not everything in my life was practical. Not always.”

The silence that followed stretched. He felt it tighten in his chest, like a thread pulling taut. He wanted to ask…wanted to know what she’d meant, what had been given, if Baird was the only one who had seen her as more than the impenetrable shield she wore for everyone else. But he didn’t. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, kicked at a crack in the pavement. “Must be nice,” he muttered.

They walked on. The streets grew quieter as they veered away from the brighter corridors, shops shuttered, their metal grates pulled down, and the hum of the city softened into the low murmur of late-night traffic. Roman’s sneakers scuffed against the sidewalk, while Gerri’s heels kept their steady rhythm. That sound, her measured cadence beside his restless shuffle, lodged itself in his memory, even as it was happening.

He glanced sideways again. The light caught her face at an angle, her expression unreadable. A flicker of warmth sat in his chest, uninvited, unmanageable. He wanted to tell her…something, anything. That he hated needing her but couldn’t imagine surviving these days without her there to keep him from crumbling. That walking beside her like this felt dangerously close to peace. That maybe, just maybe, this was what it could feel like to not be a disaster.

“Bet you’re wishing you were back in New York right now,” he muttered instead. “Or, I don’t know, anywhere that doesn’t smell like noodles and corporate shame.”

“Not particularly,” she said.

“Really? Because if I were you, I’d have ditched me in the bathroom two hours ago and caught the first flight back.”

“That’s why you’re not me.”

He barked out a laugh, the sound too loud in the quiet street, but he couldn’t stop it,“Thanks for the reminder.” Another pause. The lights shifted across her face as they passed under a sign, red bleeding into white into blue. Roman caught himself staring. The steadiness of her profile. The set of her jaw, the way her coat swung slightly with each step, precise, measured, like everything else she did. He wanted to say something - why are you here? why do you even bother with me? - but he shoved it down, instead,  “So, when we write up tonight for Dad, are we calling it a win? Or just, like, ‘Roman didn’t completely combust, please clap’?”

“A win,” she said simply.

That landed harder than he expected. A win. As if she could just decide it, make it so. Roman jammed his hands deeper into his pockets, pulse jumping under his skin.

They turned a corner. The hotel rose ahead, glass and steel lit up against the dark sky. Roman stared at it, then at her, the distance between them suddenly too much and not enough. “Guess we survived,” he said lightly, because he couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

Her answer was quieter, but steady. “We did.”

The rain caught the streetlights, turning the air into a blur of gold. Roman felt his throat tighten. He almost said it…almost told her he didn’t think he would’ve survived any of it without her. But the words stuck, burned, dissolved.

He shoved his hair back instead, forced a smirk, and muttered, “Well. Add that to my list of achievements: didn’t die in Japan. You can put it on my tombstone.”

This time, she actually smiled. Small, but there.

She didn’t understand what it did to him, her steady sarcasm, her refusal to indulge his self-pity. Or maybe she did…maybe that was the point.

The hotel’s glass doors slid open with a muted sigh as they stepped inside, the lobby warm and bright after the cool damp of the street. The floor gleamed, polished marble reflecting chandeliers that dripped light like cut crystal. A few businessmen lingered near the check-in desk, murmuring in low voices; a concierge smiled mechanically as they passed. Roman shoved his hands deeper into his coat pockets, shoulders hunched, shoes squeaking faintly against the marble. Gerri moved with that same unshakable stride, her heels clicking evenly, coat still neat despite the rain. He hated how much he noticed it, the line of her collar, the way her hair had dried and curled a bit into a smooth frame at her jaw. She looked untouched, the way she always did, and he felt like a scuffed shadow beside her.

They didn’t speak as they crossed the lobby. The silence wasn’t empty, though, it was weighted, vibrating with everything he hadn’t said on the walk back. He tried to smother it under a smirk, under some half-formed joke waiting at the back of his throat, but for once the words wouldn’t come.

At the elevator, she pressed the button. The light blinked on and they stood side by side, close but not touching. Roman shifted his weight from one foot to the other, bouncing lightly on his heels, the silence gnawing at him.

The doors slid open and they stepped inside. Mirrored walls caught them both then: her composed reflection, his restless one. Roman jammed his hands into his pockets, glanced at the ceiling, the buttons, anywhere but at her. Then, inevitably, he looked back and saw her standing straight, hands folded neatly around her bag, eyes forward but soft, as if even in this silence she was in control.

The doors closed with a hush. The elevator lurched upward.

He felt it then, the air tightening, humming. Not overt, not something anyone else would have noticed but to him it was alive, buzzing just under his skin. The space seemed smaller, closer. He caught the faintest trace of her perfume, subtle, clean, something that didn’t announce itself but lingered. He inhaled, pulse stuttering, then cursed himself silently for even noticing.

“Fun night,” he said finally, his voice low, too quick. It sounded pathetic even to him.

She glanced at him, only briefly, her expression unreadable. “You managed,” she said at last. Not praise, not indulgence, just fact but the tone was steady, sure in a way that made something tighten in his chest.

“Managed,” he echoed, smirking weakly at his reflection in the mirrored wall. His face looked sharp, pale, twitchy. Next to hers - calm, contained, still - it was almost grotesque. “That’s me. World-class manager of disasters.” He waited for the joke to land. It didn’t, it hovered there, thin, breaking apart in the silence.

The elevator climbed, its hum low in his bones and Roman’s throat ached with the words he wouldn’t let himself say: thank you. Don’t leave me. You’re the only person who doesn’t make me feel like I should disappear. They pressed against the back of his teeth, urgent and humiliating. He swallowed them, jaw clamped.

Instead, he muttered, “Guess I should put that on my résumé.”

Her gaze flicked toward him again, not long enough to pin him, but long enough to steady him like a hand on his shoulder he couldn’t admit to needing. She didn’t answer, but her silence wasn’t cold. It was permissive like she knew he was drowning in his own noise and had decided the kindest thing was to give him quiet.

And that - that tiny allowance - cut through him. Because no one else did that. Not his father, not his siblings, not anyone. No one else gave him space without using it against him. No one else steadied him without reminding him of the cost.

The elevator’s mirrored walls caught the two of them together again:  her posture still straight, her reflection so composed it looked untouchable. And his beside it, jittery, eyes darting everywhere but her and yet for a moment he imagined the glass was telling another story: that he belonged there next to her, tethered to her steadiness, part of whatever balance she carried so effortlessly.

Something unfamiliar flickered under his ribs then, not just relief, not just gratitude, a kind of ache, sharp and humiliating. He wanted to stand closer. He wanted to lean into her calm, even as some part of him recoiled from the thought, scorning it as weakness.

The elevator chimed softly and then the doors opened. She stepped out first, her heels clicking against the carpeted hallway. He followed, his mouth still full of everything unsaid.

Later, when he replayed it, this was where it started: the tug he would never name, the way his chest had tightened in that silence, the absurd little flare of wanting that wasn’t quite sexual and wasn’t quite safe but lodged in him anyway. Admiration, dependency, some strange crush, he couldn’t parse it then. He only knew that he’d wanted to follow her out of that elevator not because he had to, but because something in him already didn’t know how not to. 

He asked himself then, if he’d spoken then - if he’d let anything real slip out - would it have changed anything? He didn’t know. He would never know.

But in memory, the silence was louder than anything words could have been.

The hotel hallway dissolved first, like someone pulling focus until all that was left was the sound of his own breathing. The sharpness of it startled him, he blinked, and the mirrored elevator walls were gone. His apartment walls stood in their place: blank, gray, unhelpful.

For a moment, he didn’t move. It was like surfacing too fast, lungs burning, ears ringing, the body unsure of which air belonged to now. His hand was still resting against his knee, curled as though braced for something, and he loosened it finger by finger.

The city outside pressed back into him: sirens faint in the distance, a horn blaring, the occasional thrum of footsteps on the street below. February light slanted across the room, cold and washed-out, nothing like the neon warmth of Tokyo but he still felt it, the echo of that elevator silence. Felt it like a bruise he’d touched too hard.

He exhaled, sharp, and rubbed a hand down his face. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered, like scolding himself might force the memory back where it belonged. But it wouldn’t go, it never did. The edges of it clung; the reflection of her beside him, the steadiness in her voice, the unsaid words crowding his throat. He’d thought it was nothing at the time. He’d let himself think it was nothing and now, years later, it came back dressed as something enormous, something he couldn’t dismiss without feeling like he was cutting out a piece of himself.

The silence of his apartment deepened. He glanced at the laptop, still closed on the table. Her absence there seemed sharper now, crueler even, against the backdrop of a memory where she’d been constant, right beside him. Roman shifted restlessly, standing up, pacing toward the window. The glass was cold under his palm. The city looked indifferent…Valentine’s displays bright even in the distance, couples walking close against the wind. He pressed his forehead to the glass, breath fogging the surface.

“I should’ve said something,” he whispered, and the words startled him by being out loud.

Said what? He didn’t know. He hadn’t known then. He didn’t know now. But the ache was the same, the pull of something he couldn’t define and couldn’t undo. And standing there in the dull February light, it hit him: the memory hadn’t faded at all, it had sharpened like every year since had only honed it further.

Part IV – “Valentine’s Eve”

The city was dressed for Valentine’s. Or maybe not dressed, more like costumed. Storefronts crowded with pink foil and red ribbons, clusters of heart-shaped balloons bobbing against the ceiling of every drugstore. Roman hated it immediately, hated the way even the street seemed to wear it like cheap perfume. He kept his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, as though anonymity might shield him from the sight of it all.

February 13th, tomorrow the city would drown in flowers and prix fixe menus. Tonight was just the rehearsal, and already he could feel it pressing in on him: couples bent together over bakery windows, women carrying small glossy bags with tissue paper folded just so, men at jewelry counters pretending they weren’t panicking about being too late.

He wanted to laugh at them - at the earnestness, the cliché of it all - but something in him refused. Instead the sight made his stomach tighten, not quite jealousy, not quite grief, but a raw recognition that he was permanently adjacent to it, never inside, like someone pressing his face to the glass of a party he hadn’t been invited to. He passed a florist’s display where roses, neat and stiff in rows, stared out at him with the kind of smug inevitability only flowers could manage. He wondered, fleetingly, if anyone had ever given Gerri roses, if Baird ever did. He tried to picture her holding them, and immediately it didn’t fit, too on-the-nose, too loud, too…ordinary. She wasn’t roses or chocolates or any of the other cheap signifiers littering the shelves around him. She was…other. She was the pause before she spoke, the angle of her wrist when she slid a document across a table, the low, exhausted note in her voice when she told him to behave.

He tried to imagine what he would give her, if he were ever allowed to. The thought startled him, because it arrived so fully formed, like he’d been carrying it around for years without realizing: not roses, not candy, not anything with a bow. He imagined a gift that fit that, something with weight. A fountain pen, black lacquer, heavy in the hand. He pictured her signing her name with it, neat and decisive, without ever knowing that the ink was his attempt at permanence. Or maybe cufflinks, silver and understated, slipped into a drawer she’d only open on certain mornings. Or something stranger still: a paperweight, jagged crystal, something that sat on her desk and caught the light in fractured ways, like the mess of him contained inside something she could actually use.

Each thought lodged deeper in his chest, ridiculous and painful, because they were all gifts he would never give. He wasn’t allowed to mark her in that way. He wasn’t her husband. He wasn’t even her friend anymore. He was just the shadow of a man who’d already lost the chance to hand her anything real. Still, he couldn’t stop imagining it, the way her fingers would close around the pen, how she might pause for a fraction of a second before signing, like she’d felt the difference but couldn’t name it. Or how her wrist might flash silver under the cuff of her jacket, and no one would know, no one but him.

Roman lingered at the window longer than he meant to, the reflection of pink foil hearts blurring against the glass until it looked like static. His breath fogged up the pane, and for a second he thought about drawing something in it, the way kids scrawl messages in condensation. Her initials maybe. A stupid little G . He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets instead, his throat ached with the thought, with the sheer futility of it, but the picture wouldn’t dissolve. It just grew sharper, clearer, until he had to move, had to push himself away from the glass like the display was burning him.

“Here,” he muttered under his breath, as though he could hand her the thought itself. “Not flowers. And then, quieter still: “Not for you. Never for you.”

A man walking past turned his head at the sound, but Roman didn’t notice.

He stopped at a candy shop window next, not because he wanted anything but because the display was aggressive enough to halt him. Chocolate boxes stacked like bricks, bows tied with surgical precision. He imagined her looking at something like this and raising one eyebrow, unimpressed. She wouldn’t want this either. She’d probably accept it politely, thank whoever had given it, and then set it aside like something she’d eventually give away.

He hated the idea of her being given things by anyone else. Hated it so much his hands curled tighter in his pockets, nails digging into the lining.

The sidewalk moved around him in waves, people in pairs, in clumps, laughing, brushing against each other. His whole body wanted to recoil from it. He cut across the street too quickly, nearly colliding with a cab. The driver laid on the horn; Roman flipped him off without slowing. He kept walking and kept seeing her, in the corner of his mind, she was there - her posture in the Tokyo elevator, her voice on the phone that she never picked up, her two words in an email he’d read until the letters had worn grooves into his skull: I’m here.

Was she? Here, anywhere? Or was it just the way she said it, like anchoring herself to a place just outside his reach. 

He wanted to ask her. The thought came unbidden, the way his mind sometimes filled in silence with imagined dialogue. He heard himself say it as though she were beside him, coat brushing against his sleeve. “What does that even mean, Ger? Here, like…here with me? Or just alive and breathing somewhere in the city? Because those are different things.”

He heard her answering in the dry, measured way she always had when he asked too much. Maybe: Don’t twist it, Roman. It meant exactly what it meant.

But he twisted it anyway, on repeat, until the words folded in on themselves.

He turned down a quieter block, East 50th maybe, though he wasn’t paying attention to street signs. The shopfronts thinned, replaced by dim lobbies and blank facades. His breath came out pale in the cold. He shoved his hands deeper into his coat and kept moving. Every couple he passed made him feel like he was walking in reverse. They were all moving toward something - dinners, beds, futures -  while he drifted back into memories. Tokyo, a hotel elevator. The side of her face in profile, unreadable.

He wondered, not for the first time, if that had been the night. If something could have happened then, if he’d been someone else. If he’d said what he almost said - thanks, I’d be lost without you - would the floor of the world have shifted under them both? Or would she have shut him down with that clinical sharpness that still managed to feel like mercy?

He never let himself finish the thought. It was too dangerous.

The streets pressed closer the deeper he went into Midtown, every storefront reminding him of the date as though it were a headline he couldn’t scroll past. Even more windows heavy with heart-shaped boxes, plush animals, cartoon cherubs clutching foil balloons. All of it looked faintly diseased to him, saccharine and bloated like a parody of tenderness. Couples stopped to peer at displays, heads bent together, fingers touching with an ease that might as well have been sorcery. Roman kept his hands jammed in his pockets, shoulders up like a shield, scuffing at the grit on the sidewalk as though motion itself might make the spectacle dissolve.

He told himself it was nothing, just seasonal noise, but the fact that he couldn’t unsee it, couldn’t move five feet without tripping over roses wrapped in cellophane, meant it wasn’t about the city at all. It was about her. Always her. The thought landed like a body blow: if he were capable of giving anyone anything that wasn’t tainted, it would have been her. Not roses, not chocolate, not any of this mass-produced theater. Something else. Something sharper, weirder, something only she would understand. A pen heavy enough to last decades. A paperweight cut like ice. A joke wrapped so tightly in sincerity that she’d have to hold it in her hands before realizing it was real.

The idea almost startled him with its clarity, like he’d been carrying it inside himself all this time, unacknowledged. The fact that he could imagine her fingers closing around a gift from him - steady, elegant, pragmatic - made his throat ache. Because he couldn’t. Because he’d forfeited that right the moment he’d blurred the line between her role and his need.

He slowed outside one display where jewelry glittered under bright halogen, rings lined up like they were waiting to be auctioned off. He muttered under his breath, “Yeah, right. Here’s a diamond, Gerri, because nothing says I totally didn’t ruin our careers like blood-soaked rocks from the earth. Very subtle.” He smirked at his own voice, but it cracked halfway through, the smirk folding into something thinner, almost brittle.

If he ran into her, what would he actually say? The thought came uninvited, intrusive, as though the street itself had scripted it. His brain supplied fragments before he could shut them down:

Hey, Ger. You look…
No. Too normal.

I wasn’t gonna say anything, but I - I read your email like it’s scripture now.
Pathetic.

Do you ever think about that night in Tokyo?
Insane. Absolutely insane.

He kept walking, but the ghost of the words clung, circling like gnats.

“Okay,” he whispered to the air, voice caught somewhere between a hiss and a plea, “what if I just said - hey, thanks for still existing in my direction. That’s all. Thanks for not deleting me entirely. Is that…fuck, is that a thing?”

No one answered. The city didn’t even bother to echo him back.

He ducked into a bodega for water just to be under a different light for a moment. The fluorescent buzz felt surgical, peeling everything down to nerves. He lingered by the refrigerators longer than necessary, staring at rows of bottles as though hydration might be the answer. But even here, the cashier was arranging buckets of roses by the counter, their chemical sweetness leaking into the stale air. “Jesus,” Roman muttered. “Can’t even buy Poland Spring without choking on romance.”

He paid, left, the bottle cold in his hand, condensation slick against his palm. On the sidewalk again, he twisted the cap off, drank too fast, water sliding down the wrong pipe. He coughed, choked, doubled over slightly, the fizz of air scraping his throat raw. The laugh that broke out of him was sharp, almost manic, echoing too loudly in the narrow street. If she’d been there, she would have given him that look - half disgust, half indulgence - handed him a napkin with two fingers like she didn’t want to catch whatever idiocy he carried. She might have said, Jesus, Roman, what are you, twelve?

He missed it, the sound of her not-laugh. Not even the real thing, not quite. The little exhale she gave when he said something so ridiculous it scraped a smile out of her before she could stop it. It was never a full laugh, never generous, but it was his, in some warped way, because he had earned it against her will. He could still hear it in his head, that soft, almost secret sound, like she was pressing a hand against it to keep it from escaping.

He sat down on the low stone ledge of a closed storefront then, the bottle dangling from his fingers. The city moved past him in blurred streaks: headlights, scarves, perfume. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, staring at the wet shine of the pavement until it doubled and swam.“Say something, Ger,” he muttered under his breath, the way he used to prod her in boardrooms when the silence grew too tight. In his head, he could almost hear her voice answering, dry and exact, cutting through his mess. Maybe: You’ll survive, Roman. You always do. Or maybe softer, rarer: Pull yourself together. I’m not going to do it for you.

He closed his eyes, pressed his knuckles against his mouth. The ache that rose up was worse than jealousy, worse than fear, it was absence. Absence so total it felt like a weight strapped to his ribs. He sat there longer than he meant to, until the bottle was warm in his hand, until the chill of the stone seeped through his coat. When he stood, his legs felt unsteady, not from drink, but from the heaviness he carried.

The walk home stretched longer than it should have, blocks lengthening like elastic. He cut through smaller streets, quieter ones, neon bleeding in pools on the wet asphalt. Somewhere above, an apartment window glowed warm, shadow-figures moving inside. He let himself picture her there, coat draped over a chair, glass of wine on the counter, reading something on her laptop with that terrifying calm. Was she alone? Was someone with her? Both possibilities hurt in different registers, one sharp, one dull, neither survivable.

The air thinned around him. He shoved the bottle in a trash can, hands back in his pockets, pulse too quick. If I saw you, what would I say? he thought, and fragments rose again, uninvited, like static:

I don’t know how to do this without you.
You steadied me when I didn’t even know I was falling.
I still want you in the room. Even if it’s just the room of my inbox.

He walked faster, as if pace alone could burn the words out of him. They didn’t burn…they seared in.

By the time he reached his building, the Valentine’s machinery was still everywhere, shops glowing red and pink like open wounds. He slipped inside fast, head down, as though anonymity could save him. The lobby smelled faintly of lilies - someone’s delivery already arrived early - and the scent was so at odds with his chest that he almost laughed again, a laugh without air.

In the elevator, the mirror bright around him, he caught his own reflection. Hollow-eyed, collar askew. For one sliver of a second, he saw her there beside him instead, her posture precise, coat immaculate, face unreadable but not unfeeling. The memory of Tokyo bled into the now, and it was unbearable.

The doors slid open. He stepped out into the hall, walked to his door, and let himself in. The apartment was still the same kind of silence it had been before but heavier now, layered with everything he hadn’t said. He dropped his keys on the counter, leaned against it, and closed his eyes.

He wondered what she was doing. He wondered if she had thought of him, even once, in the blur of this stupid holiday’s approach. He wondered if she’d ever know what he would’ve given her, not flowers, not hearts, but the sharp edge of attention, of being seen when no one else was looking.

The night folded around him. February 13th ended, and he was still alone, but never without her. Not really.

Part V – “Almost Again”

The apartment seemed smaller when he came back in, though nothing had changed. The same faint, unwashed smell of radiator heat and old upholstery, the lights he hadn’t turned on before leaving, the window blind that was still caught at a crooked angle, everything sat where it had been, inert and unhelpful. But his chest tightened as though the walls had crept closer in his absence, squeezing air out of the room with the same dull persistence as the winter dusk outside. He dropped his coat over the back of a chair and didn’t bother with the shoes. His feet ached but he walked straight to the desk anyway, the one cluttered corner of the apartment that looked like it belonged to someone who still cared about the world. 

Laptop waiting, screen dark, a single glass beside it with a ring of water in the bottom. He hesitated with his hands on the lid, as if opening it might release something he wasn’t prepared to meet. And then, because hesitation was worse than whatever followed, he flipped it open.

The inbox bloomed, stark white against the dim room, and he felt it immediately, the weight of stillness, the absence shaped like her. No reply. No new message. No movement of her name against the rigid column of time-stamped entries. The silence was thicker now, swollen by the days he had given her, days he had told himself might carry some small chance of rescue. And now that hope had collapsed back into its own echo.

He clicked into his sent folder instead, scrolling until he found it. The draft-that-became-a-message. His voice sent out like a flare, caught and trapped forever in the archive of his own choosing. He opened it, reread the first line, and almost shut it again. But he didn’t. He read it slowly, line by line, as though waiting for a new sentence to appear, some better phrasing that might have slipped through since he had last checked. Each word burned in its awkwardness, too formal here, too guarded there. A sentence that staggered into nothing when he had wanted it to land like confession. He hated it. He hated how careful he had been, how practiced, how his attempt at control only bared the desperation underneath. 

And yet, in the same breath, he clung to it. Because it existed. Because it had left him, crossed whatever invisible space lay between them, and landed in her possession. He couldn’t take it back. He wouldn’t take it back. The shame of it was the only proof that he’d been able to say anything at all.

He stared long enough that the words blurred, broke apart into shapes instead of language. His reflection shimmered faintly in the dark edges of the screen, pallid face split by the glow. He rubbed his eyes, closed the window, and opened a new draft. The cursor blinked against emptiness. A small pulse, steady and unbothered, as if time could be measured in that single insistence.

He didn’t throw himself at it, not this time. He folded his arms across his chest, rocked slightly in the chair, waited for his own hands to betray him. They hovered, tapped against the desk, brushed the keys once, twice, then retreated. He typed nothing, he breathed through his teeth and stared until the brightness prickled at his eyes. At last he bent forward, almost in surrender, and let his fingers fall.

Hi.

He sat back immediately. The word looked skeletal, ridiculous. Too casual, too schoolyard. He hit backspace.

The cursor blinked again.

Hey.

No. That one sagged with limp familiarity, like a sound tossed across a room without eye contact. Gone.

Dear Gerri- 

He froze, his chest tightened at the sight of it. Formal, ancient, as though he were about to draft a condolence note or a resignation. He lingered on it longer than he meant to, imagining the shape of her name written there, the quiet authority it carried. Then he deleted it, each letter vanishing like a swallowed breath.

He rubbed his forehead, pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes. He typed again, slower this time:

I wasn’t going to write.

His mouth tightened. Already too revealing. He highlighted it, deleted. The cursor blinked.

It’s been a while.

He grimaced at the flatness, the way it offered nothing but an opening into a silence he might not be able to cross. Gone.

He tried again.

I keep thinking about the last time we spoke.

The sentence glared back at him, its weight obvious, its path leading straight into terrain he could never navigate cleanly. He deleted it in a rush, as though it had been dangerous even to glimpse.

He let his fingers rest, unmoving, then forced another line.

You don’t have to answer this.

His stomach turned. Too pleading. He stabbed at the backspace key until it was gone.

He leaned sideways in the chair, his elbow on the desk, fingers to his lips. The blankness stretched open, indifferent to his stammering attempts.

And then the thought pressed on him, he checked the time, today, the date, the clutter of hearts and ribbons and hollow sentiment stuffed into every storefront window. He could see them still in memory: boxes of candy, cards, the whole city dressed in pink plastic longing. Valentine’s. The word itself made him wince, sharp with absurdity. He had sneered at it most of his life, despised the manufactured neediness of it. But now the word pressed closer, refusing to be ignored.

His fingers moved before he could talk himself out of it.

Happy Valentine’s.

Three words. Nothing ornate. No preface, no sign-off, no effort at disguise. They sat there in the middle of the page like an accusation. He stared at them. His pulse lifted into his throat. They might have been sincere; they might have been a joke. He couldn’t decide which frightened him more. He rested his hand over the trackpad, holding still, afraid to click, afraid not to. The words seemed to swell as he watched, louder than anything he had written before, larger than the screen itself.

He reached for the backspace key, slowly, deliberately, as if pressing it were an act of mercy. One letter disappeared, then another, until all three words were erased. And then he was left with it again: a blank subject line, an empty body, and the blinking cursor, steady, patient, willing to wait forever.

The apartment had gone fully dark while he sat there, the screen the only light in the room, casting its pallid glow across his hands, his jaw, the lines hollowed beneath his eyes. The city outside was muffled, dulled by February cold, traffic sounds leaking faintly through the glass. He hadn’t moved in what felt like hours, hadn’t stood to switch on a lamp or fetch water. Just the blank draft, the blinking cursor, and the emptiness he had typed into, deleted from, typed into again. At last he closed the window without saving, the absence of words more bearable than the evidence of failure. He flicked back to the inbox, less out of purpose than habit, compulsion trained into him by years of waiting, for orders, for verdicts, for scraps of approval. He didn’t expect anything. He just needed to see the stillness confirmed.

But this time the stillness wasn’t there. At the top of the list, fresh, stamped with the hour, a new message had appeared. His eyes caught it before he could process it fully, before he could even draw the next breath.

From: Gerri.

The name fixed itself in his vision, stark and undeniable. A new subject line, a new line of text in bold.

He froze.

The cursor blinked in the corner of the screen, steady as a pulse. The glass on the desk glinted faintly in the laptop’s glow. The radiator hissed once and fell quiet. He did not open the message. He did not move. He only stared, every nerve drawn to the fact of it, the existence of it, the shift it implied.

Something had broken the silence.

And the night pressed tighter around him, electric, claustrophobic, the air itself altered by that single arrival.

Chapter Text

Part I – "At the Hour of Silence"

The house was quiet in the way that only winter could make it, every sound muffled, slowed, the radiators clicking faintly now and then as though reminding her they still lived. Outside, the street was abandoned, the kind of hour when even the late drinkers had gone home and the occasional car passed like something ghostly. Inside, she had left no lights burning. Only the laptop, open on the dining table, gave off its weak, unwavering glow, spilling a pale square onto the wood grain and her hands.

Gerri sat there, spine angled forward, glasses slipping a fraction down her nose, and had the vague sensation of watching herself from across the room. The way she hadn’t moved much in the last hour, the steady pulse of the cursor blinking on the blank screen. She knew exactly how the scene would look if someone else walked in: the careful woman in her sixties, hair pushed back, shoulders set, staring at nothing as though waiting for a decision that refused to arrive.

The decision had been circling her all evening. She’d eaten nothing more than a piece of toast around eight, poured herself half a glass of wine and then abandoned it, untouched, when she couldn’t stand the sourness. Instead she drifted from room to room, restless, returning always to the laptop. Every time she’d stood over it she thought - no, not now, not this hour, not on this date. And yet the hours had slipped forward, and now it was past one in the morning and there was no refuge left in waiting.

Valentine’s. She hated that it was this day. Or this night. The holiday had always irritated her - cheap gestures in expensive packaging, dinners that felt like obligations - but now it was unbearable in its coincidence. If she wrote tonight, if she pressed send now, what would it mean? Would he read into it, imagine it as something she hadn’t intended? Would it look like longing disguised as civility? Or worse, would it look like pity?

Her hands hovered over the keys, then retreated. She leaned back, exhaled through her nose. The room was too still, the silence pressing against her. She reached for her phone, checked the time, as if the numbers might argue her out of it. 1:07 a.m.

It had been days since his emails, days of carrying the shape of it with her, his words, clumsy and too bare, and the restraint he’d tried to stitch over them. She had read it once in the dark of her bedroom, then again the next morning with sharper eyes, then again three times since. Each reading pulled her closer to answering. Not to soothe him, not to reignite something dangerous, but to acknowledge. That much, at least.

The draft had been waiting for her all evening. It sat there on her laptop each time she passed the table, cursor blinking at the end of a single line she had written a week ago and then abandoned:

This time, I wanted you to know I saw it.

She had typed those words almost impulsively, then refused to send them. Closed the lid, walked away, let days pile over it like snow. But the line stayed alive in her head, rephrased and doubted and tested against every possible interpretation. Too little, she’d thought. Too flat. Then, too much, what would he hear in it, what tone would he supply? She had both wanted and dreaded the possibility. Now, in the silence of the house, there was no more room to delay. She sat down, drew the chair closer, placed her hands on either side of the keyboard as though steadying herself against the weight of the words.

Her gaze lingered on the line. It was not warmth, and it was not cruelty. It was a thread between silences. She had chosen it because it gave nothing away, and yet it admitted the fact that he had reached her, that she had read him. She could not let him believe his words had vanished unanswered into the void, that would be too much like cruelty, and she was not cruel. Or at least, she did not want to be anymore. She glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen again, 1:14 a.m. 

Already she was too deep into the night, in the hour when things seemed to carry more weight than they should, when everything written looked like confession. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, exhaled slowly, reread the line again and again, searching for a fracture. It was strange: the words seemed to change under her gaze. At one reading they were clinical, almost detached; at another they sounded like a whisper, private and almost tender. She couldn’t control how he would hear it. That was what unnerved her. She could control every clause of a contract, every statement in a press release, but not the silence between words, not the way someone else might read them.

Her fingers hovered, flexed, retreated. She reached for the wine glass she had abandoned earlier, found it still half full, set it down again, abandoned. The radiators hissed and stilled. She thought suddenly of her daughters, what they might think if they knew she was here, in the early hours of Valentine’s, staring at one line to a man who had undone so much of her composure. She felt a flash of maternal guilt, of absurdity, but it did not loosen her resolve.

Because beneath all the anxieties, all the calculations, there was this: she wanted him to know she had seen him. Not to give him hope. Not to open a door. Only to break the silence that had begun to feel suffocating even to her.

Her thumb touched the trackpad. She hesitated one last time, aware of her own heartbeat in her throat, the strange intimacy of this small action. Then she pressed.

The message flicked away, gone into the hidden systems, into his inbox. Out of her hands.

For a moment she sat motionless, almost braced for some recoil. None came, of course. Just the same pale glow of the screen, the line no longer hers to edit. 

She lowered the lid of the laptop with a kind of care that felt ceremonial, as if she were sealing something dangerous inside. The glow vanished at once, the square of light shrinking to a thin line and then extinguished. The room fell into darkness so complete it made her blink, disoriented, as if she had been dropped into another hour entirely. She sat back in the chair and let the silence press in. The sound of her own breathing seemed loud, the house carried on in its small ways, the groan of an old pipe, the faint hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen, the whisper of the radiator as it cooled. Outside, a car passed too quickly down the street, headlights cutting across the ceiling for an instant, vanishing again.

Her hands rested in her lap, oddly still, her fingers twitching now and then as though reluctant to believe the action was complete. The message was gone, out of her reach, its trajectory invisible. Somewhere, already, it might be waiting for him, unopened or opened, ignored or pored over, misunderstood or understood too much. She would never control which.

The thought unsettled her more than she wanted to admit. She leaned back until the chair creaked faintly, letting her head tip against the wood. The darkness had weight to it, holding her in place, wrapping itself around the tension of what she had done. There was no taking it back, no restoring the silence that had come before. Her eyes adjusted slowly, pulling shapes from shadow: the edge of the table, the outline of the shelves along the wall, the dull gleam of the glass she had left untouched. All of it ordinary, unchanged, as though nothing had happened here. And yet she could feel the air shifted, charged in some quiet, invisible way.

She thought, briefly, of her daughters asleep in their own lives, of how little they would understand the choice she had made tonight, or worse, how much they would. She thought of Roman in his apartment, alone as she was, and the uncanny tether of the hour between them. She thought of morning, and the possibility of waking to nothing at all, or to something she could not bear.

Her throat felt dry. She pressed her palms flat against her knees, grounding herself, and let the minutes slide forward. Time passed differently now, thickened by what she had set in motion. Finally, she stood, the chair legs rasping softly against the floor. She left the laptop closed, and left the room without switching on a light. The house was still, watchful, as she moved toward the bedroom.

The night held the tension of what she had done, and she carried it with her, step by step, into the dark.

Part II – "Surface Tension"

The apartment lay in its winter hush, a kind of silence that belonged to February, to the hollowed-out weeks that trailed after holidays and left nothing but grey daylight and overlong nights. Gerri woke into it as if pulled upward from a depth, her body reminding her that she had never quite slept, only turned from one restless angle to another. The air was dry, faintly chilled, the radiators ticking as though they were tired of their own labor. She lay there for a moment, eyes open on the faint outline of the ceiling, her mind caught between the residue of the night before and the fact of the day ahead. She had sent it - the email - her reply. Or not quite a reply, not in the conventional sense: restrained, almost cool, yet edged with a clarity she couldn’t quite disguise. The words still pressed against the surface of her consciousness, lines she knew by heart because she had reread them half a dozen times before pressing send.

This time, I wanted you to know I saw it.

Not indulgent, not dismissive. Balanced on the thin wire between distance and acknowledgment. It was the most she could allow herself, the least she could justify. And now the message lived elsewhere, carried away into Roman’s inbox, into his silence, into whatever he would or would not do with it.

She closed her eyes again, briefly, as if the act of waking could be reversed, but there was no refuge left in sleep. At last, she moved, setting her feet to the floor, her body heavy, leaden with the effort of what the day required. Coffee, she thought. Shower. Clothes. Function.

The kitchen light was too bright when she flicked it on, washing the countertops in hard white glare. She moved through her familiar motions: setting the kettle, grinding beans, waiting with the dull patience of someone accustomed to beginning each day with fuel rather than rest. The house smelled faintly of coffee grounds and the ghost of last night’s meal. She stood at the counter, her hand around the warm ceramic of the mug once it was ready, staring at the dark surface as if it might offer a reflection back, of herself, or of some truth she could hold onto. But all it reflected was the kitchen ceiling lamp, a sterile oval glow.

She didn’t check her email. Not yet. That would be too much, too quickly like a reveal she wasn’t ready to face while still in her robe, hair undone, the soft tatters of domesticity hanging about her. If he had written back - unlikely, but not impossible - she would know soon enough. If he hadn’t, she could live a few more hours before confirming the void.

She drank, set the mug aside, and moved toward the long process of assembling herself for the day. The wardrobe doors opened onto her suits and blouses, shades of navy, charcoal, muted creams, the uniform of her survival. She chose deliberately: a dark skirt, silk blouse, a jacket with sharp lines that gave her posture a kind of impenetrable authority. Armor. The mirror gave back the face she knew well, drawn, but contained; eyes shadowed but steady, a faint trace of lipstick restored the illusion of vitality.

She looked professional. She looked functional and that was what mattered.

By the time she was out the door and got into the corporate car, the morning had fully taken hold. The February sky was pale, clouded, a smear of dull light across the horizon. She drew her coat closer around her as she made her way to the car waiting to take her downtown, the leather of her briefcase cool against her palm.

The driver, familiar but anonymous, opened the door with a nod. She slid into the back seat, the warm air inside brushing against her face in contrast to the winter air outside. The leather seat gave a little beneath her weight, the faint scent of polish and something citrus hanging in the air, and the door shut with the insulated thud of expensive engineering. 

She set the briefcase beside her, clasped her hands together in her lap. Her nails pressed against one another, thumb working at a rough edge until she caught herself and stopped, smoothing her hands deliberately against the fabric of her skirt. Habit had always been her shield, correct posture, composed expression, the faintly distant air of someone already thinking several steps ahead. It was a shield she knew she would need today more than most.

The car pulled into motion, merging with the flow of morning traffic. Through the tinted glass, the city passed in increments; couples walking close against the wind, a man clutching a bouquet wrapped in paper, a shop window dotted with pink foil hearts. Valentine’s Day, she had nearly managed to forget until the evidence of it moved insistently outside her window. She let her gaze rest on it for a moment, then away again, refusing the tug of sentimentality, of memory. It was just another day. That was the line she fed herself, clean and efficient, though her chest gave the faintest constriction around the words. Another day of meetings, decisions, carefully maintained equilibrium. Whatever weight last night’s action carried, whatever ripples it set in motion, she would not let them reach the surface of her face.

Her phone vibrated faintly in her bag, a calendar reminder no doubt, and she ignored it, folding her arms across herself as the car slipped further into the city’s core. She could feel the energy of the day already coiling tight, the switch she had to make from private to public, from woman alone at her dining table to executive with an entire room listening for what she would say.

The car turned, stopped at a light. Her eyes followed a delivery boy carrying a heart-shaped balloon awkwardly, the wind tugging it sideways. She almost smiled, but didn’t. Her fingers twitched once more toward her nails, then flattened against her leg. Stillness, control. Already she could feel the mask lowering into place, as natural and practiced as breath.

By the time the car pulled up to the Waystar building, her expression was composed, her body aligned to function. Whatever the day contained - Valentine’s or not, Roman or not - she would meet it on her feet, with her voice steady.

Waystar’s building stood in its usual morning gloss, glass catching what little light the day offered, the lobby a churn of employees moving with clipped precision. The world inside these walls never stopped, never slowed, not for grief, not for scandal, not for the exhaustion of the individuals who sustained it.

Gerri entered with the steady rhythm of long practice, her heels carrying her across marble, through the revolving doors, into elevators where conversations hushed or sharpened depending on who stood within. She nodded to a familiar face, exchanged a word with an assistant who stepped forward with a folder, her voice already tuned to the neutral key of authority. 

Upstairs, her office was waiting, the blinds angled to let in light without glare. Papers stacked neatly, her computer already humming. She took off her coat, set her bag down, and stepped into the role demanded of her; meetings lined the morning, calls already slotted into the gaps, decisions to be weighed, documents to be signed. The world here operated on cadence, on control and she slipped into it as though into water. The current carrying her forward, the surface smooth enough to disguise what roiled underneath. Still, the silence pressed in at the edges.

She didn’t let herself open her inbox yet. Too conspicuous, too loaded an act when she was supposed to be reviewing quarterly numbers, approving phrasing on a release. Her attention was where it needed to be, at least outwardly, but her mind flicked toward the possibility of Roman like a moth to flame; had he read her words, had he seen the restrained acknowledgment, had he felt it as she intended or as something else entirely?

She straightened in her chair, adjusting the jacket that felt suddenly too tight across her shoulders, and returned her focus to the papers in front of her. Function, always function.

The hours unspooled as they always did, windows of glass and fluorescent light, the drone of air circulation, the measured tones of executives presenting numbers that were either threats or victories depending on how they were spun. Gerri spoke in clean sentences, decisive, clear. She felt the weight of authority in her voice, the way it steadied those around her, the way it still carried the residue of her years beside Logan. But underneath, another current ran… quieter, sharper, impossible to dispel.

However, lately that current wasn’t only personal; it was professional too, a gnawing recognition that under Matsson’s reign she had been pared down, her influence thinned to the outline of what it once was. She was still here - still the steady presence in rooms that prized steadiness - but no longer central and no longer indispensable. It left her feeling both exposed and oddly invisible at once, a figure of authority whose edges had been quietly eroded. The knowledge sat with her, even as she carried herself with practiced certainty, a whisper of insignificance that returned in the pauses between calls, in the brief silences when no one’s eyes were on her.

By the time the light outside her window had begun its slow winter fade, the hours had already collapsed into each other, leaving her with the kind of fatigue that never showed on her face but lived sharp and private in her bones. The office around her was quieter now, a thinning out of footsteps in the corridor, the hum of conversations dwindling as people slipped away. She remained at her desk, posture composed, jacket still buttoned as though she had just sat down. The laptop glowed, spreadsheets lined neatly, emails answered with the practiced economy of someone who refused to leave a trace of disorder behind.

But beneath the controlled rhythm, that whisper of erasure still gnawed at her. Every meeting had underlined it, Matsson’s people speaking in the casual shorthand of those who knew the room tilted in their direction, her voice present but peripheral. She had done her part, as always, and yet walked away with the quiet knowledge that her weight no longer shifted the balance. Functioning, yes. Central, no.

She rubbed once at the base of her neck, then forced her hand back to the desk, unwilling to allow the gesture to linger. It was at that moment, as the silence thickened around her, that a knock came at the open door, light and precise.

Karolina stepped inside with the kind of quiet assurance that always made Gerri think of her as one of the few left who knew how to walk the fine line between authority and discretion. She closed the door softly behind her, as if granting Gerri the courtesy of a private bubble against the thinning evening noise outside.

“You’re still here,” Karolina said, not so much surprised as faintly reproving, her tone dipped with that dry undercurrent she wielded better than anyone.

Gerri lifted her eyes from the laptop, allowed herself the flicker of a smile that wasn’t quite one, “Pot calling the kettle.” She nodded toward the folder under Karolina’s arm, “Let me guess, another fire dressed up as strategy?”

“Not even dressed up,” Karolina replied, crossing to the desk. “Just fire.” She set the folder down. “Matsson wants to push that segment live tomorrow, before anyone’s signed off. He thinks speed equals genius.”

“Speed equals recklessness,” Gerri said flatly, leaning back in her chair. She tapped the cover of the folder with one manicured finger. “And then it equals liability. But why would that ever occur to him?”

Karolina’s mouth quirked, her expression veering somewhere between amusement and fatigue. “He said, and I quote, that America ‘loves a little chaos.’”

“Mm, America loves returns,” Gerri countered, sharp but dry. She reached for her pen, flipped open the folder, scanned the page. The numbers glared back in their raw immediacy. She sighed, low, contained. “He doesn’t care what burns, as long as it’s not his reflection in the glass.”

“That’s the working theory.” Karolina settled into the chair opposite the desk, one leg crossed neatly over the other. For a moment, they worked through the pages together — Gerri correcting language, reshaping phrasing with the controlled flick of her pen, Karolina offering quiet confirmations. It was the kind of task they had done a hundred times before, a duet of pragmatism played without fanfare. It was only when the notes were squared away, the work tethered, that Karolina glanced up and said, almost as if it were an afterthought: “Have you heard from Roman?”

The name landed in the air like a sudden shift in temperature, Gerri kept her gaze on the page for a beat longer than necessary, her pen poised above the margin. When she finally answered, her tone was brisk, clipped, “No.”, a clean incision of a word.

Karolina watched her, too perceptive not to notice the edge. She didn’t press, but the silence stretched for a beat before she looked down again, her voice lighter. “He’s been quiet. I was…wondering if you knew how he’s doing.”

Gerri set the pen down deliberately, aligning it with the folder. She looked across the desk, her face composed but her eyes sharper than she intended. “You think I have a direct line?”

“I think,” Karolina said carefully, “that if he were speaking to anyone, it might be you.” The air seemed to thicken between them. Gerri exhaled, a sound halfway between a scoff and something softer. “Well, then your theory’s wrong.” She pushed the folder a fraction forward, the gesture brisk, final. But her hand betrayed her, the faintest tremor as she withdrew it back to her lap.

Karolina’s gaze lingered, quiet, unflinching, but she didn’t pursue it. Instead, she shifted the conversation back toward numbers, toward optics, as though offering Gerri an escape hatch. “We’ll need to reframe that lead paragraph before the press gets their hands on it. Otherwise they’ll smell blood.”

“Then reframe it,” Gerri responded, her voice even, as though nothing had cracked. “Take out the swagger, add the stability. If Matsson wants chaos, he can perform it on Twitter. Not in our reports.”

Karolina nodded once, her professionalism intact, but the flicker of concern in her eyes didn’t fade entirely. She gathered the folder back into her arms, rose smoothly, and stood at the threshold a moment longer. “Don’t stay too late,” she said, her voice neutral but edged with something more personal.

“I won’t,” Gerri replied, without looking up. Her tone was sharp enough to close the subject.

The door clicked shut with its usual soft finality but in the silence that followed, Gerri felt the weight of the conversation unspool in her chest, taut and insistent. She leaned back in her chair, spine straight but head tilting toward the ceiling, as though that shift of angle might ease the constriction pressing around her ribs.

Roman.

Even the syllables, left in Karolina’s mouth, seemed to hang in the room, echoing against glass and steel. She had handled it - clipped, brisk, the way she always did - but the words she’d chosen had carried too much edge. Karolina had noticed, Karolina always noticed. And now the air in here was dense with the residue of a question she’d refused to answer honestly.  

Her hand reached for the pen she had so carefully aligned a moment earlier but instead of lifting it, she only tapped it once against the desk, an unconscious rhythm. Outside the window, the city’s winter light had dissolved into the dull haze of evening, the skyline lit unevenly, offices glowing in pockets, streetlamps flickering on. She watched a cab’s headlights glide across the avenue far below, a faint trail of brightness swallowed quickly by shadow.

She had not been asked about him in weeks. That was its own silence, its own verdict, Roman drifting further into absence, Gerri disciplined enough to never raise his name herself. And now, suddenly, it had broken open. Not in private, not in her own time, but here, under the fluorescent hum of a late office, in Karolina’s clear voice.

For a moment, Gerri allowed her face to soften, no audience to catch the shift: the faint downturn of her mouth, the crease between her brows, the flicker of something raw that she would not have tolerated in any meeting, any boardroom. It lasted only seconds before she pulled it back, smoothing her expression into neutrality again.

Her phone buzzed faintly against the desk, another message from a junior, a reminder about tomorrow’s slate. She silenced it with a flick of her hand, the digital noise was manageable. It was the human one - the echo of Roman’s name - that had unsettled her equilibrium.

She stood, eventually, crossing to the window. The glass was cool beneath her hand, the city beneath her vast and impersonal, Valentine’s lights punctuating the grey like an afterthought, neon pinks strung in a shop window, the dark shape of someone holding a bouquet too large for them, a smear of red against the February dark. She almost let herself laugh at the absurdity of it. Almost.

Instead, she only pressed her palm flat to the glass, felt the cold through her skin, and told herself, again, as she always did, that she was functioning. The mask had held, the day was nearly over. But the silence in the office was no longer clean, it was crowded, restless, thick with what had been spoken and with what had not.

Part III – "Before the Storm"

Hours later, when the building had thinned to its final shadows of staff and the hum of printers died away, Gerri gathered herself with the precision of habit. Coat, bag, the deliberate slide of her laptop into its sleeve. The silence of her office clung to her as she stepped into the corridor, heels a muted echo on the polished floor, each stride measured, outwardly unhurried. By the time she reached the lobby, the mask was fully in place again, shoulders squared, chin held at that exact angle that suggested control without overstatement. The corporate car idled out front, black against the wet pavement. February had glazed the streets with a damp chill, the kind that slid under collars and pricked at ankles. She slipped inside, the leather cool beneath her palms, the scent of polish faint but insistent. The driver nodded, wordless, and they pulled into the tide of evening traffic.

Gerri sat angled slightly toward the window, the blur of city lights dragging past in streaks of gold and red. She kept her posture intact, a silhouette of efficiency, but her hands betrayed her in small, restless gestures, a thumb pressing against a thumbnail until the edge whitened, a quick smoothing of her cuticle, then the same cycle again. Outwardly poised, inwardly taut. The day was done, but the residue of it - Karolina’s question, the slip in her own voice, the echo of Roman’s name - lingered like grit under her skin.

And it was Valentine’s Day, she acknowledged it only in passing,  a flick of her eyes toward a couple at a crosswalk, arms looped awkwardly around a bouquet of white roses; the glow of a heart-shaped neon sign for some bar two streets over. She registered it without indulgence, without sentiment. Just another calendar day reframed by other people’s rituals. And yet, there it was, stitched into the background, unavoidable.

By the time the car slid to a halt outside her apartment, the windows had gone black against the night, the light of the building the only steady beacon. She stepped out, thanked the driver in her even tone, and entered the building, each click of her heels marking a retreat from the public into the private. The key turned smoothly in the lock, the door gave way to the familiar hush, and she exhaled in a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

Her safe space, Home.

The stillness was immediate, the rooms holding the residual warmth of the day. She set her bag down, shed her coat with deliberate carelessness, and moved through the dim hall toward the kitchen. She didn’t turn on many lights, preferring the softened glow of a single lamp, its circle of gold anchoring her in the dark. She poured herself water, held the glass with both hands, and leaned against the counter. And then, without warning, the memory struck.

It was not gentle, it came sharp, electric, a jolt as sudden as a crack of lightning splitting a night sky. One moment she was standing in her kitchen, the hum of the refrigerator steady, the water glass cool in her grip. And the next she was somewhere else entirely, the house gone soft around her, replaced by another night years earlier, warm with light, with sound, with life, filling the room around her before she could steel herself against it.

It was Valentine’s, but not the ornamental kind. No extravagant dinners in reservations-only Manhattan restaurants, no bouquets delivered in sleek white boxes. Just their house then, lived-in, a little chaotic with children’s clutter, the smell of simmering sauce hanging heavy in the air. The kitchen had been lit with the amber glow of overhead lights and the flicker of candles Catherine insisted on, the wax already beginning to curl down in uneven rivulets.

“Mom, you can’t just put them down,” Catherine, twelve and solemn in her authority, had scolded. She was arranging the stubby candles with exaggerated care, her brow furrowed, a strand of hair falling across her cheek. “They have to line up, like…like a pattern. Otherwise it doesn’t look festive, it just looks random.”

Baird, stirring sauce at the stove, caught Gerri’s eye over the girl’s head. He raised his eyebrows, mock alarm in his face. “Festive, huh? Cat, you’re twelve going on eighty. Next you’ll be writing restaurant reviews in your math notebook.”

“I would be good at it,” Catherine shot back, deadpan, though the corner of her mouth twitched.

“You’d be brutal,” Gerri replied, smiling despite herself. “The restaurant industry wouldn’t survive you.”

Catherine gave a satisfied nod, turning back to her candles.

Meanwhile, Peti - just a few months away from turning eight, hair frizzing from where her braid had come half undone - was bouncing at Gerri’s side, clutching something folded in two. She pressed it into her mother’s hands with a ceremonial air. “Don’t lose it, okay? Because I worked really hard.”

Gerri crouched down, opening the card with theatrical slowness. The marker letters spilled across the page, uneven and brave: HAPPY VALENTINES. A balloon-heart floated at the top, tethered with a string that trailed off the edge.

“Oh,” Gerri said, letting her voice fall soft and reverent. “This is serious. This is…museum-level.”

“Better than museum,” Baird said, tapping the wooden spoon against the pot, sauce flecking his wrist. “This is cutting-edge contemporary art. The kind the critics don’t understand yet.”

Peti giggled, delighted. “You’re making fun of me!”

“I would never,” Baird replied, crossing the room to kiss her temple. “I’m just preparing you for fame.”

The kitchen swelled with sound, the hiss of the stove, Catherine sighing dramatically at her father’s jokes, Peti’s laughter spilling like bells. Gerri remembered how she had stood then, absorbing it all: the hum of family, the fullness of the air, the sense, so rare and so fleeting, that nothing was missing.

Dinner had been imperfect, as dinners with children often are. Catherine had complained about the sauce being “too tomato-y,” Peti had spilled half her water, and Baird had overcooked the pasta by a minute. Yet the table was alive: conversation darting between Catherine’s school projects, Peti’s insistence that her teacher was “mean but funny,” and Baird’s gentle teasing that threaded everything together. He leaned back in his chair at one point, glass in hand, and declared, “Ladies, you don’t realize how lucky you are to live with a culinary genius. This sauce is going to change the world.”

“Dad,” Catherine groaned, rolling her eyes, “it’s spaghetti, it literally can’t change the world.”

“It changed my world,” Baird said, reaching across the table to brush his fingers against Gerri’s wrist, quick, easy, and unguarded.

And she remembered the warmth of that, how natural it had felt. How much she had taken for granted.

Later, after dishes were cleared and the girls tucked in - Catherine pretending she wasn’t tired, Peti clutching her bear - she had lingered downstairs with Baird. The table was messy with crumbs and candle wax but they didn’t bother cleaning it fully. She sat with her wine glass, running a finger around its rim, while Baird dropped into the chair across from her with that sigh that meant he was fully home, a posture of ease that belonged only here, never in the boardroom or the client dinners. He’d pulled at his tie until it hung loose around his neck, his shirtsleeves pushed up, his forearms bare and warm from the stove. He leaned his weight into one elbow on the table, chin balanced against his hand, his other hand playing idly with the stem of his glass. The whole of him seemed softer now, unspooled from the day,“You okay?” he had asked then, and the question had been simple but exact. The kind that reached straight into her, because he’d always known how to look past the polished surface she gave the world.

She gave a small, practiced smile, evasive. “I’m fine.”

“You sure?” His eyes held hers, steady, unflinching, the way they always had when he wanted the truth from her,  never demanding, just patient.

For a beat she let the silence hover, her throat tightening around things she couldn’t even name. Then she managed, “Sure enough.” And somehow, with him across from her, with the warmth of his presence filling the space between them, it felt like it might even be true.

He reached across the table, sliding his hand over hers, thumb brushing her knuckles in a familiar arc. “Happy Valentine’s, Ger.”

Her chest softened, the practiced lines of her composure giving way to something more fragile, more open. “Happy Valentine’s.”

The moment rested there, warm and deliberate, before she leaned toward him and met his kiss across the table, slow, unhurried, tasting faintly of red wine and all the years they had gathered together. His hand tightened around hers, anchoring her in that quiet certainty she only ever felt with him.

When he drew back just slightly, he was smiling. “Come here,” he said, already tugging her from her chair.

They left the table behind, glasses half-finished, and moved together into the living room where the fire still glowed, a deep ember light. The couch welcomed them in its familiar dip, but they didn’t sit with space between. Baird pulled her into his lap, her knees straddling him, his hands already sliding under the hem of her blouse, warm against the small of her back.

She laughed once, low in her throat - rare, unguarded - and he kissed it away, catching her mouth again, harder this time, the kiss deepening until she felt the blood rushing in her ears. His tongue brushed hers, tasting, teasing, and she pressed closer. “Been a while since we had the house this quiet,” he murmured against her lips.

“Mm,” she agreed, breathless already, the thought of silence almost foreign. She could hear it now,  no small feet above them, no interruptions, only the slow crackle of firewood.

“Good,” he said, sliding her blouse further up, exposing her skin to the air, to his touch. “Then I’m not wasting a second of it.”

She arched into him, laughing again but softer, the kind of laugh she only gave to him. It broke against his mouth, and he swallowed it in another kiss, firmer now, still tasting of wine and now also of heat and something older, deeper. He drew her closer, his hand splayed against the small of her back, pressing her against him until she could feel the solid line of his body under her. Her fingers slid into his hair, tugging lightly, and he groaned into her mouth, low and unrestrained. The sound sent a tremor through her, the sort of involuntary response she had long ago stopped questioning. She kissed him harder, her lips parting, opening for him, the kiss lengthening into something wetter, hungrier.

His hands moved, exploring, one gliding up her spine beneath her blouse, the other skimming over her hip. She shivered as his palm found her ribs, the heat of his hand steady and familiar. He murmured her name against her lips,  not a question, not even a word so much as a sound threaded with want.

“Baird-” she whispered, though she didn’t mean to stop him, didn’t want to.

“Shh,” he breathed, kissing her again, slow and deep, his tongue tracing hers in a way that made her knees weak even though she was straddling him.

The fire cracked, a log shifting, throwing sparks up the chimney. The sound made her lift her head for half a second, breaking the kiss, but his mouth found her jaw, her throat, pressing open-mouthed kisses along the line of her skin. She tilted her head back instinctively, granting him space, her pulse quickening beneath his lips.

His hand slid higher, cupping her breast through the thin fabric, his thumb brushing over the outline of her nipple until she gasped. Her hips moved, unbidden, rocking against him, and his breath stuttered against her skin. “God, Ger,” he murmured, his voice rough now, frayed at the edges.

She answered by pulling his face back to hers, kissing him fiercely, the kiss breaking into shorter ones, half-kisses, breaths colliding. Her hands tugged at the buttons of his shirt, fumbling, too impatient to be precise, slipping one free, then another, until the fabric gaped enough for her to press her palms flat to his chest. His skin was hot under her hands, his heartbeat fast and strong.

He shifted, pressing her back against the couch cushions, hovering over her now. She laughed again, breathless, tugging him down with her. His body covered hers, his weight both grounding and exhilarating, his mouth never leaving hers for long. He kissed her like he was starving like every inch of her mattered, and she clung to him, her nails dragging lightly down his back through the cotton of his shirt.

The living room blurred - the fire, the shadows, the glow of lamplight - until there was only the heat of his mouth, the press of his body, the old but ever-renewing ache of wanting him left. When his hand slid under her skirt, fingers tracing along the inside of her thigh, she moaned softly into his kiss, her whole body tightening, straining toward him.

They could have stayed like that for hours, lost in the urgency of lips and hands, the half-sound of desire threaded with laughter. But eventually he pulled back, resting his forehead against hers, both of them panting, flushed, their bodies pressed close. “Upstairs?” he asked, voice low, already knowing the answer.

She nodded, her fingers still tangled in his hair, her lips swollen from kissing. “Upstairs.”

They were on their feet a moment later, pulling at each other as they stumbled from the living room. Baird’s hand found hers, their fingers laced tight, and he tugged her toward the stairs. She followed willingly, almost running to keep up, the firelight behind them fading into shadow. They kissed again halfway up the staircase, him pressing her against the wall, his mouth urgent on hers. She let out a soft gasp as his hands roamed down her sides, catching on her hips before he broke away, laughing low against her lips.

“Bedroom,” he managed, his forehead pressed to hers.

“Yes,” she whispered, breathless, tugging him upward, her pulse hammering.

The door clicked shut behind them, the faint light from the bedside lamp spilling over the sheets. The room smelled faintly of lavender from the linen spray she used, familiar and domestic, but everything felt charged now, electric. He kissed her again before they even reached the bed, his mouth hungry, his hands framing her face, tilting her head to deepen it. She pressed herself flush against him, feeling his erection straining through his trousers, her own body already aching with need.

Their hands fumbled at buttons, at fabric, neither patient enough to take turns. His shirt fell open under her hands, her palms sliding over the warmth of his bare chest. She shivered when he tugged her blouse down her shoulders, leaving it to slip from her arms, pooling onto the carpet.

They laughed between kisses - low, breathless, like teenagers sneaking time together. His belt clattered to the floor. Her skirt slid down her legs with a practiced tug. The urgency of it made her dizzy, the sense that they couldn’t get close enough, fast enough, as though time itself might betray them if they slowed.

He kissed down her throat, across her collarbone, his teeth grazing lightly, drawing another gasp from her. She pulled at his trousers, shoving them down, and he kicked them away, both of them stripped to their underwear now, bodies pressing together, heat against heat.

“God, you’re beautiful,” he murmured against her skin, his hand cupping her breast through the thin lace of her bra, thumb brushing until she moaned.

She pulled him back to her mouth, desperate for his kiss, and together they tumbled onto the bed. The mattress dipped beneath their weight, sheets tangling as they pressed against each other, frantic and uncontained. She felt his hands everywhere - on her waist, her thigh, her back - guiding, urging, worshipping. She arched into him, legs parting as he pressed between them, and for a moment they paused, their foreheads touching, their breaths colliding. He searched her face, eyes dark and soft all at once, “You okay?” he whispered again, the same question, now ragged with want.

“Yes,” she breathed, the word spilling out of her without hesitation this time. “Yes.”

A moment later, he slid her underwear down with aching slowness, his hand lingering on the bare skin of her thigh, her hip. She tugged at his, impatient, and then there was nothing between them. He pressed into her slowly, carefully, until she gasped, her back arching off the bed.

The stretch, the fullness, the sheer reality of him inside her made her clutch at his shoulders, nails dragging lightly down his skin. He moved gently at first, steady, his gaze fixed on hers as though he didn’t want to miss a flicker of her expression. She met his eyes, and for that moment, she felt completely seen, completely held.

Then the rhythm deepened, his hips pressing harder, faster, her body responding with equal urgency. She wrapped her legs around him, pulling him closer, their bodies finding that old, inevitable rhythm they always fell into, each thrust building, drawing sharp gasps from her throat.

His mouth claimed hers again, a kiss that was more heat than breath, his lips moving against hers with a hunger that made her toes curl. She opened for him, letting his tongue slide against hers, tasting him, swallowing the low sound that rumbled from his chest. When he finally pulled back, she chased his mouth with her own, not wanting to lose the connection. Then he lowered his lips to her neck, and she gasped, her head tipping back against the pillow. Each kiss there was slow and deliberate, hot presses of his mouth against her skin, his tongue darting out to trace the line of her pulse. He sucked gently at the tender place beneath her jaw, drawing a soft, startled moan from her.

Her fingers buried themselves in his hair, tugging lightly as if to anchor herself, her nails grazing his scalp. He groaned at the sensation, the vibration of it shivering against her throat. “Gerri,” he murmured, her name spilling from his lips like a prayer, breath warm against her skin.

She tightened her hold on him, clinging as though he might slip away, pressing her mouth to the shell of his ear. “Baird,” she whispered back, his name cracked and breathless, trembling with all the emotion swelling inside her. Her lips brushed his ear with every syllable, her voice low and shaking, half a plea, half a vow. He kissed higher then, along the curve of her jaw, tracing the line up toward her chin. Each press was wetter, hungrier, his breath catching between them. She turned her head just enough to catch his mouth again, kissing him hard, almost desperate, as though the intensity between them might split her open. Her thighs tightened around his waist. Her hands slid down his back, nails raking over his skin in broken paths, urging him closer, deeper. He groaned her name once more, the sound muffled into her kiss, and she whispered his back again and again, the syllables dissolving into gasps as the wave inside her threatened to crest.

It built faster than she expected, pleasure tightening low in her belly, curling through her in sharp, insistent waves. Her breath came in shallow gasps, her nails biting into his shoulders as though she could hold herself steady against the rising tide.

Then it broke, a fierce, blinding rush tore through her, sudden and unstoppable, her whole body clenching around him. She cried out, the sound high and raw, burying her face against his shoulder to muffle it, her mouth open against his skin. Every muscle locked, pulling him closer, deeper, as if she could fuse them together in that instant. He groaned at the sensation, the sound low and rough, his rhythm faltering as her tightening walls drew him to the edge. His body shuddered against hers, movements jerking, unsteady, his forehead dropping to hers as if to anchor himself there in that shivering closeness.

They clung to each other through it, trembling, their breaths ragged and uneven, mouths brushing as though they couldn’t stop tasting the last of one another, even as the peak ebbed away. The silence that followed was immense, almost sacred, broken only by the rise and fall of their chests, still pressed together, still moving in a shared rhythm that felt like proof of something larger than themselves.

When they collapsed back onto the mattress, it wasn’t a fall so much as a surrender, their bodies still tangled, his weight pinning her in a way that felt protective rather than heavy. She held on, her hands flat against his damp back, her palms rising and falling with each breath he dragged into his lungs. His cheek was against hers, rough with stubble, warm with the remnants of exertion, and he pressed a kiss there, gentle in contrast to the urgency that had carried them just moments before. He lifted himself enough to look at her, his face softened, stripped of all the playfulness and teasing he had carried downstairs. His hair clung damply to his forehead, and his eyes searched hers with an openness that made her chest ache. He kissed her mouth again, slow this time, lingering, as though trying to leave something of himself imprinted on her lips.

Her chest still rose in quick bursts, her skin damp with sweat, strands of her hair fallen loose across her flushed face. He brushed them back tenderly, tucking them behind her ear, his fingertips skimming her temple with absent-minded reverence. His gaze caught hers - unguarded, almost boyish in its gentleness - and for a long moment neither of them spoke, simply breathing each other in.

“I love you,” he murmured at last, his lips still grazing hers, the words carrying more weight for their quietness.

She closed her eyes, pressed her forehead to his, and let her own words spill out in a whisper. “I love you too.” It felt steady, certain, a truth that had been lived rather than merely said.

Around them, the house was still, the lamp casting a low golden glow over tangled sheets and discarded clothes. The world had receded, shrunk down to this room, this bed, this narrow warmth between their bodies. For that night, it felt infinite, as if they were whole and unbreakable, as if time would hold still for them.

She hadn’t known - couldn’t have known - that it would be the last Valentine’s they would share, the last night she would feel this safety, this closeness with him alive beside her. To her then, it had felt endless.

The memory bled out slowly, like a film reel stuttering to an end. For a moment she almost expected to hear the soft thump of little feet on the stairs, a child calling out for water or reassurance, Baird’s voice steady beside her, telling them to go back to bed. But the house was quiet, too quiet. The silence now was not the full, living hush of a home with sleeping children and a husband nearby, but a hollowness that rang louder because of what it lacked.

She blinked and found herself back at the kitchen counter, the glass of water still cool in her hand. Her knuckles were white around it, the condensation dampening her fingers as though she’d been holding it far too long. She hadn’t realized she’d drifted so far into the past, so vividly that she could almost feel the brush of Baird’s hand at her temple, the heat of his body pressed against hers. More than a decade ago, and still the memory could ambush her like this, sharp and merciless. 

Her throat tightened, and she forced a swallow of water, the glass trembling faintly against her lip. The taste was metallic, thin, unsatisfying. It didn’t soothe the rawness left in her chest. She set the glass down too quickly, the faint sound of it against the counter echoing louder than it should have in the dark. Her present solitude pressed in around her, unforgiving. The house that once rang with laughter and small quarrels and hurried footsteps now held only her, moving quietly through its rooms. The completeness of that night - the wholeness of family, of love, of safety - stood in cruel contrast to this life she had pieced together since. She had built walls of competence and professionalism, and yet here, alone, the cracks showed.

And then, unbidden, her thoughts shifted. To Roman, the impossible thread of him, fragile and dangerous, weaving its way through her mind. It wasn’t love as it had been with Baird; it couldn’t be. And yet it was a tether all the same, unwanted and undeniable, making the solitude heavier, the air tighter in her lungs.

She pressed her fingertips to her eyes, as though she could rub the images away, the glow of the lamp on tangled sheets, Baird’s voice saying I love you, her own laughter muffled against his throat. But the past clung stubbornly, layered cruelly against the present, and she was left with the ache of having lived something once whole, only to stand now in the fragments.

When she finally lowered her hands, the glass of water sat there on the counter, catching the dim light. She reached for it again, steadying herself with the coolness of the glass, the ordinariness of the gesture. But the taste of the memory lingered, bittersweet and unbearable, a reminder of everything time had stolen and everything she had let herself remember, just this once.

Part IV – "What Remains of..."

The building had gone quiet hours ago. It always did, once the day’s last meeting adjourned, once the parade of assistants and executives had fled to their dinners and families and whatever else they did to make the long corporate grind feel worth it. The corridors of Waystar at night carried their own kind of hush, sterile, fluorescent, the hum of ventilation filling spaces where earlier there had been voices, footsteps, endless interruptions.

Gerri stayed later than she should have. It was habit as much as necessity. The work was never finished, not with Matsson looming from across the Atlantic at the moment, firing off curt emails that demanded whole decks redone, whole strategies adjusted overnight. But it wasn’t just the pressure, it was the emptiness that came when she closed her laptop too early, when she stepped into her house and found herself too aware of its stillness. Work filled the space, made the silence tolerable.

Her office smelled faintly of the tea she hadn’t finished, now cooled in its cup, leaving a faint ring against a legal pad. A few papers lay stacked in neat piles on her desk, though she knew she wouldn’t touch them again tonight. The city pressed at the glass behind her, high windows framing the towers lit up against the black winter sky. She stood, at last, smoothing the lines of her blouse, reaching for her jacket draped over the back of her chair. The leather of her bag creaked as she lifted it, its weight a familiar anchor. When she clicked off the lamp, the room darkened, leaving only the harsh spill of the hallway fluorescents to guide her. She walked out with her usual briskness, heels striking lightly against the polished floor, though each step echoed louder than it had during the day. She passed doors already shut, blinds drawn tight. Somewhere, a printer clicked into standby, the only reminder that the building was still alive in some mechanical way.

She caught her reflection in the long pane of glass along the corridor: coat folded over her arm, hair pinned in its usual precise french twist, posture erect as though she were still preparing to walk into a meeting. She barely glanced at it, though some small part of her registered the look in her own eyes, a touch shadowed, more tired than she liked. She adjusted the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder and kept walking.

The elevator was slow at this hour, the kind of silence where every shift of the cables could be heard. She watched the numbers blink down toward her floor, her hand hovering near the button though she’d already pressed it. She found herself glancing at her phone, as though something might have changed in the last few minutes, though of course it hadn’t. No new messages. No reply. The silence where she’d hoped there might be something. When the doors opened, she stepped in, pressing the ground floor button with a touch more force than necessary. The mirrored walls threw her image back at her, neat, contained, the picture of composure. She smoothed the collar of her coat as though anyone might be watching, and then, realizing how absurd that was, dropped her hand again.

The elevator descended with its faint mechanical hum. She found herself thinking of Karolina’s voice from earlier in the week, gentle, professional, a little too curious when she had asked if Gerri had heard from Roman. She hadn’t known how to answer. She still didn’t honestly. The question had lodged under her skin, resurfacing at odd moments. She drew in a breath, let it out slowly, and watched her reflection blur slightly in the brushed steel panel as the elevator slowed.

The lobby was mostly deserted, a few security guards at their stations, their conversations low and indistinct. The glass doors at the front gleamed, reflecting the cold wash of the city’s lights beyond. A janitor’s cart stood parked near the far wall, the scent of industrial cleaner faint in the air. The hum of forced air heating filled the space, warm but impersonal. She crossed the marble floor, each step quick, controlled. Outside, she could already see the sharp white of headlights streaking past, the glint of wet pavement catching the glow of streetlamps. New York in February, bitter, damp, and yet alive in its restlessness. She tugged her coat tighter over her arm, her other hand gripping her bag. Her driver would be waiting; she never lingered long once she’d left the building.

But tonight, something in her slowed. Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour, or the week’s exhaustion, or the faint, persistent hum of thought she couldn’t quite shake, the weight of an unanswered message, the ghost of memory that refused to be buried. Her stride faltered as she neared the doors, her gaze drawn to the glass and the blurred outlines moving beyond it. She felt her pulse in her throat, though she couldn’t yet say why. The night waited outside, heavy with cold and with something else she hadn’t yet named.

The glass doors parted with a muted rush of air, and the cold struck her immediately, sharp, bracing, the kind that cut through even the thick weave of her coat. She pulled it around her shoulders as she stepped outside, her breath misting faintly in the February dark. The street was quieter than usual, Midtown always carried its undercurrent of noise, but this late on a weekday the flow thinned: fewer cabs, fewer voices, only the occasional rush of tires on damp asphalt. The sidewalk gleamed under streetlamps, patches of frost at the edges where the snowmelt hadn’t fully drained while the air smelled faintly metallic like snow that might return by morning.

Her driver was there, as expected, the sedan idling at the curb with its lights on. She could have gone straight to it, and usually she would have. But her steps slowed at the edge of the pavement. There was no real reason, at least none she could articulate. She paused, her gaze wandering across the small strip of plaza in front of the building: a line of benches, a pair of bare trees caged in their winter grates, the dark gleam of glass from another office tower across the way.

It was there, in that glance, that she saw him.

For a moment she thought she was mistaken, that it was simply the trick of the light, or some stranger whose frame her memory instantly tried to fill in. But then he shifted, and the profile resolved into certainty. Roman.

He was standing not far from the edge of the plaza, near one of the benches, his coat unbuttoned against the cold as though he hadn’t noticed the wind at all. His hands were shoved into his pockets, his shoulders hunched slightly forward, and when he lifted his head, his eyes caught hers across the distance.

The shock of it went through her like a physical jolt. She hadn’t prepared for this, hadn’t even imagined it, an email unanswered was one kind of silence, but this was another entirely, flesh and bone in the cold night air. Her pulse surged in her throat, and for a second she thought of stepping back inside, of retreating into the safety of glass and marble.

But she didn’t move and neither did he.

They only looked at each other, the streetlamps carving light across his face, stark against the tired pallor of his skin. He looked thinner, perhaps, or maybe it was only the way the shadows caught him, but the sight of him - unmistakable, alive, present - pulled something taut in her chest.

She should have gone straight to the car. That would have been the sensible thing, the professional thing, the literal thing she’d trained herself to do after years of walking out of buildings with cameras waiting and rivals circling. Get into the car, close the door, drive away. Contain everything. But, this time, her feet wouldn’t move.

The sight of him froze her there on the pavement, heart hammering in her throat, every nerve pulled taut. Roman. Half a year had passed since she’d seen him in person, since that last raw exchange after the funeral, her voice flat with finality, his expression shuttered and broken in ways she hadn’t let herself study too closely. I’m out. I’m done. She’d said it, she’d meant it, she’d made herself mean it. And then there had only been silence, until the emails began, thin threads across a void, carefully worded, never enough, but something nonetheless.

And now here he was. Not in her inbox, not as a thought at two a.m., but here.

Her palms prickled, suddenly damp. She slid one hand over the strap of her bag, grounding herself, but it didn’t steady her pulse. She was aware, acutely, of her own posture, how she held herself, how her chin tilted, how her mouth settled in that neutral line she used in boardrooms and press scrums. Except this wasn’t that, this was him, and neutrality felt like a flimsy disguise already cracking at the edges.

Roman shifted. It was a small movement - he straightened a little, one hand tugging free of his pocket before sliding back in - but she caught it as if it were magnified. She always had; his nervous tics had long been a language she knew too well. His eyes hadn’t left her. He looked…startled, yes, but something else too. Unmoored maybe.

Say something, she thought, but the words jammed in her throat.

And then he moved, slowly, almost uncertainly, he took a few steps toward her. Not all the way, not enough to close the gap, but enough that the air between them shifted. She felt it, the narrowing distance, the pull of inevitability.

“Uh,” he said finally, his voice carrying across the cold air, too loud at first, then softening. “Wow. Uh- hi.”

Her breath caught. She schooled her face into something that might have passed for calm but inside she was reeling, the sound of his voice like a strike against old glass. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it until just now, raw and unvarnished.“Roman.” She kept her tone even, clipped, but her saying this name felt strange in her mouth after so long.

He gave a quick, jerky shrug, his mouth twitching toward a smile that never landed. “Didn’t - didn’t expect to see you. Obviously. Not stalking. Just -uh - being a creepy bench guy, you know. Classic.”

The corner of her mouth tugged before she could stop it, a ghost of a smile she quickly suppressed. “I see.”

Meanwhile, her brain raced, cataloguing details, the pallor of his skin, the shadows under his eyes, the set of his shoulders. He looked thinner, yes. Frayed at the edges. She wanted to ask a hundred things: Are you sleeping? Are you eating? Are you - are you okay? But the questions lodged in her chest, trapped behind the barricade of everything unsaid between them.

Silence stretched again, the traffic behind her moved on, headlights glancing over them both, fleeting, like some cruel spotlight.

Roman’s eyes flicked away, then back, restless. “So, uh…fancy seeing you here. Out in the wild. Not behind…email walls.”

Something in her tightened. The emails, they’d been cautious, restrained, each one a thread she’d measured before sending. And now, to hear him invoke them, standing here in front of her, was almost unbearable.

“Yes,” she said, her voice steadier than she felt. “Emails are…different.”

He huffed a laugh, too sharp, almost breaking on itself. “Yeah, well. Safer, right? Less chance of…whatever this is.” He gestured vaguely between them, his hand slicing the cold air, before shoving it back into his pocket as if he regretted the motion instantly.

Her throat ached, she told herself to keep her mask, to stay in control, but her heart was thudding, her mind a storm of memory: the funeral, the rupture, the silence, the way his name still echoed inside her when she didn’t want it to.

Her driver shifted at the curb, the car door opening with a soft click, waiting. The sound made her flinch.

Roman noticed. His eyes flicked toward the car, then back to her, sharp, searching. “Right. You’ve got places to be. Important…uh, you know. Queen of Denmark stuff. Whatever the fuck Matsson has you doing.” His tone was flippant, but the bite in it was unmistakable.

She drew in a breath, steadying. “Roman.” It was half a warning, half an appeal.

He blinked, his bravado faltering for just a second, and she saw it, the raw edge beneath, the boyish vulnerability that undid her no matter how hard she fought it. He looked like he wanted to say something else, something real, but the words snagged.

“I should…” she began, but the sentence collapsed under the weight of what she wasn’t saying. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from him.

He gave a small, uneven nod, swallowing. “Yeah. Yeah, you should.”

For a heartbeat they only stood there, the cold night pressing in, the space between them charged and fragile. Her chest felt tight, every breath a conscious effort. She could feel the cliff edge under her feet, the certainty that this moment mattered, that something had cracked open just by their eyes meeting again.

Finally, she forced herself to move, to break the stasis. She stepped toward the car, her heels clicking sharply on the pavement. But even as she reached the door, she glanced back. He was still standing there by the bench, watching her, his face caught between defiance and something that looked like loss.

Their eyes locked one last time. It was brief, wordless, but it held more than anything they’d managed to say aloud.

Then she ducked into the car, the door closing with a muted thud. The city blurred past the window as they pulled away, but the image of him - thin, restless, unbearably present - stayed etched against her vision, refusing to fade.

Chapter Text

Part I - “The Shock"

The taillights dissolved into the dark, a smear of red swallowed by the avenue’s curve, and Roman stayed exactly where she’d left him. He didn’t breathe at first, or maybe he did and just didn’t feel it, his lungs felt tight, his throat raw, his body stunned into a kind of frozen vigilance like if he held absolutely still, the air would reverse itself, the moment would unspool, and she would step back toward him instead of in the waiting car, her voice cutting through the cold again.

But she didn’t. Cars slid past, headlights harsh and impersonal, strangers pressing forward into the winter night. The city’s noise carried over him but dulled, as if cushioned by some invisible distance, horns, chatter, the grind of tires on wet pavement, all thinned to a murmur beneath the soundless echo of her voice in his head. Roman. Just the way she’d said his name, clean, steady, the same mouth that once cut him open and once patched him together, both in the same breath.

His breath ghosted out in white, shaky streams. He shoved his hands into his coat pockets, then  pulled them out again, flexed his fingers like they itched, useless. They twitched at his sides, wanting to grab onto something. There was nothing, just the air where she had been, charged still, as if her presence lingered, faint and impossible to dismiss.

He stared at the space where her driver with the car had been parked, then at the curve where it vanished. His eyes burned as he told himself it was the cold, the bite of wind slicing against skin, but that wasn’t the truth. He could name the cold. This other thing was something else entirely, something both raw and unnamable.

She had looked at him. Not just past him, not just through him, but at him, the way she used to in boardrooms when she needed him to shut up and straighten out, the way she used to in moments when it was only them, a shared glance heavy with all the things she refused to speak aloud. And he had stood there like an idiot, choking on words that wouldn’t string together. Hi. Hey. Sorry. Don’t go. Nothing had come out right, nothing had come out at all except for a few chocked out words..

Now his mind wouldn’t shut up. Her face, tight but not cruel. The way her mouth pressed around silence, careful, cautious. The flick of her hair in the streetlight as she turned. The tone, low, measured, too quick to vanish. It had been real, she had been real, not a projection on his screen, not a memory he kept pressing against until it collapsed under its own weight.

He felt sick. Sick in that familiar way where relief and panic tangled into something jagged, and unmanageable. He was dizzy with it, the sudden weight of her in his night again. Relief that he hadn’t imagined it, that the emails hadn’t been a hallucination conjured by a brain starved for any scrap of human connection. Panic because she’d left, and he’d let her, because he was still the same idiot who ruined everything. Longing so sharp it bordered on violent, as if the air itself could split open and deliver her back to him if he willed it hard enough. And fury, of course, at himself, at the moment, at her for leaving, though he knew he had no right to it.

He stayed rooted. His shoes were wet through, cold seeping into him from the ground but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t tear himself away from the sight of nothing. Somewhere deep inside him, his body believed that staying meant holding the thread intact, that if he left now, she was gone for good, but if he waited, if he just held the place long enough, she might circle back.

Time was slippery, it always was with him. Minutes slid into each other, elastic, until he couldn’t tell how long it had been since the red lights vanished. All he knew was the hollow in his chest, widening with every second she didn’t return.

He told himself to move. To breathe, to shrug it off, make a joke of it, spin something cruel enough to cover the burn. He couldn’t. His throat wouldn’t work, his chest was a drum, hammering out the truth: he’d seen her. She’d seen him. The silence between them had cracked open, and he had no idea what to do with the air now rushing in.

What felt like hours later - though the city’s indifferent clockwork told him it had been 10 minutes at most - Roman finally shifted. His knees ached with the kind of dull stiffness that came from standing too long in the cold, the kind of ache he usually associated with airports or funerals. His hands had gone stiff too, the blood sluggish, the nails bluish at the edges where he flexed them open and shut. The damp night had seeped into his bones, into the hinge of his back, making him feel older than he was, like he’d been carved into the sidewalk and left there too long.

He rolled his shoulders, as if the motion might loosen the ghost of her from them, but the air still carried her outline, faint but unshakable, like an afterimage on the inside of his eyelids. One step, then another. His shoes scuffed against the pavement in reluctant drags. His body was moving, barely, but his mind had stayed behind, fixed at the curb where she’d stood, where her voice had landed on him like a strike, where time had briefly warped and turned him into someone who could still be undone by nothing more than a name.

And it came back immediately, raw and clear, replaying without his permission:

“Uh. Wow. Uh- hi.”

Christ. That was what he had opened with. Not I’m sorry, not you look good, not hello in any register of sanity. Just broken syllables, half bark, half whisper, delivered like he hadn’t spoken to another living person in months. Which, he thought grimly, wasn’t that far from the truth. His own voice had sounded foreign to him then, splintered, carried too loudly across the air like he had forgotten how to adjust the volume knob on himself. He could still feel the crack in his throat when he’d said it, brittle, like glass catching under pressure.

And then…her. “Roman.”

Just his name. Two clipped syllables, contained, cooled before leaving her mouth, but it had hit him like a clean punch to the ribs. He’d felt it scatter through him, sharp and shattering, like glass splintering under pressure. She hadn’t called him that in so long. He’d read her writing it, sure - in those emails that came like drops of water in the desert - but that had been text, characters typed and screened. This was her mouth shaping it, her breath carrying it, her eyes fixed on him while she did. His name hadn’t sounded like a punishment. It had sounded like recognition, like proof he hadn’t been completely erased.

He shoved his hands into his coat pockets now and yanked them back out again, restless, as if replaying the exact twitch he’d given in front of her. The jerky shrug, the stupid mouth twitch that was supposed to be a smile and landed like static. Didn’t expect to see you. Not stalking. Creepy bench guy. Jesus Christ…that was what his brain had queued up? A rejected pilot script line? He cringed at himself so hard his teeth ground, lips pressing tight, breath fogging out too quickly in front of him.

But, her mouth. He’d seen it. The smallest tug, the beginning of a smile, ghostlike, gone almost before it arrived. She’d buried it fast but not before he’d caught it, not before it had lodged in his chest like contraband. He’d banked it instantly, hidden it deep, because he knew it was more than he deserved.

And then: “I see.”

So cool, so damn tight. But her eyes hadn’t matched. He’d seen the way they flicked over him, quick, scanning like she couldn’t stop herself from noticing. His weight, his face. The shadows under his eyes. He’d felt the heat of it like she was cataloguing damage and trying not to. That tiny fracture in her composure had been a lifeline, proof that she wasn’t untouchable, that some part of her was still tuned to him, even if she didn’t want it to be.

He dragged in air now, harsh, loud in his ears, chest pulling tight. The traffic rushed past behind him, but he was elsewhere, inside the moment, replaying it with the merciless fidelity of a bad dream.

Emails are different.
Safer.
Less chance of…whatever this is.

He could hear himself saying it, hear the idiotic way he’d cut the air with his hand, like a mime performing nothing, like he could gesture his way out of what sat between them. And her face, steady but too steady all at once, like the words had pressed right up against her skin and she was refusing to flinch.

Then the sound. The soft click of the car door opening. He’d seen her flinch at it - small, involuntary - and it had made his chest seize like a fist closing tight around his heart because he knew what it meant. Lifeline, exit wound, end of scene. He had wanted to throw himself in front of it, to stall the whole damn street, to hold the moment in place. But instead? He’d managed a cheap dig at Matsson. Because he couldn’t stand it, the idea of her world belonging to someone else, folded neatly away from him.

Her voice had cut him again. Roman. This time not sharp, yet not soft either. Half warning, half something unnamed. He’d blinked, lost his footing for just a second, and she’d seen it. He knew she had. He’d seen the way she looked at him, like maybe, just maybe, there was something left. That he hadn’t torched it all.

And then she had stumbled, I should…, the sentence collapsing under its own weight. She’d looked at him still, eyes snagged, like she wanted to finish it but couldn’t.

He clenched his jaw, hard then. He had nodded, thrown up the useless yeah, you should, and every cell in his body had been screaming don’t.

Now the words chased him down the street, dragged at his cold ankles with every reluctant step. They tangled inside his ribs, pulled him backward even as his feet carried him forward. He wanted to hold onto something solid, lamp post, brick wall, anything, because he felt himself sliding sideways, the ground tilted under him, and there was no one around to steady it.

His body was thawing painfully, pins and needles rushing back into his hands and feet, but inside he was nowhere near thaw. Inside he was locked, teeth bared against the replay, every line, every pause, every glance repeated with merciless precision. And the longer he let it spool out, the worse it hurt. Because he had seen her. And she had seen him. And the current between them - buried, denied, written off - had lit up the air anyway, impossible to kill.

He wanted her back. Not just in emails, not in shadows. He wanted her there. Next to him, looking at him, not walking away. He wanted to drag time backward by sheer force, erase all the months of silence, undo the mess he’d made when he’d pushed her out, fired her, broken the only tether he’d ever trusted. He wanted to start again, he wanted the impossible. But he couldn’t even move fast enough to follow her car when it slid away from the curb. Couldn’t call out, couldn’t risk her turning, seeing him still standing there, pathetic, carved into the street like some lovesick idiot. 

He hadn’t even said what mattered. Not one thing. Not even I’m sorry, not I miss you. Not I haven’t stopped thinking about you, not for a single goddamn day.

The ache of it hollowed him out, sharp and vast. He knew it already, that whatever line stretched between them wasn’t dead. But tonight had proven it mercilessly. One look, one clipped word, and the whole thing lit up again, brighter than before, blinding him.

He walked slower now, as if dragging the distance might keep her closer somehow, even though she was long gone, swallowed by headlights and avenues and the sealed doors of her life. His chest ached with the weight of it, with the certainty that he’d never be free of her. That he didn’t even want to be. That maybe being ruined by her was the only thing he had left worth clinging to.

And wasn’t that the joke? That he’d ruined it himself, that the thing he wanted most in the world was also the thing he had put out of reach with his own hands. He wanted her still - God, he wanted her - but all he had was the echo of her voice, the shape of her name on his skin, and the memory of headlights carrying her further and further away from him.

Part II - “Spiral"

The apartment door shut behind him with a hollow slam that seemed too loud for the space, echoing against bare walls that had never quite warmed into anything resembling home. Roman leaned his back against it, eyes shut tight, as if he could block out everything, the streetlights still painted into his retinas, the lingering outline of her face burned against the inside of his skull.

The quiet pressed in on him immediately. Not the soft kind of quiet, not rest but the kind that amplified everything: the hum of the refrigerator, the faint rattle of a vent, the buzz of his own blood in his ears. He shoved his hands through his hair, tugged once, twice, as if that would dislodge her voice, her eyes, the ghost of her standing in front of him.

He pushed off the door then, pacing three steps into the living room and then stopping, pivoting sharply, pacing back again. His feet dragged against the floor, restless, like his body couldn’t decide if it wanted to collapse or run. He poured himself a drink without thinking, hand shaking just enough that amber sloshed over the rim, spotting his shirt. He didn’t notice until later.

The first swallow burned down his throat, but it didn’t quiet anything. If anything, it sharpened it. He saw it again, the way she’d looked at him when he’d joked about being a “creepy bench guy.” The almost-smile..the almost. He latched onto that flicker, replayed it in slow motion, as though if he studied the angle of her mouth long enough he could prove to himself that she still felt something, that he hadn’t destroyed it all.

“Fuck,” he muttered, too loud for the room, dragging his hand over his face. He dropped onto the couch, then sprang up again almost instantly, unable to stay still. The walls were too close, the silence too sharp. He paced again, drink in hand, the liquid sloshing dangerously close to the rim of the glass.

He thought about her eyes then…her eyes which was what gutted him most, the way they’d scanned over him before she schooled her face. Not detached, not disinterested. Searching instead. She’d looked at him like she wanted to know things, wanted to ask if he was eating, if he was sleeping, if he was okay. And she hadn’t asked, she hadn’t let herself. But he’d seen it there, a break in the mask, and God, he’d wanted to fall into it, to fall into her at once.

He dropped heavily into the armchair this time, forcing himself to stay down, though his legs bounced, his fingers tapped against the glass. He tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling but it only brought another memory down on him, uninvited as they always were these days.

Her face at the funeral. He could still summon it in an instant, like a knife flashing in the dark. The day had been washed in greys, skies swollen with rain that never quite fell, air sharp despite the early autumn weather, and she had looked like the only thing in the world still capable of being carved from stone. Perfect hair, perfect outfit, perfect restraint. But her eyes. Christ. Her eyes had been merciless. Not wild, not even furious. Worse. Cold, precise, cutting in that quiet way of hers that didn’t need to raise its voice.

The words themselves were still etched into him, burned down to the bone: done. Finished. No more alliance, no more tether. Like she was cutting a cord he had been too afraid to admit existed. He had felt it like a guillotine, brutal and clean, no chance to beg or bargain. A rope slipping through his hands so fast it burned before it was gone. He’d wanted to grab her, shake her, plead, but what could he have said? He’d already detonated the bridge when he fired her, already betrayed the one person who had ever - God, ever - looked at him and seen him as something more than an expendable little creep.

He’d let her walk away that day because there had been nothing else left to do. Watching her disappear into the crowd of black coats, her heels striking against the stone, he had felt the world go soundless, the martini he ordered cool under his fingertips. The silence was its own burial. He had told himself then that maybe it was better, better clean, better final, better to cauterize the wound before it festered. But the lie had never held. Because even in that moment, watching her back vanish, he had seen the flicker. Not just the anger, not just the disgust, but something under it. Hurt. It had been there, undeniable, before she shuttered it and locked it away.

And now tonight, impossibly, unbearably, there had been another flicker. Different, but cousin to the same flame. He’d seen it in her eyes when she said his name, when she looked at him like she hadn’t decided whether to banish him or drag him closer. The two moments braided together until he couldn’t separate them, the funeral and tonight, her walking away and her standing still before him. One past, one present, both lodged in his chest until he couldn’t breathe.

Because maybe - maybe - if there had been hurt back then, then the connection hadn’t been all in his head. Maybe it had mattered, maybe it had cut her too. And if it had cut her, then maybe it wasn’t dead, maybe it was only buried, waiting, and tonight had been the earth cracking just enough to show him the glow still under there, faint but alive nonetheless.

And that thought, the possibility that she hadn’t been untouched by all of it, that she hadn’t been the cold killer bitch through and through, was both salvation and torture. It was oxygen and it was poison.

He slammed the glass down so hard the rim crashed onto the wood and a small, bright jolt of sound cracked through the apartment, the kind of sound that makes you realize you are still capable of startling yourself. He flinched at it, like it had come from someone else’s life, then laughed, short and ugly, and the sound boiled up in the hollow of his throat. His hands twitched at his sides, useless as puppets with invisible strings. He wanted to move, to fling himself into something, into motion, into noise, into contact, anything, really, to drown out the hum of the room and the echo of her name on the pavement.

There were a thousand violent, stupid things he could do. Walk back to the plaza, chase the car, climb onto the bonnet and scream, call her, email her, heck even drive to her doorstep and pound until someone sensible took him away. He could already hear the imagined chorus of reasons not to: dignity, discretion, the workaday rules of the world that had once been enough to keep him afloat. But those rules had never been enough for this. Not anymore.

Instead he paced, he circled the living room like a shark in a tank, glass in one hand now, the ice gone and the liquor flat. A jolt of panic pulsed in his chest, a drumbeat that made his teeth ache. “Stupid,” he muttered, because words were the only small ballast he had. “Fuck, should’ve said…said anything. God, Roman.” His voice sounded foreign in the space, as if someone else had left a tape recorder running in his skull.

Her face at the funeral rose up again without warning: the tilt of her chin, the ice in the syllables she used to make the word done feel more like law than choice. He could summon the texture of that moment, stone, rain, the smell of black coats and damp umbrellas, as if recollection had a smell of its own. He had watched her close a door, watched her take a blade to whatever thread tied them, and he’d been helpless to stop it. He’d been the blunt instrument that had undone them; he’d fired her in a fury that now seemed monstrously short-sighted. He’d chopped the bridge between them and then stood, stunned, on the rubble, pretending he hadn’t meant it.

Tonight’s image, her stopping, the way she’d tested him with the tilt of her head, the almost-smile he’d clawed at like contraband, folded into that old pain and made it raw again. He felt, suddenly, as if he were breathing through a wound. It hurt in a place that had no name other than her.

He went, reflexively, to his phone. The device lay on the coffee table like landmine or salvation; his thumb hovered over her contact, her email. He could feel the shape of those letters beneath his finger as if they were embossed, Gerri. He imagined a hundred openings and closings of his mouth, rehearsed lines that sounded either theatrical or pathetic as soon as he thought them. ‘I messed up. I’m sorry. I don’t want this to be over.’ Each possibility seemed both painfully honest and fatally dangerous. He imagined her reading and re-reading, the tiny internal punctuation as she considered whether this was grace or another performative collapse. He could see the setting of her jaw as she considered him. He imagined that look - not you again - and his stomach hollowed.

His thumb retreated without sending a message or making a call. It trembled there, low and ridiculous with the effort not to press. The fear was electrical, rejection glowed up in his mind like a neon sign: Closed. Final. Done. The image of her at the funeral, clean, decisive, resolute, rose up as a warning. He could not bear the thought of hearing that tone again, of feeling that blade close.

He dragged his hand through his hair until it stung and the scalp hurt. He let out a sound that might have been a laugh but was near to a sob. The apartment kept feeling too small, the ceiling leant down, the air thickening. He tried to be clinical with himself, to inventory the reasons to stop: she had been right to walk away after he’d fired her twice; he had been an asshole, predictable in his worst ways; she had been kinder than he deserved. The litany was clinical and cold, and it did nothing to quell the fever.

He remembered, with unpleasant precision, the last lines of her email, those few words that had kept him awake through Valentine’s Day and on many nights since. This time, I wanted you to know I saw it. The sentence had the economy of someone used to saying everything without drama. It had been a blade in its simplicity, admitting attention without invitation. He’d read it and reread it until the characters imprinted themselves beneath his skin. They were a line that didn’t shout; they were a soft, persistent litany. She had noticed him, she had not feinted away. She had seen him, and had chosen to keep her sight from him without explanation. It was both mercy and punishment.

He closed his eyes, imagining the slow, stubborn way she might have typed those words. He imagined her posture at the desk, so deliberate, so private, and his chest convulsed with envy. He was jealous of the desk and the light and the arc of her finger moving over the keys. He hated that he was even capable of being jealous of furniture. He was ridiculous; he was small; he had broken the one honest thing in his life. Still, at the center of his ruin, hunger throbbed in a new, terrible way.

He felt elated then, as if a rusted thing inside him had been kicked loose. It was the cruelest, most childish joy: proof he could be seen. Proof that his being alive could still reverberate in someone else’s orbit. He wanted to scour that small mercy into permanence. He wanted to build a shrine to it on the mantle and visit every night. He wanted to kneel in the street and beg for another flicker of that almost-smile. But under the joy was a more viscous emotion, fear that this flicker could be an echo of pity, that she had seen not love but the debris of what had been and responded to it with adult civility.

He consumed another glass as if the drink could smooth the edges. The liquid washed down, betraying no salve. He pressed his palms into his temples, feeling the map of recent strain. He pictured her in motion, the way she’d moved away from him at the curb, the precise tuck of her hand into the corner of her coat. He pictured the resilient, armored way she existed in the world, the competence that had long formed part of the scaffolding of their alliance. He wanted to take her apart to see the inside, which made him ashamed, because that was monstrous in its intimacy.

He began to imagine scenarios, absurdly elaborate, childish maneuvers in which he would orchestrate their reencounter. In some, he was a better man, contrite and spectacular; in others, he was simply present, a quiet constant she could lean on. In all of them, she did not turn away. He could see the way she might roll her eyes and then forgive him with her own small, private mercy. He could hear her laughter, the particular, short wryness that had once been a kind of currency between them. He wanted, with a ferocity that threatened to blind him, to buy back those moments.

But then the memory of the firing - of his own hand slicing the rope - would clutch at his throat and he would be cruel to himself. Images unspooled of the conversation that had led to it: anger, hubris, the quiet cruelty of a man who thought the world orbited his whims. He remembered her face as he’d done it, stunned first, then that very controlled hurt, and finally the implacable click of decision. That hurt had been like fire in his chest; he had watched it and told himself it was necessary. Now it was a ledger he could not square. He had wanted power and had paid for it with the one person who had ever aligned with him without calculation. The trade was obscene.

He started to type, an actual sentence in his head, clear and dangerous: I saw you. I’m sorry. Let me try. He pictured the cursor, blinking, then the thin, shameful futures that one line could open. He imagined her reading and folding him, or worse, filing him away like a nuisance. He imagined the clean hardness of her eyes when she said done and he knew - knowing with a clarity that sickened him - that he might not survive the clean severing this time. If she decided not to respond, the silence would be a clean, finalist thing that would leave him essentially homeless.

He pulled his laptop toward him almost without meaning to, fingers clumsy as he opened the screen. The room smelled faintly of old takeout and the last, bitter dregs of his drink. The laptop came to life in an instant with its small, obliging chirp. He put his hands on the keys and froze, as if the action itself was an acting out. His thumb hovered over the letters as if over a red button. He typed a few words, then deleted them. Typed more. Deleted. The cursor blinked an impatient, judge-like rhythm. Each attempt felt monstrously inadequate and yet necessary. He was a man arranging his offering, unable to decide whether to burn it or present it.

In the end, he did neither. He closed the laptop with a snap, the sound small but final in the quiet. He sat back and let the shadows in the room fold over him. The draft of the email, messy, pleading, obscene in its honesty, sat somewhere between his head and the screen, a thing he could not yet bear to release into the world. It would come, he told himself, with the rigid certainty of someone who tries to map out a siege…or it would not. Either way, he felt raw and exposed, a man with a wound that would not scab.

He whispered her name again, softer this time, like prayer or damage, “Gerri.” The word filled him and then emptied him. He held it there, in the quiet, as if repeating it might summon some small mercy. But the apartment answered with the same indifferent hum of its appliances. 

Outside, somewhere, life went on. Inside, he sat in the dark with the light from the laptop like a small altar, and the memory of her like a candle he could not find the courage to blow out.

Part III - “The Confession"

The laptop’s glow burned into his eyes until the edges of the room felt like they were dissolving. Roman sat forward, elbows pressed hard to his knees, and opened his inbox with a hesitation that was closer to nausea than caution. It had been a week - probably more than that actually - but he didn’t need to search. He knew exactly where it was, he could trace the path of his cursor like muscle memory, back to the sentence that had further ruined him in its restraint.

There it was; This time, I wanted you to know I saw it.

He read it once, then again, then out loud, his voice cracking mid-way as if the words had weight. “This…time,” he muttered to himself, dragging the syllables into something unsteady. “I wanted you to know…I saw it.” Each repetition felt like peeling away a layer, as if there was some hidden clause beneath the ink, something he could excavate if he just said it the right way. His tone shifted - mocking, hopeful, bitter, desperate - testing the sentence like it might crack open if he hit the right register.

“You saw it. What, like…like a ghost? Like Bigfoot? Like Jesus on a piece of toast?” His laugh was thin, hollow, too loud in the apartment. He rubbed a hand over his mouth, muttering into his palm, “No, no, not that. Not a joke. She meant it. She meant she didn’t ignore it, she looked, she read it.”

He leaned closer to the screen, as if proximity might coax more truth out of the text. His chest ached with the wanting, the endless spin of it: she hadn’t dismissed him. She had looked and now tonight, she had looked again. The thought scalded him, unbearable in its tenderness.

Before he could stop himself, his fingers flew across the keys suddenly. The draft box bloomed open, hungry, and he started to feed it because, apparently, the second time he tried to type the whirlwind of his mind down, it worked or at least worked somewhat.

Gerri - 

He began and the cursor blinked at him, impatient for more. So he typed more.

I don’t know how to do this without fucking it up. I don’t know how to say anything that doesn’t sound like either a joke or a crime. You saw it. Yeah. You saw me. You keep seeing me, and it’s killing me, because I don’t know what to do with that.

Delete. Re-type. Add more. His sentences fractured, scattered, contradicted themselves. He was chasing himself in circles and spilling at the same time.

I miss you. I hate that I miss you. You were right to walk away and I hate that you were right. I hate that I fired you. I hate that I ruined the only thing that ever felt like it wasn’t…transactional. I hate that I can still picture your face when you said ‘done’, like I’d just…cut my own throat and didn’t notice until you pointed out the blood.

His fingers stuttered. He let them rest, shaking, then pushed forward.

But then tonight. Jesus Christ, tonight. You looked at me. Not like I was a stranger, not like I was dead. You looked at me like…like you remembered. And I wanted to say everything all at once. I wanted to tell you I’m sorry, I wanted to tell you I’d take it back, I wanted to tell you I can’t stop thinking about you, I wanted to tell you I-

He froze, the cursor a white, impatient eye on the black. The room narrowed to the screen and the small, absurd shape of his hands. His breath caught, sharp, animal like, and the air in his chest felt suddenly too small. For a second he simply sat there, the apartment’s hum reduced to distant static, while the word throbbed against the inside of his ribs like a foreign thing.

Love.

It was obscene how ordinary the word looked when it finally presented itself on the inside of his skull full force. No flourish, no excuse, no strategic preamble, just the naked noun, terrible in its bluntness. He remembered how he typed it before, naked and ridiculous on the screen, and his stomach knotted. The thought of it there - there for her, in the cold light of her inbox - made his throat close. He could feel his pulse at his temples, a frenetic drummer. Saying it would be confession, indictment, humorless and final. Saying it would be to hand her the map of all his weaknesses.

He touched the keys as if they might burn and typed the first letter on impulse, the capital I making the line feel like a hinge. Then his thumb hovered, a coward over a precipice. He pictured her reading it. He pictured the small movements she made when she read something that annoyed her, the set of her jaw, the way she slid her glasses up, the shallow exhale that meant she was deciding whether to answer with precision or with cruelty. He imagined a dozen possible expressions cross her face and each one was a different kind of execution.

He could hear himself - her name in his mouth followed by the word - and suddenly it all felt too loud. It was not the tidy Hollywood confession he’d fantasized about in the idle, safer corners of his mind. It was not even the clean, theatrical apology that might have allowed them to salvage something. It was messy, embarrassing. It was his whole ugly, incoherent interior rendered in three letters.

His thumb hit backspace.

The sentence vanished. Not a deletion of letters so much as the erasure of a life he hadn’t yet allowed himself to inhabit. For a moment he sat with the erasure like a wound. He had tasted the possibility, brief, fierce, and now the absence of the word left a hollow ache that hurt more sharply than if he had simply sent it and been refused. At least then there would be the clean end, the finite cruelty. Now there was only this suspended, burning uncertainty.

He typed again, hands suddenly frantic, as if motion could fill the vacuum the deletion had made.

Forget it. Don’t answer…or do. I don’t know. I just…I wanted you to know I’m not numb. Not when it comes to you.

The sentence came out jagged, the punctuation amateurish and frankly shameful. He read it, the letters swimming a little on the screen, and felt both ridiculous and incandescent. He tried to soften it, to dress it up with sarcasm, his reflex, his armor. He wanted to make himself into a joke so if she laughed he could live with that. He could be laughed at, he could be tolerated, he could be folded into the small mercies of her life in a way that didn’t require confession.

Maybe this is dramatic. Maybe I’m pathetic. Classic Roman, right? The man who burns the bridge then stands on the rubble asking for directions.

He snorted softly at the screen, a sound that tasted like bile. The sarcasm clicked against something tender and only made it ache. He wanted to be clever, but cleverness here read like cowardice. He found himself hating what the sarcasm could do to the sentence, strip it of its risk, make it palatable. He wanted honesty. God, he wanted to be honest in the worst possible way and let the consequences follow.

Another line unspooled, slow and almost tender in its bad decision-making:

I loved you -no, I love you, and there is a difference here because it’s not memory or nostalgia for me. It’s not a tidy past tense. It is current and stupid and undeniable and if you hate me for saying it then erase it and go on. But I needed to tell you that, even if only to prove I’m still real.

He stopped before the period. The line sat there, swollen and raw, and his hands shook as if from fever. He could feel the salt of tears beginning to rise to the rims of his eyes, not performative, not the kind that comes easy at funerals or in speeches but quiet, close, and utterly private. He hated that the vulnerability felt like weakness even as it felt like salvation.

He read the sentence aloud to no one, the sound rough and small. “I love you,” he said, soft, not the theatrical bellow he’d imagined in other, drunken fantasies, but a small intonation that felt like a confession whispered into a dark church. The apartment swallowed it. The phrase hummed inside him like an electric current.

He could already see the recoil: her fingers, trained to hold things at bay, hesitating above the keyboard before she answered with some calibrating sentence that would be merciful or merciless depending on the weather of her mood. He could imagine her reading the capital I and then the tiny, immutable rest of the phrase and categorizing him; irrational, dangerous, needy. He may as well have carved the words into stone. She could draw a fine line along their length and step away. He would stand there and watch the line sever him in two.

The terror of that possibility made his throat close like a fist. He had always found the idea of her definitive refusal worse than the absence of her entirely. Finality was annihilation; ambiguity left a thread to clutch.

He shoved his palms into his eyes, frustrated by the salt that had come unbidden. When he looked again the sentence still blazed on the screen, obscene and sacred all at once, like graffiti scrawled on a monument. He couldn’t delete it, couldn’t scrub it out. Not anymore. His fingers hovered, trembling, but the thought of erasing it felt like extinguishing himself. So he left it there. 

A wound, open and unbandaged, glowing back at him from the screen. He closed the laptop instead, as if shutting the machine could contain the truth, even though he knew it was written now, permanent in him, whether she ever saw it or not. 

Then just seconds later, he opened the laptop again, not deleting but trying other shapes, subtler admissions, cheaper salvations. I’m not numb with you. I care more than I probably should.You saw it. You’ve always seen me. Each line tasted like compromise and betrayal both: to himself, for not risking the whole, and to her, for offering less than he felt.

His mouth formed a bitter smile, an expression that suited the man for its self-loathing and self-preserving irony. He typed one more attempt, at once raw and guarded:

I don’t expect anything. I don’t want to demand anything of you. But there’s…there’s something here I can’t ignore. I thought I’d crawled out of wanting. I haven’t. If you don’t want to be dragged into this, say so, I’ll go. Quietly. But I had to tell you…I had to tell you that I see you too, and whatever disaster that is, it’s mine to own.

He read the paragraph back, the rhythm off, the punctuation ragged. It was terrible. It was honest. It was everything he feared and needed it to be. He sat back in the chair, the breath he let go of long and shaky. For a moment he considered the send button, not as a plea but as a release. To hit the button would be to let the consequence fall, to no longer live inside the suspended, corrosive ember of possibility.

His thumb hovered over the trackpad. The cursor seemed to pulse in the dim light, a small, judgmental heartbeat. He thought of the way she’d looked at him tonight, briefly softened, immediately pulled back into armor, and of the funeral where she’d burned the cord. He imagined the look on her face if she opened the message at two a.m. on some Wednesday and read his confession. He imagined the precise economy of her refusal, the way she might ration kindness so it could hum like a faint consolation without being mistaken for permission.

Fear, sharp and animal, closed around his windpipe. Not the abstract fear of losing her - he had already felt that - it was the fear of being reduced to the version of himself that begged and begged and then, even when given a scrap, proved unfit to steward it. He was terrified at how little courage he had to be the man who could love without contingency. Love, to him, had always been worn like a costumed betrayal; the notion of owning it without explanation was ruinous.

He saved the draft instead.

He watched the file icon blink in the draft folder like a small, impotent heart. It was both triumph and confession, proof that he had the audacity to say the words to himself, and proof of his inability to withstand the marquee of the response. The draft sat there and he felt like someone who had carved a monument that only he could see: meaningful to him alone, meaningless in the public light.

Then, like a man exhausted by the battle but unwilling to yield victory, he closed the laptop. The screen dimmed to black and the night reclaimed its soft, indifferent breathing. The confession remained, unsent, imperfect, incandescent in its private place, and he folded over it, a man who had bared himself and then found he could not bare the cost of being seen.

He knew it wasn’t just friendship, hadn't been for a long time. That was the truth that hollowed him out, the splinter that made every silence heavier, every memory sharp enough to draw blood. He loved her, in his own crooked way, jagged, bruised, unpresentable. Not the kind of love that could be held up to the light, admired, paraded around. It was raw, selfish, trembling in the dark corners of himself. That was what terrified him: not the emptiness of what they’d been, but the fullness of what it had become without him meaning to. The fact that the word had slipped, even in private, onto a screen, that it lived now outside his chest, felt like standing on the edge of a drop he couldn’t see the bottom of.

He pushed himself up, restless, unwilling to sit in the raw silence that pressed against him from all sides. He tried to make a night out of small tasks, anything that would disguise the fact that his body shook with adrenaline he couldn’t discharge. He straightened the stack of unopened mail, shuffled through envelopes without opening them, rinsed out a glass that didn’t need rinsing, wiped a surface already clean. He fiddled with the dimmer on the lamp until the room was drenched in something close to twilight. He told himself it was routine, just something to fill the air. But every motion trembled with the undertow of the thing he hadn’t sent. The sentence lived behind his ribs like an animal with its teeth bared.

Almost on autopilot, he reached for the speaker on the shelf. Music, he thought, something to smother the noise in his head, to trick his body into thinking he was safe. The first chords filled the room, low and almost hesitant. And only when the melody took its shape did he recognize it.

He froze.

It was a song she had once offhandedly mentioned in that dry, half-amused voice of hers, Fleetwood Mac, “Silver Springs.” He remembered the exact cadence of it, the way she’d been passing through his office, eyes scanning the room as if she half-expected to find a fire she’d have to put out. The song had been playing low from his computer speakers, background noise while he scrolled aimlessly through spreadsheets. She had paused, just for a second, one hand resting against the frame of the door. “Oh, I like this one,” she’d said, voice neither indulgent nor confessional, just a small acknowledgement dropped into the air like a coin tossed into a fountain without expectation of retrieval.

Nothing remarkable about the way she’d said it, no weight to the words. But he had carried it away like a stolen treasure, tucked it into the hidden places of himself. He hadn’t shown it on his face - God forbid he’d look too eager, too transparent - but the simple fact of her liking something had branded itself into him. Back then, his listening to her had been less like worship and more like instinct, the unthinking act of a man who leaned toward her voice the way a body leans toward light.

And now, years later, the opening chords poured into his apartment, soft and ghostly, and his stomach dropped as though gravity itself had shifted. He stood in the half-light of the room, frozen in the first bars, his hands slack at his sides. His chest tightened with the recognition, an ache so immediate it felt like his ribs had shrunk around his heart.

She was there again: leaning against the doorway of his office, her arms folded, her head tilted in that faintly skeptical way. Small hairs had fallen just slightly out of her signature French twist, one lock grazing her cheek, and there had been - God help him - a trace of humor softening her mouth. Not a full smile, nothing broad, just the smallest lift at the corner, enough to spark against the dull air, enough to turn the whole sterile room into something momentarily alive.

He had wanted to hold onto it, bottle it, even then. And though he had buried the memory under years of noise and missteps, his body had remembered. The recognition coursed through him now, hot and sharp, his pulse fluttering at his throat, his hands twitching as though they needed to catch something before it fell.

The sound filled the room, familiar and unbearable, and he sat back down, almost unsteady, as though the memory itself had weight and he was no longer strong enough to carry it. The song pressed against him like a hand he couldn’t refuse, the echo of her voice laced into every note, and for a moment he wasn’t in his apartment at all but in that office doorway, looking up at her and pretending not to need what he already knew he couldn’t have.

He reached for a book then. Random, he told himself. Just something to keep his hands busy, keep the night from collapsing inward. But it wasn’t random. His hand found it almost blindly, and when his fingers closed around the spine, he felt the faint crackle of recognition before he even looked down. The leatherette edge was softened, familiar, the way it had been when she’d first pressed it into his palm just over a year ago. Middlemarch by George Eliot, a doorstop of a novel, more weight than he usually had the patience for.

He had laughed when she’d given it to him, one of those deflecting, half-mocking chuckles that made everything feel like a joke before it could sting. “What, homework?” he’d said, tossing it lightly in his hand as if to show her he wasn’t rattled by the unexpected intimacy of a gift. But she had only arched an eyebrow, her mouth tightening in that way it did when she had already decided he was beneath the moment. “Read something that isn’t a shareholder report for once,” she’d said, voice dry, teasing, but beneath it there had been, unmistakably, a softness. A note of care she would never admit to outright. And he had taken it, pretending it was casual, pretending it didn’t mean more than it did, because that was the only way he knew how to take anything from her.

But the truth was, he had been struck. No one gave him books, no one gave him anything that wasn’t bought, branded, transactional. And here was this, something chosen, something she had touched, something she had thought of him in connection with. He hadn’t known then what to call the feeling that had flared in his chest, only that it was strong, unrelenting, and dangerous.

Now, in the present, when he opened it, her handwriting met him like a ghost. Slanted, hurried, impatient, notes scrawled in the margins. An underline here, a question mark there, the occasional dry aside in her hand, meant for no one but herself. He stared at the ink as though it were alive. His thumb hovered above it, then pressed down lightly, tracing the curve of a letter, following the faint dent where her pen had pressed too hard. He half expected the words to vanish, smudge into nothing under his touch, but they didn’t. They held.

His eyes snagged on one line she had circled;“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow.” Next to it, in her small, impatient script, she had written: Too much to ask. He read it once, then again, silently, as though she were murmuring it beside him, her voice bleeding through the years and the distance. The page blurred, not because of the print but because of the way his chest tightened, his throat thickening until he had to set his jaw against it.

The music carried on in the background, the voice of Stevie Nicks twisting like smoke through the air, binding itself to her words, her marks on the paper. The room felt less his than hers, as though she had stepped through some invisible seam and was now inhabiting it with him; her handwriting, her song, her ghost-smile at his desk. He sat like that for a long time, the book open across his knees, one hand fixed over her annotation as if to guard it, as if by keeping his skin pressed there he could tether himself to her.

His body was restless even in stillness, heartbeat quick, breath uneven, legs bouncing with some low-grade panic, but over it all a strange, brittle calm began to settle. Not peace, not even anything close to it, but a fragile imitation, a bitter grace at the edge of collapse. He knew it wasn’t solid. He could feel the seams straining, the edges of it already threatening to split apart. But he clung to it anyway because it was all he had.

And in that fragile lull - book in his lap, her words under his fingers, her song seeping through the walls - he sat suspended between despair and something like hope, a balance so precarious it felt like standing at the lip of a cliff. Somewhere inside him, he already knew the truth: this wasn’t the end of breaking, only the first fracture. The real collapse was still on its way.

Part IV - “Intervention"

The days folded over themselves like damp paper, soft at the edges, difficult to separate. Roman wasn’t marking them anymore. He couldn’t have said whether it was three days since he’d last left the apartment or six, whether the frozen dinner tray on the counter had been there since Tuesday or Friday or maybe Sunday. Time had become viscous, a fog that blurred the outlines of things.

The email still sat inside his laptop like a live wire. He hadn’t opened the laptop again. Couldn’t honestly. Every time he walked past the table where it lay, lid shut, a faint hum in its silence, he felt the pulse of it, the confession that waited, unsent, humming like a secret. He avoided it the way one avoids a door one knows has something monstrous waiting behind it. Still, he thought of it constantly, the words running through his head like a mantra. I love you. I miss you. I ruined it.

He remembered the shape of the sentences more than the sentences themselves, as though they had branded his brain. So he collapsed inward instead. He stopped answering calls; Shiv, mostly, the screen lighting up with her name five, six, seven times in a row, always silenced. He ignored Tom’s number, too, though Tom never called more than once. Kendall didn’t bother anymore. Connor occasionally left a voicemail that sounded like it had been intended for someone else.

He spent the mornings in bed, though morning had no real distinction. He would wake into a thick gray haze, stare at the ceiling until the light shifted slightly, then turn over and press his face into the pillow again. Sometimes he dozed, sometimes he just lay there, limbs heavy, feeling the hours pool under his skin like lead.

By late afternoon he would stagger into the kitchen, drink water straight from the faucet until his stomach lurched, maybe open the fridge, stare blankly at its barren shelves. A carton of spoiled milk he hadn’t thrown out. A half-full jar of olives. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten a meal that didn’t come out of cellophane. The very thought of cooking, pots, pans, heat, all felt baroque, grotesque even.

Nights were worse though. Nights were when the quiet turned predatory. He would pace the apartment barefoot, wearing the same T-shirt for days, his hair sticking damp to his forehead. He couldn’t sit still but he also couldn’t do anything. He’d start tasks and abandon them, pull a drawer open, close it again, stand in front of the bathroom mirror, splash his face with water, walk away dripping. He played no music, not since the night with the book and the song. He couldn’t bear it. The silence was worse but much safer.

The spiral had a texture he knew by now. He could chart its course the way you chart a storm: first the restlessness, then the claustrophobia, then the sense that his body was collapsing in on itself, ribs pressing too tightly, lungs refusing to expand. It was December all over again, but heavier, because now there was the added weight of what he had almost done. What he had actually done, even if no one else had seen it. Written it. Admitted it. Loved her.

He tried not to think of her face the night he’d seen her. He failed, obviously. It kept breaking through;  her eyes meeting his, the impossible recognition, the silence that had stretched between them like a bridge half-built. He replayed it obsessively, the way a tongue worries a wound. He told himself it meant nothing, that she had only looked at him because she couldn’t not. And yet he remembered every flicker, every pause. And it was killing him.

By the fourth - or maybe the eighth - day, he wasn’t answering the door either. Delivery drivers left things outside and texted. He didn’t always bring them in. A bag of takeout sat on the hallway floor until it cooled, then spoiled, until the smell made him gag when he finally picked it up.

He was slumped on the couch one afternoon, blinds half-closed against a weak late February sun, when the knock came. Not a knock, exactly, more like a rapid, insistent pounding or hammering, as if someone wasn’t going to leave until the door was opened. He ignored it, he was good at ignoring things. But then came the voice.

“Roman!” Sharp, cutting, unmistakable. Classic Shiv. 

He squeezed his eyes shut, groaned into the couch cushion. Of course…she’d finally decided to escalate. The pounding came again. “Roman, open the fucking door. I swear to God, don’t make me waddle out here like this for nothing.” 

He didn’t move though. He hoped, faintly, that maybe she’d give up. “I know you’re in there,” she snapped a moment later, “Don’t pull your disappearing act on me. I’m eight months pregnant, Roman, and if you make me stand in this hallway any longer, I will kill you before this baby ever has the chance.” He grimaced at that, shoved a hand through his hair and stood up, feeling faintly dizzy as he did so. Another Classic Shiv move: half-annoyed, half-worried, all blade.

When he cracked the door an inch and peered through, she filled the frame like an accusation and an apology at once. She was bundled in a long coat that hid most of her but not all. The curve of her belly was unmistakable, a soft, undeniable crescent beneath wool, and there was a tiny stoop to her shoulders that made her look both smaller and more dangerous. Her hair was pulled back in an efficient knot, and there was a smudge of exhaustion at the corner of one eye that softened her face in a way that, for a sliver of a second, nearly made Roman’s heart twist with something like protectiveness. She had a big tote slung across one arm, last minute stuff for the baby? Snacks? Some newfangled pregnancy supplement he’d never heard of, and in her other hand a paper cup, steam rising in a thin line into the hallway air. The smell of coffee trailed her, sharp and domestic, and for a moment Roman thought of the many mornings they’d shared a quick, brittle cup before being hurled into the day’s chaos. 

She looked at him as if cataloguing damage, her gaze moving over his jaw, the stubble that had collected like a small confession, the hollows beneath his eyes.“You look like a hermit who ran out of things to be mad about and just sat in his shack crying for a month and a half” she said, the barb perfectly timed. It landed like a practiced jab, but Roman could hear the undercurrent; the worry she hadn’t dressed up as a question. Shiv had always been an expert at wearing concern with a collar of sarcasm so sharp it cut clean through pretense.

He frowned, the motion automatic, defensive. “Thanks, sis. Always nice to get a little pick-me-up.” His voice scraped, he had to clear it.

She didn’t bother with pleasantries. Instead she clicked her tongue, the sound crisp in the narrow entryway, and pushed past him with a familiarity that was something like permission. The coat’s wool brushed his sleeve. Her perfume - citrus and something green - flashed in his nose, oddly intimate, and he almost reached out to touch the curve of her belly before deciding he had no right. He had never been the sort of man to feel parental things easily, even the thought shocked him into some kind of private shame.

Shiv dropped onto his couch with a heavy, irritated grunt a minute later, the sofa compressing under her in a way that made the room rearrange itself around her. She folded her hands over her tote, leaned forward, elbows on knees, and looked at him with those eyes, sharp, assessing, incandescent with sibling exasperation. For a second she was not the polished executive who could parry a hostile board with a single sentence; she was fierce yet at that moment she seemed small and human and waiting.

“Don’t say it,” he muttered before she could find the phrase that would sum up the scene; ‘mess,’ ‘hovel,’ something more brutal he knew she was saving.

“Oh, I’m going to say it,” she replied, unable to suppress a smirk even as worry creased her forehead. “This place looks like the waiting room in hell.” Then she added, almost softer, “Roman, seriously. Talk to me.”

She had that way, the one that cut through his deflections, the roll of her eyes when he offered sarcasm, the tilt of her mouth when she softened the barb into a command. Now, sitting on his couch, smelling like coffee and the city, three inches of his life away, she looked like the only person who could still call him out of whatever private ruin he’d decided to live in.

He watched her place the cup on his coffee table with the exacting care of someone setting down a relic. She set it near the lamp, then, in a gesture that would have been invisible to anyone else, smoothed the cushion beside her as if inviting him into a space he’d been pretending didn’t exist. He caught himself reading the small gestures - the neat fold of her coat, the angle of her feet, the way she held the tote so it didn’t bump the sofa - because those were the things you noticed when the rest of the world had narrowed.

For a second, his shame and relief tangled into something ferocious and quiet. He’d expected the door to open and the world to have moved on without him, he hadn’t even expected Shiv to arrive like this, with the combination of tenderness and exasperation that could reach him when no one else could. Her presence was a shove and an anchor all at the same time. It made him acutely aware of how unsituated he’d let himself become, of how small and human the consequences of his actions were when refracted through the eyes of someone who had always refused to be fooled by him.

She looked at him, head tilted, that expression that was half reprimand, half fear. “Alright,” she said finally, voice dropping in that way she did when she meant to be careful with him. “Talk.”

Roman’s lips twisted, almost a smile, almost a grimace,“Talk? Wow. Great therapy technique, Shiv. You should open an office, charge by the hour. I’m sure people would love to be berated into emotional breakthroughs.”

She exhaled through her nose, slow, sharp. “Roman.”

“What?” He dragged out the word, pitched it higher, mocking. “What do you want, exactly? A monologue? A soliloquy? Some Hamlet shit? ‘Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio’, except it’s me, and I’m Yorick, and I’ve just been rotting in this very fine, very cozy, hermit-chic apartment.”

Shiv stared, her silence was suddenly worse than anything else.

He rubbed a hand over his face, nails scratching through stubble, wishing she’d just yell, tell him to get his shit together, leave. Instead she just sat there, belly obvious under her sweater, patience a taut thread stretched between them. Finally, she said, “You’ve been disappearing again. Not answering calls, not even Greg’s. Do you realize how insane that is? Greg. The human email notification…He said you ignored three of his texts.”

Roman snorted at that, “What’s he gonna do, sue me? File a missing-persons report in Comic Sans?”

“Roman.” She said,  her voice was sharper now. He glanced over, saw her jaw set in that familiar way, the same way she used to look at their father when he was drunk on his own bile. Half-disgust, half-love, a cocktail only Shiv could pull off.

“Jesus, you’re intense,” Roman muttered. He crossed to the window, pulled the blinds down another inch even though it was broad daylight and the only audience out there was a brick wall. “I’m fine. Just..busy. Important things, corporate espionage, international arms deals. You know.”

“You smell like you haven’t showered in days.”

He froze, shoulders tightening. “Wow. Okay. Thanks, pregnant nose, right? Heightened sense of smell. Real cute.”

“Not cute, Roman.” Her voice softened again, but it was the softness of a blade’s edge just before it cuts. “Scary.”

The word landed in him like a hook. He swallowed, throat raw, suddenly aware of the silence between her breaths. He laughed then, too sharp. “Oh, come on. Scary? What am I gonna do, Shiv? Blow my brains out with a Nerf gun? Drown in expired takeout containers? Please. If you want scary, look at Kendall. I’m, like, the fun little court jester by comparison.”

“That’s exactly the problem,” she shot back, “You think being pathetic is a punchline. But it’s not, iIt’s a…it’s a void, Roman. And I’m watching you fall into it.”

His chest ached then, he turned away, pressed his forehead against the cool glass. “You sound like a Hallmark movie. The pregnant sister with the heart of gold, saving her degenerate brother from despair. Roll credits.”

Shiv shifted on the couch, grunting, adjusting her weight like the baby itself had protested. “I don’t give a shit about credits. I give a shit about you.”

The silence that followed was different. He could hear her breathing, steady, grounding. He hated her for being here, for forcing light into the rot, and he loved her too, in the broken way he loved anyone.

He muttered, barely audible, “I saw her.” The words seemed to drop between them, heavy, unmistakable.

Shiv stilled. “…Who?” she asked after a moment. 

He cursed under his breath. “Fuck. Forget it.”

Her eyes narrowed. “No. Who?”

He turned, met her gaze, hated himself for the flush creeping up his neck. “Gerri.”

Shiv blinked. “You-” She barked a laugh, too loud, too cutting. “You saw Gerri? Holy shit, Roman. What did you do, follow her home like a sad little stray cat?”

“Fuck you,” he snapped, but the heat in his face betrayed him. He dropped onto the arm of a chair, fingers fidgeting at a loose thread, “It wasn’t like that.” he said, quieter. 

Shiv leaned forward, elbows pressing into her knees despite the curve of her stomach. “So? What happened? Did you…what, just…stand there? Drool on her shoes?”

He swallowed hard, throat closing, “She…talked to me. For a minute or so.”

Shiv’s smirk faltered, just a hair. “And?”

“And nothing.” His voice cracked. He pressed his knuckles against his mouth, as though he could push the truth back inside. For a moment he simply stared at the seam where the floor met the wall, eyes unfocused, pupils too large. He could feel the memory like a burr under his skin - her profile at the curb, the way her coat had moved - and it made his fingers ache.  “She was…she was there. And I was there. And it was fucking terrible, okay? I wanted to-” He broke off, shaking his head violently. “Doesn’t matter.” the syllables came out thin and exhausted.

Shiv watched him, the mockery draining from her face and leaving something raw and unpracticed, “You still love her.”

The word landed like a thrown stone, Roman flinched as if struck. For a breath he looked ashamed, the protective mask slipping so fast Shiv would only have to reach and it would fall away. “No. No, I don’t. I’m not…love isn’t…” He tried to bark it off, to make it a joke, but the sound rose and frayed. His chest heaved, his shoulders went tight and small as if bracing for impact, his voice spiraling higher, “I’m not pathetic like that. I’m not-”

“Roman,” she said gently, interrupting his rambling.

His hands trembled, he clasped them together, digging his nails into his palms, trying to anchor himself. “I can’t. If I…if I let myself…” He bit down hard, forcing the words through his teeth. “She doesn’t want me. She never wanted me. And if I keep…if I keep feeling this…it’ll kill me.” The last two words were barely more than breath. He seemed to shrink into them as if the phrase could be small enough to carry.

Shiv didn’t move closer, she had learned the rules of proximity with him. There were places he would let only a certain few in, and touch had to be earned. Instead she let a palm rest on her own belly. Her other hand flattened on her knee as if to steady herself in front of him. “It won’t kill you. It’ll hurt. But it won’t kill you.”

He laughed then, not loud, but sharp and bitter, like someone surprised by an unexpected pain, “That’s easy for you to say. You’ve got a kid on the way, a…future. I’ve got…what? Empty takeout boxes and a head full of shit I can’t burn out.” The words tumbled, and the cadence, defensive then self-derisive, was a rhythm she knew well, “I’m fucking pathetic, Shiv.” he said at last. 

“You’re not pathetic.” She replied with the bluntness of someone who had no patience this evening for romanticized ruin. Her eyes, though, lingered on the hollows under his cheekbones, the unshaven jaw, and the fraying cuff of his shirt. There was the barest tremor in her voice that she did not let become softness, “You’re not pathetic.” she repeated firmly. 

“Yes, I am.” He met her gaze and for the first time he didn’t shade the truth. There was no polished wit, no leaning irony to hide behind. Just the raw, blistered honesty of a man who had tired of pretense, “I am, and I can’t stop being. And I don’t know what to do.”

The room took the words in and it felt like it was holding its breath, as if the apartment itself needed to register the admission. Outside, a distant car alarm went off and then settled, the radiator clicked. The plain domestic sounds of the building continued as if he hadn’t declared himself bankrupt in the space of a sentence.

Shiv exhaled slowly, rubbed a hand over her belly, like steadying herself as much as him, “Then don’t do it alone.” she replied at last. 

He looked at her, his eyes burning while anger started to flicker up at being seen as well as tenderness at being seen that deep, and a childlike imploring that made him look ten years younger than his passport read. He wanted to sneer, to crack a joke, to crawl back into the hole he’d dug but she was still there, her body pressing into his couch, her presence filling his ruined space. And instead he found himself blinking then, as if someone had asked him to read an unfamiliar script. The impulse to recoil was strong - so instinctive he felt nearly embarrassed by it - but Shiv was still there, her presence like a small shore against his tide. She wasn’t leaving. And something inside him cracked open, just a sliver.

Shiv shifted the tote from one hand to the other and then, because she could not help herself, she smirked, a tiny, sharp thing intended to deflect both of them from the surging emotion in the room. “Seriously, Roman. Stand up, stretch. I don’t want to have to ship you home in a jumper with ‘RESCUE ME’ across the back.”

He managed a smile, half apology and half surrender. He pushed himself up, joints complaining, and walked the perimeter of the living room like a man checking a fence that had been hit by wind. Each step was an attempt to reframe himself as a functioning adult, to take the edges off the panic rising behind his ribs. He paused at the bookshelf, fingers trailing along spines he hadn’t touched since that day he saw Gerri again. The motion was automatic, some primitive attempt at order.

Shiv watched him with a concentration that steadied the air between them. She had always been able to read his micro-gestures, how he rubbed the bridge of his nose when he was about to own something, how his foot tapped a staccato rhythm when nerves had found a tempo. She read him now like an open page she would not let be burned. “Tell me one actual thing you did that night,” she said,  “Not the philosophical collapse, one thing. Say it slow.”

He closed his eyes, letting the pressure of her tone settle him. The image rose without effort now: the lamp-halo around her face, the streetlamp catching in the corner of her eye, her hand on the door of the car as her eyes finding his before she entered the car. He could see the way she adjusted the strap of her bag - small, human - and it made his mouth ache. “I said stupid things,” he began, voice rough. “I mumbled. I made a joke about being a creepy bench guy. I…” His fingers curled into fists at his sides. “I couldn’t get the words out. I wanted to-” The sentence stumbled, collapsed into itself. 

“Wanted to what?” Shiv pressed, not harsh but insistent, the way a dentist presses a vulnerable tooth to find out if it’s loose.

“I wanted to tell her I was sorry. I wanted to tell her I’d take it back. I wanted to say…everything.” His throat worked. For a second he looked like he might cry, surprising both of them. When the twitch in his cheek subsided he spoke smaller, quieter “I wanted to tell her I love her.”

Silence. The word sat between them, soft and absurdly enormous. Shiv’s face softened in an expression of pure, raw, private alarm like someone watching a candle gutter and worrying if it could be saved. She did not call him weak, she did not offer platitudes. She simply let the truth stand there in the room.

Roman’s hands were white at the knuckles where he’d gripped invisible rails, the nails digging crescents into his palms. He swallowed. The admission had unmoored something inside him that felt like both shame and relief. The shame had always been reflexive, conditioned, bred from a lifetime of not allowing himself gentleness. The relief felt sinful and therefore dangerous. He had said it aloud; he had not meant to be brave, only honest in a way that made his stomach twist.

Shiv’s eyes, sharp, then soft, tracked the movement of his throat as if measuring the cost of his words. “And she-?”

He could barely meet her gaze, “She looked at me,” he said. “Like I existed, like I wasn’t already a ghost.” He laughed, a small, broken sound. “That’s what did it. That’s all it took and now I can’t stop doing that thing where I keep figuring out how I wrecked it.” He shook his head, “I’ve made a thousand constructions for myself to hide behind and that night…that night she looked at me and they all fell like a house of cards.”

All of the sudden, Shiv reached out impulsively, a small hand toward his arm, then withdrew it as if remembering the rules, no rescue plays that suggested pity. But her fingers brushed his sleeve in a way that felt like an anchor. He noticed it, and the sensation tightened something in his chest that had been open raw for weeks.

“You don’t have to be heroic about it,” she replied, not flippant now, just quiet. “You also don’t get to be reckless and then wear it like a badge when it all falls flat. You have to do things that aren’t for show or damage.” Her voice was not scolding but exact. “But also…don’t disappear on me. Not when it’s easy to call and tell me you’re alive.”

He opened his mouth to deflect, to make a joke about being the last delightful ruin left in their family, but the humor curdled. The truth - harder and lonelier than any joke - rose in him like bile. “I can’t stop thinking about the things I said and the things I didn’t say.” He pressed a palm to his chest as if to keep his heart from escaping. “Every time I try to be a person, I end up doing some spectacular idiotic thing. I feel like I don’t deserve-” He stopped, the sentence evaporating under the weight of its own appetite.

Shiv watched him. For a breath, her face was an unreadable map. Then she shrugged, an almost graceless shrug, and said, “Then stop doing spectacular idiotic things that make the rest of us have to show up with tarps and duct tape.” The attempt at levity cracked a thin smile out of him, immediate and brittle.

He exhaled, slow. The room exhaled with him at once, there was no tidy remedy here. No clean solution. What remained was the simple fact of two people sitting in a living room, scarred in their different ways, not touching but tethered by something that was not a speech or a gesture but felt progressive: shared childhood, shared cruelty, a history of being both weapon and wound to one another.

They did not embrace, they didn’t need to. Instead, Shiv reached for the coffee cup she’d set on the table, sipped gingerly, and set it down with a decisive little clack. She rubbed her palm again over her belly, as if certifying reality. Roman slipped down from the arm of the chair then, and onto the floor, back flat against the couch fabric, knees drawn up. He looked up at her, and there was exhaustion and a new, fragile openness in his eyes.

When at last the night pressed in fully and exhaustion dragged him under, Roman felt the flicker of something he hadn’t let himself feel in months: not hope, not yet, but the barest suggestion that the void wasn’t bottomless. He imagined, weakly absurd but comforted by the thought, that if he tumbled too far someone would still come knocking. That thought was an affront to his pride and a consolation beyond measure.

He hated it, because it made him vulnerable and small. He needed it, because the alternative was worse. He knew, with a terrible, tender clarity, that this crack in him wouldn’t seal again. Something had been opened and whatever came after would have to reckon with it.

Chapter Text

Part I – "Unraveling at the Seams"

The door clicked shut behind her with a weight that seemed to reverberate in her bones. Leather against wool, her coat sliding across the seat, the faint scent of polish and the driver’s cologne. She folded her hands too quickly in her lap, as though restraint could disguise the tremor in her fingers. The car pulled away from the curb, and with every passing block, the night seemed to press harder against the glass, a dark canvas where his face still hovered, unwanted yet entirely unavoidable.

Roman…

She could still hear him, the fracture in his voice, the half-smile that didn’t quite mask the rawness underneath. She had spent years training herself not to flinch in the face of emotion, not to absorb the chaos of men who mistook her steadiness for permanence. And yet now her chest was tight, her heartbeat loud enough that she wondered if the driver could hear it through the partition.

She smoothed the edge of her bag with her thumb. A small gesture, a neutral gesture…except the skin beneath her nail was raw from earlier fidgeting, the ache of habit exposing itself. She pressed harder, trying to redirect the trembling. The driver’s eyes flicked up in the rearview mirror; polite, indifferent curiosity, but she felt seen anyway. She straightened her shoulders, arranged her face into something resembling businesslike.

“Home?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied, her voice steadier than she expected.

The city blurred by: storefronts shuttered, neon signs blinking, traffic lights pooling across wet asphalt. Usually the drive was tedious, a slow unraveling of streets she knew too well mixing with the chaos of traffic. Tonight though, it contracted, collapsed inward. By the time she blinked, they were already halfway there. She realized she had been staring into nothing, replaying words that had already passed, staging counterfactuals in her head: what if she had said less? What if she had said more?

Her hand slipped into her coat pocket, curling into a fist around nothing.

When the car stopped in front of her building, it startled her, it seemed too soon. She gathered her things with unnecessary precision, thanked the driver in a clipped voice, and stepped into the cold. The air bit at her face, but she barely felt it. By the time she reached her apartment door, she was already elsewhere, still across from him, still caught in the unfinished sentences and the way his eyes had searched hers, almost pleading.

Inside, she let the quiet close around her like a punishment. The apartment was immaculate, as always. Surfaces gleamed, books aligned, not a single object out of place. But her body carried its own disarray. She shrugged off her coat, got rid of her heels, left her bag on the console, and for once didn’t care that it broke the symmetry of the room.

Work, she thought, that was the solution. It always had been. She pulled her laptop onto the table, opened the screen, and let the cold glow flood her face. Spreadsheets, memos, contracts, each one stacked neatly in her inbox, waiting for her practiced efficiency. She clicked through them, trying to anchor herself in language that didn’t hurt, numbers that behaved, things she could control.

But his voice intruded.

Fragments slipped in between bullet points. The tilt of his mouth, the way he had hesitated before speaking, the restless energy that always seemed to vibrate through him, now dampened into something rawer, almost fragile. She could hear him even now, overlaying the text on her screen: half-mocking, half-desperate, cutting himself down before anyone else could. She pinched the bridge of her nose, forced her eyes back to the figures.

It didn’t hold.

Instead, she found herself opening another window. Her email. Their last exchange still sat near the top, preserved like a relic. Her message; careful, restrained, polished into something professional yet not entirely cold. A message that said nothing and everything. And beneath it: his silence.

She read it again, as though some new meaning might emerge now that they had met again. But it was still the same, a restrained acknowledgment. A gesture of presence without demand. She had told herself it was enough. That it was better to hold back, to let things remain muted. But now, after standing across from him, after seeing the fracture that no silence could disguise, it felt paltry. Worse: it felt like cowardice.

Her hand hovered over the keyboard. For one insane moment she thought of writing again, something simple, something human. But she pulled her hand back, curled it into her lap, nails biting into her palm. Reckless, she thought. To let him see softness was reckless, to open even a crack was to invite collapse.And yet the crack was there and she could feel it widening.

Gerri leaned back in her chair then, staring into the darkened window. Her reflection looked back at her: composed, sharp, professional. But beneath it, the memory replayed, Italy, the villa, the night when everything shifted.

It hadn’t been long ago. Just over a year, and still the memory struck with the clarity of a fresh wound.

He had come to her then, in Italy, when everything was already unraveling. The villa had been too bright, the heat clinging to the air, the windows thrown open to let in a breeze that never really came. She remembered the taste of mineral water still sharp on her tongue, the faint smell of lemon trees, the weight of her phone in her hand. She had been trying to keep herself busy, emails, logistics, the scaffolding of control she built when everything else tilted.

And then Roman was there.

He’d moved quickly, almost jittery, like a boy running late for class, then he was on his knees before her just as quickly. His eyes were wild, restless, darting across her face as though searching for the right angle to breach her defenses. The GoJo deal had collapsed, the presidential election was chaos, and he…he was stripped down to raw nerve. His voice was pitched high with urgency, the words spilling over themselves, but the plea unmistakable beneath it. “Gerri, Gerri, Gerri” His eyes were pleading and begging her already at that moment even as he continued,. “He’s not well, you can help us, right? You can help us stop him..”

It wasn’t the words themselves but the way he looked at her. She remembered that with a clarity that sickened her. His eyes searching hers, frantic, desperate, begging in the only way he knew how. Help me. Stay with me. Don’t let me drown in this.

And she had said it. The sentence she wished now she could unsay, as though the syllables might be peeled back from the air if she only wanted it enough: “But it doesn’t serve my interests. How does it serve my interests?”

Her voice had been cool, deliberate, unflinching. She had sharpened each word before releasing it, as if to make certain there could be no misinterpretation. She’d felt the armor slide into place even as she spoke, the old instincts of self-preservation kicking in with brutal precision. 

She had watched him flinch, recoil. A flicker across his face, so quick another person might have missed it. But not her, she had seen the way the brightness in his eyes closed in on itself, shutters slamming down. The wall went up, fast and brutal, and she knew she had built it. “Right,” he’d said finally, voice curling in on itself, brittle and too loud. “Right. Of course. Yeah, no- totally, why would you…yeah. No, I get it. I get it.”

But she remembered his silence more than his words. The silence that stretched out after, filled with the sound of cicadas droning in the heat. She had told herself it was necessary. That she couldn’t keep being pulled under by his chaos, that she had to draw a line, keep her footing, survive.

Still, in the silence of her apartment now, she remembered his eyes. How even after the dismissal, even after the blade of her reply cut through him, his gaze had lingered, always searching hers, as if hoping she might retract it, soften, give him even the smallest mercy.

She hadn’t. She’d held her ground. And he had walked away, shoulders tight, the air between them scorched.

She pressed her palms together now, fingertips white with the force of it. That sentence - those six words - felt heavier with every passing month. How does it serve my interests? She had meant it as armor, a reminder to herself not to fall into his undertow again. But sometimes, at night, she wondered if it had been cowardice. A failure of nerves. A refusal to risk herself where he had, just for that second, risked everything. She hadn’t just refused him….she had abandoned him. And now, sitting here with his voice still echoing, she wondered if he had ever really recovered from that night.

The memory lingered not as proof of her strength but as evidence of her betrayal. Not of Logan, not of Waystar, but of him.

The cursor blinked on her screen,mercilessly patient, as she forced herself to focus on what was in front of her. She closed the laptop, the sound too loud in the quiet. The room darkened, swallowing her in the shadows. She sat there, rigid, her hands resting flat on the cool wood of the table, and tried to slow her breathing.

It had been reckless, to let him see her soften today, to let him glimpse the part of her that still…still what? Regretted? Wanted? Loved? She refused the words, even in the privacy of her own head. But the truth was there, hollowing her chest, crowding her ribs more and more.

When she finally rose and moved toward the bedroom, the apartment seemed smaller than it had ever been, every step echoing with absence. 

The drive had felt too short. The night stretched too long. And somewhere in between, she had the sickening certainty that she had already lost control of herself.

She lay on top of the covers, still in her blouse, the skirt creased under her legs, her stockings itching faintly against her skin. She had not bothered with the lamp; the room was painted in half-light from the city outside, a dull, fractured glow that never fully died. It should have been grounding, familiar, the same view she had returned to night after night. But it wasn’t. The walls seemed to pulse with restlessness, as if the apartment itself knew something had shifted, however slightly, and would never right itself again.

Her heartbeat had slowed since she had returned home, but it still remained unsteady, catching whenever his face rose up again in her mind. Roman; still too near, too present. The way his eyes had held hers, even when words failed, even when silence gaped between them. She pressed the heel of her hand against her sternum, as if she could calm it, flatten it, make the feeling disappear. But it didn’t.

Work had quite literally failed her, her armor, her strategy, her ever-reliable distraction. She had opened the laptop, forced herself through memos and numbers, but his voice threaded between the lines, refusing to be exiled. It had followed her into the dark, and now it filled her bedroom as surely as if he were lying beside her, muttering sharp, defensive nothings to cover the tremor underneath. She closed her eyes, but that was worse, then she saw him there too.

The villa, his face when she had said the words. The recoil. She could not escape it. Not then, not now. The words had been precise, deliberate, cold by design. But she felt them like a knife in her own chest now. How does it serve my interests? She had thought survival required cruelty. And maybe it had. But at what cost? She kept asking herself over and over until the ceiling blurred as her eyes prickled. She forced the tears back, refusing to let them fall, even here where no one would see. Tears solved nothing. Regret solved nothing. And yet she felt it coil tighter, the ache of it spreading until her breath came shallow.

She worried for him. That was the simple truth, stripped bare. She worried about the emptiness she had glimpsed in his eyes, the exhaustion in his shoulders, the fragility she recognized but which he masked so poorly now. It was not just pity - it was sharper than that, deeper. She wanted, against all reason, to step in, to do for him what she had denied before. To steady him, to catch him.

But beneath the worry lurked something even more dangerous. She knew it. She had felt it rising with every second they’d stood facing one another. The truth she had never spoken aloud, not even to herself until now, in the silence of her own bedroom. She felt something for him…not an obligation, not mere loyalty, not just guilt. Something she had spent years refusing to name, because to name it would mean to lose control entirely.

She shifted on the bed then, curling onto her side, her hands gripping the sheets too tightly. She tried to marshal her thoughts, to recast him in the language of professionalism, of self-interest. But it dissolved, useless. All she could see was the boy he had been, the man he was trying to be, the man he might have been if she had not cut him down when he needed her most.

Her lips parted, and in the dark she almost whispered it, a word she had forbidden herself, a word that made no sense in the architecture of her life. But the sound never came. Instead, she pressed her face into the pillow, smothering the heat of her own breath.

It was reckless. It was impossible. It was everything she should not feel. And still, it was there.

The city hummed outside, a low and constant reminder that the world carried on. But inside, in the hollow of her chest, she knew she had stepped into something she could no longer control. And for the first time in years, she was afraid not of losing power, but of losing him entirely instead.

Sleep didn’t come that night. Only the slow, inexorable knowledge that she was already too far gone.

Part II - "The Spaces Between Memos"

By Thursday, the rhythm of the office had returned to its familiar hum, emails stacked in neat blocks across her screen, phone buzzing with questions only she could untangle. Gerri moved through it with practiced ease, her answers precise, her tone clipped, her posture unassailable. On the surface, she was herself again; controlled, efficient, indispensable. But beneath it, the fault line widened.

She noticed it in the small hesitations. The second too long before replying to a question, the way her pen clicked in her hand as though her fingers sought an outlet. Roman’s face lingered in the corner of her mind, an image she hadn’t been able to shake: the pallor of him, the way his voice had snagged in that brief conversation days ago. Her heart kept replaying it like a cruel loop.

It didn’t help that her presence in these rooms had thinned. She still held a title, still signed off on the right documents, still carried the gravitas of decades at the company. But since Matsson’s arrival, she had been cut from the deeper current. Meetings happened without her. Strategies were drafted elsewhere and dropped on her desk to bless, not to shape anymore. She had once been in the room where decisions were made. Now she was the figure asked to legitimize them, a relic dressed up as relevance. Some days, she wondered if resignation would be dignity or cowardice. Other days, she thought she should simply hold her place, bide her time, watch the Swede stumble.

And threaded through it all, Roman had taken a permanent place in her mind. Always Roman.

“Gerri?” The voice cut cleanly through her thoughts. She looked up to find Karolina standing in the doorway of her office, tablet in hand, expression deceptively neutral. Except for the eyes, Karolina’s eyes had a way of noticing things Gerri wished would go unnoticed.

“Yes,” Gerri replied, steady, professional. “What is it?”

Karolina crossed the threshold, closing the door behind her with a soft click. That, in itself, was telling. A closed door meant something unfiled, unscheduled. Something personal. “They’re asking about the upcoming board schedule,” Karolina began, placing the tablet on the desk, but her tone was too measured, her gaze too direct. “And I thought I’d check with you before circulating the notes.”

Gerri scanned the tablet. Numbers, bullet points, logistics; all manageable, all familiar. Yet she felt the prickling sense that Karolina was only half-talking about the board.

“You’ve been a lot…quieter this week,” Karolina said, after a pause that stretched a second too long.

Gerri let out the faintest breath, almost a laugh, though it was humorless. “Quieter?”

“Quieter for you,” Karolina replied. Her voice was gentle, but it carried weight. “And distracted.”

That word landed like a stone…distracted. Gerri straightened in her chair, smoothing the edge of a folder. She was careful with her voice now, measuring her response, “I wouldn’t call it that. Just…there’s a lot.”

Karolina tilted her head. “There’s always a lot. You’re usually better at pretending.”

The sentence was so lightly delivered it might have been a tease, but Gerri felt her throat tighten. Karolina had seen it. The crack. The hairline fracture where Roman had gotten in.

She folded her hands over the table thent, fingers interlaced, forcing composure into her posture. “If you’re worried about my performance-”

“I’m not,” Karolina interrupted smoothly. “You’re still better at this than anyone could ever be. That’s not the point.”

Gerri hesitated for a moment, her instinct was to deflect, to build the wall higher, but her voice betrayed her with a slip too soft, too close to truth. “It’s…not about work.” 

Something flickered across Karolina’s face right after she said that, something quick and careful, the way someone handles a fragile object. She didn’t push, but her silence invited for more.

Gerri closed her mouth, jaw set. She could feel the words pressing against her teeth - Roman’s name, the conversation she had replayed in the car, the echo of his eyes - but she swallowed them back. Too dangerous. Too personal. Just too much.

Still, her gaze dropped to her desk for half a second too long, betraying her.

Karolina didn’t smile, but her voice softened. “Whoever or whatever it is…it’s clearly not nothing.” she said after a beat, and Gerri looked up sharply but the gentleness in Karolina’s tone disarmed her. For a fleeting moment, she allowed the silence to hold, as though Roman’s ghost might step into the room between them. But she said nothing, and Karolina, mercifully, didn’t ask again.

Instead, she straightened the tablet on the desk, aligning it with the edge. “I’ll circulate the notes,” she said quietly. “And let me know if you want me to cover the Friday prep.”

Gerri gave a clipped nod, but her chest felt tight. “Thank you.”

When Karolina left, the silence of the office pressed in. Roman’s voice returned instantly, raw and uncontainable. She put her hand to her forehead, as if she could rub him away.

Her eyes drifted back to the screen, to her inbox. An email from Matsson’s office sat unopened, subject line bloated with meaningless buzzwords. She clicked it, skimmed the condescending tone, the directive phrased as if she were a junior counsel rather than someone who had once stood shoulder to shoulder with Logan Roy. The hollow in her chest deepened. She could walk, she had enough money, enough connections, enough years behind her. But then what? Retirement? Reinvention? Or worse…irrelevance.

Her hand moved on instinct, mouse gliding across the screen, cursor hovering in the search bar. She typed three letters before she stopped herself: Rom-. She froze, breath catching. One more keystroke and his name would fill the space, bring up the archive, the restrained exchanges, the silence that had followed.

She deleted the letters, one by one.

Her reflection caught in the dark glass of the monitor: eyes sharp but tired, lips pressed thin. She looked like herself, but also not quite. The fault line was widening, and she could no longer pretend no one had noticed.

She forced her gaze back to the inbox. Numbers, memos, agendas…all waiting, all neutral. She clicked one open, scrolled without reading, clicked the next. She drafted a line of reply, deleted it, tried again. Each word felt foreign, her fingers mechanical, her brain lagging two steps behind.

Because he was there. In the walls, in the air, in the memory of late nights in this very office when it had been just the two of them, the hum of the city outside, the tick of the clock marking how long they could push themselves before exhaustion finally won. He had often sprawled in the chair across from her, shoes scuffing the carpet, a mess of restless energy. She had sat straighter, sharper, reminding herself she was the adult in the room, the professional, the tether.

Her mind sprang to her hotel room at Argeste, it had been standard, bland: patterned carpet, impersonal artwork, too-bright lamps. Roman had sprawled across the armchair as if he owned it, tie loosened, shoes scuffing the cheap upholstery, a mess of restless energy. She had sat straighter, sharper, cross-legged at the desk, papers fanned out like armor, “You look like a librarian who hates her job,” he’d muttered once, chin tilted, eyes following her hand as she annotated a document.

“And you look like a child who snuck into the minibar,” she’d replied dryly without looking up.

He’d grinned at that, pleased. The banter was easy then, too easy. She kept her tone cool, clipped, but inside she could feel the strain of holding the line.

Hours bled into each other. The television on mute flickered useless light, the carpet smelled faintly of disinfectant, and the sound of his restless shifting filled the room as she tried to focus on the numbers, the strategy, the fallout.

“Hey,” he’d said suddenly, breaking the quiet. “One more thing, real quick - should we get married?”

She remembered looking up, incredulous. “What?”

“You know not that, like an equivalent thing,” he’d rushed on, words tumbling over each other. “Like I abduct you and force you to live with me.”

She had blinked at him, unimpressed. “That’s not equivalent.”

“Then you kill me - you chop my dick off, you know, something. I’m kidding, but you know what I’m saying: you eat me, I eat you like they do in Germany. Anyway, a lot to think about, I get it, so like…bye.”

He’d stood too quickly, half-smiling, half-retreating, grinning as if the joke had landed. She’d rolled her eyes, forcing the door shut on the whole absurd exchange. She’d filed it under Roman’s endless list of provocations, designed to needle, to push, to test.

And she had told herself it meant nothing. She had forced herself to believe it meant nothing.

But now - a year later, sitting alone at her desk - she let herself hear what she hadn’t dared to hear then. Abduction, emasculation, cannibalism: grotesque metaphors in his mouth, but beneath them was the plea. Make a home with me, take me apart, devour me, and let me devour you. Bind me to something so I don’t slip away.

Her chest tightened.

At the time, she had chosen professionalism over interpretation. She had told herself that was survival, that if she allowed meaning into his madness, she would drown in it. But now, replaying his voice in the silence of her office, she wondered if she had missed the one thing he had been trying to give her: the unguarded kernel of truth, buried in all the debris.

She pressed her palms flat against the desk, grounding herself. The cursor blinked in the half-finished email, waiting. She forced herself to type a reply about scheduling conflicts, about logistics. Work, she reminded herself. This was work.

But the words blurred, Roman’s voice weaving over them, his face flashing in fragments: the hurt in Italy, the wreckage at Logan’s funeral, the pallor when she’d seen him a few days go. His ghost had followed her here, and no matter how many times she tried to shut him out, he returned - joking, needling, begging.

She closed her eyes, leaned back in her chair, and exhaled. For years she had been the one who stayed calm, the one who didn’t flinch. But the ghosts were winning. And she could not remember the last time she had been this close to breaking.

Part III - "Daughters and Ghosts"

The apartment was too quiet by evening. Gerri had moved through it in small circuits: stacking papers she didn’t intend to read, pouring herself a glass of red wine, opening her email as though numbers and memos might finally drown out the echo of Roman’s voice. They wouldn’t of course just as they hadn't the past hours. His voice still threaded through her skull, sly and boyish and bruised all at once. By the time her phone buzzed, she answered almost too quickly, as if a reprieve had been waiting for her all along.

“Hi, Mom,” Catherine said. Her voice was low, familiar, tinged with that habitual balance of affection and reserve, as though she had trained herself never to lean too far in one direction.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Gerri replied, letting her own voice soften. She shifted on the sofa, tucking her legs beneath her, the wine glass balanced carefully in one hand. “How’s your day been?”

“Oh, you know.” Catherine’s sigh rustled through the receiver, more amused than weary. “Pretending to care about people’s mergers while secretly wanting to run away to Argentina.” A dry laugh followed, clipped at the end. “Same as usual.”

“Argentina?” Gerri asked, lips twitching in spite of herself. “That’s a new one.”

“I read an article about glaciers,” Catherine said, as though that explained everything. “It got to me.”

They fell into the rhythm after that, as they always did; Catherine sketching the outlines of her workday, sharp but never indulgent, Gerri listening with the small, private satisfaction of recognition. Yet even within the warmth, Gerri could feel the distance: her daughter precise, controlled, never quite yielding more than she chose. Armor, Gerri thought, armor she herself had taught her daughter. And now she sometimes wished she hadn’t.

“So,” Gerri ventured after a pause, circling carefully, swirling the stem of her wineglass between her fingers. “Peti mentioned something about a colleague. A woman who gets under your skin?”

A silence stretched, then Catherine groaned audibly. “Oh God. Peti really cannot keep her mouth shut.”

“She only mentioned it in passing,” Gerri said lightly, coaxing her forward. “But she sounded convinced there was…something.”

“There isn’t,” Catherine shot back, quick but not entirely convincing. “She’s insufferable. Arrogant. French.”

“That doesn’t rule anything out,” Gerri murmured, her smile audible.

“Mom.” Catherine’s tone warned her off, but it cracked just enough to let laughter through. “She drives me insane, it’s infuriating. Which Peti insists means I’m secretly in love with her. It’s absurd.”

“Sometimes absurdity has a point,” Gerri replied, voice softer, almost thoughtful.

On the other end, Catherine exhaled, long and deliberate, as if filing the topic away. When she spoke again, her voice was lower. “Speaking of Peti, she said she might visit Dad’s grave this weekend. I was thinking of going too. You should come.”

The words dropped like a stone then. Gerri froze, her hand tightening around the glass. She hadn’t marked the date deliberately, hadn’t let herself. As if ignoring the anniversary of Baird’s death might blunt its edge. But here it was, returned to her in her daughter’s steady voice.

“I don’t know,” she said carefully, her throat tightening. “It’s…still hard.”

“I know,” Catherine replied softly, with none of her usual crispness. “But it helps…sometimes.”

The line quieted for a moment, both of them circling the same absence. Gerri closed her eyes, letting Baird’s face rise behind them: blurred by time but still there, his laugh, his steadiness, the particular way he had known her without translation. She had been someone else then, unarmored, unafraid of being seen.

“Mom?” Catherine prompted gently.

“Yes, darling.” Gerri replied, coming out of her thoughts. 

“You’ve seemed…different lately,” Catherine said slowly, as if feeling her way. “Distracted. Is it about work? Or…” A hesitation, then, deliberately: “Or something else?”

Gerri’s silence stretched a beat too long. Catherine’s voice softened further. “Mom. Is it…Roman?”

Her breath caught, sharp and involuntary.

Catherine went on, quieter still. “I only ask because…you’re not easy to read, but you’ve been off. And Peti said she thought she saw you with him. Just for a moment, not so long ago.”

Trust Peti, Gerri thought bitterly, though her heart lurched at hearing his name out loud,“It was brief,” she said at last, tone clipped, composed by force. “Not much to tell.”

“Maybe not,” Catherine replied, cautious but insistent. “But…there is something to tell. Right?”

Gerri pressed her lips together, staring at the dark swirl of wine in her glass. The surface trembled slightly with the unsteady rhythm of her hand.

“You don’t have to tell me details,” Catherine added quickly, as though sparing her. “I just think…maybe you should talk to him. Like really talk.”

The suggestion sat in the silence between them. Gerri let the weight of it settle. Her daughter’s voice, thoughtful and measured, carried none of the judgment she feared. Only concern, and…was it possible? - a flicker of hope.

“I don’t know if that would help either of us,” Gerri said finally, voice low, almost to herself.

“Maybe not,” Catherine admitted. “But maybe it’s worse not to try.”

Another silence, Gerri could hear her daughter breathing, steady, waiting. “You don’t have to decide tonight,” Catherine continued gently after the silence stretched. “Just…don’t shut it down before you even start.”

Gerri swallowed hard, pressing her fingers into the stem of the glass until her knuckles whitened. Catherine couldn’t possibly know the weight of what she was asking, that to open that door meant risking collapse. But her daughter was right about one thing: shutting it down hadn’t worked either. The ghosts were already inside.

“I’ll think about it,” she whispered then, her pulse thumping as if she’d run a marathon. And Catherine, wise enough not to press further, only replied, softly but certain: “That’s all I ask.”

When the call ended a few moments later, the apartment returned to silence. It still felt empty, but something lingered now: the aftertaste of warmth, of Baird’s memory, of her daughter’s steady voice. And beneath it all, the pulse of something she had long tried to silence: the possibility of letting Roman back in.

Part IV - "Point of No Return"

The apartment settled into stillness after the call with Catherine, but the silence was different now even a few hours later, more weighted, as though her daughter’s words had rearranged the air itself. Gerri moved through the rooms like a ghost, wine glass abandoned on the coffee table, phone still facedown where she had left it. The lamp in the corner threw its thin, warm-colored light over the carpet, and in its quiet radius she felt herself unravel inch by inch.

She tried work again, opening her laptop, scrolling through contracts and calendar notes but the words slid off her as if the sentences themselves had lost their edges. It wasn’t incompetence; it was interference. Roman’s voice ran under the surface, threading itself through every line. Catherine’s voice too, cutting through: Maybe it’s worse not to try.

She shut the laptop within just a few moments, the click of it sharp in the quiet. Her reflection stared back at her in the black screen: sharp eyes, but hollow around the edges. It was a face she had shown the world countless times, a face that had survived boardrooms, hostile interviews, the violent churn of the Roy family, even Logan Roy. But now, alone in her living room, she wasn’t convinced by it. The armor no longer looked impenetrable; it looked brittle, hairline fractures spidering just beneath the surface. 

And the wine wasn’t enough to blend it out now, so she let herself sink into the couch, hand resting on the cushion beside her like she might reach for someone who wasn’t there. Roman’s face rose immediately; eyes too wide, too quick, darting for safety while begging at the same time. Italy, the funeral, last week. Every fracture of memory layered until it felt like he was everywhere in the room, brushing the air from her lungs.

She whispered, almost without realizing it,“Why do you stay with me like this?”

The silence answered.

She thought of Baird then; his steadiness, his wit, his gift for knowing when she was exhausted before she admitted it. He would have hated this loneliness for her, she realized. He would have hated the self-denial, the way she kept circling an emptiness instead of stepping toward anything resembling a fulfilling life. He would’ve wanted happiness for her. He’d even said it once, years before he died, almost joking, Promise me you won’t shrivel when I’m gone. Find something, someone. Don’t stay safe your whole life. She hadn’t answered him then. Now, the memory felt like an accusation, like a failure on her part.

The ache built too quickly to stay seated. She rose from the couch without quite realizing it, restless in a way that had no remedy, and drifted toward the small desk by the window. The city outside was a dim reflection on the glass, her own faint outline caught against it; half ghost, half woman, framed by the dark. 

She stood there for a long time before she reached for the notebook, the one she kept for thoughts too insistent to ignore, too dangerous to speak aloud. The spine cracked when she opened it, the sound sharp in the silence, and her pen hovered above the page. Just the act of holding it felt indulgent, reckless, but she couldn’t put it down.

She began with nothing. Work, errands, lists that looked like camouflage. A shield of the ordinary but her hand betrayed her; the pen slipped, letters forming before she had consented to them.

Roman.

The name sat there, stark, black against the paper, a wound opening even further in plain sight. Her pulse jumped. It felt like disloyalty, like a trespass against her own hard-won composure, and still she could not cross it out. She stared at it until the letters blurred, until the word itself seemed to thrum on the page, alive, undeniable. Then, slower, more deliberate, she began again.

I don’t know how to write to you in moments like this, except like this - where you’ll never see it. You stay in me, even when I try to bar the door. You shouldn’t, you really shouldn’t. Yet you do.

The lines tilted, uneven, cramped as though her own hand was ashamed of them, as if the page itself might betray her. But once she had begun, she couldn’t stop.

You were absurd, impossible. You made me laugh when I didn’t want to, when I couldn’t afford to. You tore holes in the walls I built, and I hated you for it, and I miss you for it. You made everything unbearable. And I want you still.

The pen stilled. She realized she was pressing so hard the tip nearly broke through the paper. Her shoulders ached with the tension she had been carrying for years, her throat raw though she hadn’t spoken a word. The honesty burned her as she looked at it. She shut the notebook abruptly, the sound like a door slammed shut. But the words had escaped her now, and there was no pulling them back.

She sat back in the chair, eyes closed, breath shallow and she let herself do what she had never allowed: imagine. Just for a moment, she permitted herself the impossible. She let herself picture Italy, the villa, the moment he had reached for her in the only way he knew how. What if she had said yes? What if she had stayed by his side? The vision unfurled against her will, his body loosening, the panic ebbing, his eyes softening into something almost safe. The image hollowed her out, because she had denied him, because she had believed survival was the only choice. But what if survival had been the wrong one?

The clock marked the minutes past midnight, each tick too loud in the hush of the apartment. The quiet pressed in, thick and oppressive, while her body felt leaden and her mind unbearably clear. Catherine’s words returned: You should talk to him. Really talk. 

Then Roman’s voice, from Italy, wounded and sharp: You can help us stop him. And beneath both, Baird’s voice from years ago, light and certain: Promise me you won’t shrivel.

The three refrains tangled in her chest until she was trembling. It felt as though her body had already chosen a path her mind could not yet articulate.

When she finally rose, she did so slowly, like someone approaching an edge. She left the notebook on the desk, facedown, its damning words sealed inside. She carried herself to bed but the bed gave her no rest. The sheets were too cool, the mattress too large, the silence a reminder of absence. She lay flat on her back, staring up, the ceiling blurring in the dim light, her hand resting over her stomach as if to anchor herself to the present.

But when she closed her eyes, she saw him. Not the caricature he performed for the world, not the endless provocation, but the unguarded flashes she had tried not to acknowledge: the way his eyes had begged her even after she cut him down, the way his mouth twisted around jokes as if humor could hold back grief. She wanted to turn away from the memory, but it held her fast.

Her hand reached almost of its own accord, searching across the nightstand until it found the phone. The screen lit her face, a pale square in the dark, casting her in stark relief. She stared at it, breath quickening, every instinct screaming at her to stop. To close it, to put it down, to stay safe. But the guard had slipped, the wall had cracked and crumbled, and what had begun as fantasy had already hardened into intent.

Her thumb scrolled. There was his name, stark on the list, as though it had been waiting for her all this time. She hovered, frozen. Her chest rose and fell in uneven waves. She remembered his voice, fast and jittering, tumbling over words that were spoken in fear. She remembered the silences too, long, unbearable, where the things unsaid were louder than any joke could have been. And she remembered Italy; the look in his eyes when she had been cold, deliberate, cutting him off as though he was nothing but a risk.

Her throat tightened, her hand shook.

And then she pressed.

The dial tone broke the silence, a thin line of sound filling the dark, impossibly loud, impossibly fragile.

She lay there, heart pounding, eyes fixed on the ceiling, breath shallow as if the air itself had thinned. The sound filled her ears, each ring pulling her further from the safety she had clung to for so long.

And in that moment - alone in the dark, Roman’s name lit on the screen, her own heart betraying her - she knew there was no undoing it.

Chapter Text

Part I - “Echo Line”

The phone lit up on the nightstand, a soft, uncertain glow that fractured the dark into pieces.
Roman blinked at it once, twice. The name on the screen made no sense, it couldn’t be.

Gerri Kellman.

He stared at it as if it might rearrange itself into something else, something safer like spam, wrong number, ghosts. But it didn’t change. Instead, it pulsed in his hand, that small, insistent heartbeat of glass and light. He froze, every muscle in his body pulling tight. His first thought was that he’d imagined it, that some corner of his brain had finally turned traitor and started generating hallucinations just to mess with him. His second thought, a sharper one, was that if he answered and it really was her, he’d have no idea what to say.

So he didn’t answer, not right away at least. He let it ring once, twice, then three times, the sound cutting through the quiet of his apartment like a wire drawn too thin. It was late, stupidly late. Nobody called at this hour unless something was wrong.

He almost let it go to voicemail. Then, just as the ringing began to fade, he swiped. “Yeah?” he managed, voice hoarse, caught between sleep and disbelief.

There was a pause. A breath. The faintest movement, perhaps fabric against fabric, air shifting on her end. Then, low, uncertain,“Did I wake you?”

 It was her. Her.

He sat up too fast, pulse spiking. The sound of her voice went through him like something electric, like a current he hadn’t felt in months. He could hear the edge of hesitation in it, the careful way she shaped the words, as if she was testing if his silence would break. 

He swallowed hard,“Yeah,” he replied after a beat, rubbing at the back of his neck. “But that’s probably good. I think I was losing an argument with my ceiling.”

There was a small laugh; soft, startled, almost unsteady. The kind that didn’t mean she thought it was funny but that she needed to fill the air with something, “That sounds…productive.”

“Yeah, you know me,” he said. “Always maximizing output.”

Another quiet pause. He could hear her breathe, slow and controlled, the way she always did when she was thinking before speaking; the faint, measured hum of her mind ticking behind the calm. “I wasn’t sure you’d pick up,” she admitted after yet another moment of silence.

“Yeah, well. Me neither,” he replied, voice lighter than he felt, “Guess we both took risks tonight.”

Something like a smile touched her tone, a trace, a memory maybe. “Seems that way.”

He dragged a hand over his face, trying to keep his voice steady, “Everything okay?”

“Yes.” The word came quickly, then softened almost immediately as she added, “I think so.”

He could hear it then, the small waver under her poise, a tremor of something human and raw. It twisted in his chest because that was the sound he’d been missing, the one that made him feel like maybe the world wasn’t just surface.“You sure?” he asked, quieter. “You don’t…sound like a ‘yes’ kind of yes.”

A pause long enough to hear her breathe again. “I just…” Another pause, the sound of her swallowing. “I couldn’t sleep.”

He let out a short breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “Yeah, that makes two of us.”

Silence spread between them. It wasn’t empty, but thick, like fog in the morning. He thought he could almost hear her room through the phone; the faint hum of a lamp, the sigh of air against curtains. He imagined her there, sitting back straight, either still in whatever she wore to the office or something she wore to bed that looked more like something pretty than actual comfort. And, beside her, a glass of wine or a martini half-finished, a notebook on her desk. Her mind too loud in contrast to the quiet around her.

He shut his eyes, he could literally see her, that tired grace she wore like armor. The sharp line of her mouth when she was holding back too much. The way she’d used to look at him, steady and maddening, like she saw all his broken wiring and still didn’t flinch.

He wanted to ask why she called. He wanted to ask if she’d been thinking about him; if that was what had kept her awake. He wanted to say her name, just to feel it again in his mouth. But he didn’t. Anything he said now could open something that wouldn’t close again. “You still there?” he asked instead, voice almost breaking the silence.

“I am.” Her voice was low, the familiar tone that used to anchor entire rooms, calm enough to save a crisis, soft enough to kill him. It steadied something and shattered something else.

“Okay,” he said then. “Good.”

Neither of them said anything for a while. He could hear the faint static between their silences, the shared breathing, the rhythm of two people who’d forgotten how to talk to each other but hadn’t forgotten the sound of existing together.

She exhaled another moment later, slow and deliberate. “You sound tired,” she said, barely above a whisper.

“Yeah,” he murmured. “You too.”

That was it. No thank you, no I’m sorry, no explanation. Just the quiet of two people circling the edge of what they weren’t saying. He thought she might add something; a small, practical exit line like she always did. But instead, there was a silence that felt like the weight of everything that had gone wrong between them. Then, softly: “Goodnight, Roman.”

His name hit him harder than he expected. Not Roy, not any of the other names she’d used in those later months, just Roman. Clean, personal, utterly dangerous.

He swallowed. “Night, Gerri.”

The line clicked: soft, final.

But he didn’t move, not yet. The silence on the other end seemed to hang there, suspended, like it hadn’t realized she was gone. It wasn’t absence, it was residue, the sound of her voice still humming faintly against his ear.

He lowered the phone but not far. His thumb brushed over her name on the screen, her full name, stupidly formal, glaring in white text. He wanted to change it, to just Gerri, like it used to be. Yet, he didn’t.

The apartment felt altered. Like she’d entered it somehow, not in body, but in air. The smell of dust and sleep had been replaced by something sharper, clearer, faintly floral. He could almost imagine her standing there in that dark, arms crossed, looking at him the way she used to when he was about to say something inappropriate and she was trying not to laugh.

“Fuck,” he whispered, to no one.

He pressed the phone back to his ear, no line, no sound, just that faint static, the ghost of her breath. It felt like punishment and relief all at the same time. He let himself sink back against the pillows, staring at the ceiling, the phone still in his hand. His chest hurt in that small, traitorous way that wasn’t quite pain but close enough.

It wasn’t that she’d said anything monumental. It wasn’t even what she’d said. It was that she’d called, that she’d remembered him enough to reach across the distance, the silence, the wreckage.

He hadn’t realized until now how much he’d been waiting for her voice even after having met her this one time. He closed his eyes and let the dark fold around him.

He thought about all of it, the impossible timeline of them. The way he’d fired her like he was trying to hurt himself through her. The words he’d thrown - she’s not good at her job - echoing even now, thin and cowardly, something he could never take back. The silence after that, heavy enough to live in. Then the emails; cautious at first, both of them circling what they couldn’t name, two professionals pretending to be composed when what they were really doing was bleeding in paragraphs.

And then that night outside Waystar.

He hadn’t meant to be there, hadn’t meant to see her at all, and yet there she’d been; stepping out into the cold like the city had arranged it on purpose. She’d looked the same, terrifyingly the same, every line of her composed, her voice level, her control absolute. But her eyes had betrayed her for a second. He remembered that look more clearly than anything. Shock, then something softer, something that felt like it might have been longing before it vanished.

He’d said something stupid, and she’d almost smiled. Then she’d told him to go.
And he had.

But that look, that second where she’d forgotten to guard herself, had stayed with him.

Now, mere moments after the call, lying in the dark, he felt that same quiet ache spreading through him again. The sound of her voice on the line had cracked something open that he hadn’t realized was still sealed shut. She hadn’t said much, not really, but the fact that she’d called at all…it changed the air somehow. It made the impossible seem less impossible.

He could almost see her: in her apartment, light falling over her in that careful way, everything neat around her except the one thing that mattered. Maybe she was still sitting there, phone still in her hand, thinking of what she shouldn’t have done, or maybe she’d already turned back into the version of herself who could close doors and never look back.

Either way, he couldn’t stop thinking of her. The distance didn’t feel like punishment anymore. It felt like a pause. Like a breath they were somehow still sharing.

He turned onto his side, the phone still in his hand, its screen dim against the dark. He pressed it against his chest, a ridiculous gesture that he’d have mocked himself for under any other circumstance. But not tonight. Because for the first time in months, the noise in his head had gone still.

Not gone, not erased, just quieted, as if her voice had left a faint outline inside him, something like warmth.

He knew it wouldn’t last. Morning would come, and he’d start questioning it again, doubting every word, replaying the old scenes until they warped. She’d probably wake up and decide the call had been a mistake. But right now, in this thin, suspended moment, he couldn’t make himself care.

Right now, it was enough that she had reached for him at all. He closed his eyes tighter, the phone a small weight against his heart. And the quiet -  that careful, devastating quiet that still sounded like her - was the closest thing to peace he’d had known in a very long time.

Part II – “What Follows Stillness” 

He woke early, though he couldn’t have said what time it was. The light looked wrong; gray, washed-out, the kind of reluctant morning that didn’t seem to belong to anyone yet. For a while he stayed where he was, half turned toward the window, half inside a dream that hadn’t fully let go. The dream had her in it, or at least the sound of her voice, faint and unplaceable.

When he opened his eyes, it was gone.

The silence of the apartment pressed close around him, heavy but different from the kind that usually greeted him in the mornings. The radiator gave a tired hum, and somewhere a pipe clicked, small noises that made the quiet feel alive in a way it hadn’t for months. He tried to listen past them anyway, as though the echo might still be there somewhere, the trace of her voice, the low, deliberate way she’d said his name.

Roman.

It sounded almost gentle last night, or maybe that was wishful thinking. He couldn’t tell anymore where memory ended and invention began.

He lay still until the unease of stillness became unbearable, then pushed himself upright and sat at the edge of the bed. His phone rested next to him, black and blank. For a long moment he stared at it, the way someone might stare at a wound they weren’t sure had closed. His thumb hovered over her name in the call log. It felt stupid, but he did it anyway, scrolling down just to see it.

As if the act itself might conjure her back. Of course it didn’t.

He let the phone fall closer to him and sat forward, elbows on his knees, pressing his palms together until his fingers ached. His body felt like it hadn’t caught up to the fact of the night before; the voice, the impossible reality of it. The entire thing hovered in his chest like static, too alive to ignore, too fragile to touch.

By the time he’d made coffee, the silence had thickened again but it wasn’t the same dead quiet that used to sit like fog in the corners of the room. This was thinner, trembling faintly, as if something beneath it was waiting to move. Steam rose from the cup in slow ribbons. The smell filled the air, bitter and grounding but even that seemed too vivid, the table, the chair, the hum of the refrigerator, everything looked slightly rearranged, charged by some invisible current. It felt as if he’d walked into a room belonging to someone else, a life that had continued without him and now was letting him back in under supervision.

He sat at the counter, phone in reach, trying to ignore the familiar pulse of temptation. He wasn’t going to check one of her emails to him. He’d told himself that enough times to know he meant the opposite.

He reached for the phone anyway.

The message was still there, the one she’d sent weeks ago. He knew every line of it, every comma and pause, but he read it again as if the words might have changed overnight. They hadn’t. The phrasing was still deliberate, unflinching in its control. Each sentence built like scaffolding around something she refused to say outright. But now he could hear her in it. The cadence, the deliberate calm, the tiny silences that lived inside her restraint. It made the distance between them almost unbearable.

That one line ‘I’ve thought about that day more times than I’d like to admit’ had once felt polite, professional. Now it sounded like a confession disguised as courtesy. He brushed his thumb over the text, the gesture automatic, as if contact might bridge the gap, as if the warmth of his hand could cross through glass and pixels and find her.

The phone buzzed suddenly. He flinched so hard the cup nearly tipped.

Shiv.

He stared at the screen for a few seconds before answering, his voice still caught somewhere between sleep and disbelief. “Hey.”

“Well,” she began immediately, her tone bright, alert, slightly mocking, “You sound almost…functional. That's new?”

“Guess I’m trying optimism,” he replied, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand. “New drug on the market, everyone’s pretending it works.”

“Uh-huh,” she countered, skeptical. “So what’s the dosage? One fake smile per fiscal quarter?”

He smiled faintly despite himself before he replied, “Don’t mock my process. I’m evolving.”

“Fine,” she returned easily,“Be reborn. Find mindfulness. Whatever.”

There was a small pause, a subtle shift in her voice when she continued, softer now. “You do sound different, though. Not as…”

“Dead inside?” he offered.

“I was going to say embalmed,” she remarked, “But sure, that too.”

He leaned against the counter, the mug warm between his palms, watching the slow drift of light across the tiles. “Maybe I slept,” he murmured. A short silence followed, he could almost hear her raise an eyebrow through the line.“You didn’t,” she replied finally, her tone gentle but teasing. “But I’ll let you have the fantasy.”

He laughed under his breath, the sound dry but genuine. “You always ruin my redemption arcs.”

“That’s literally my job,” she reminded him, before adding “And given your track record, it’s a full-time position.” He could hear the faint smile in her voice, that familiar thread of affection wrapped in sarcasm. It did something strange to his chest, warming him from the inside out.

“How’s the kid?” he asked, voice quieter now, as if afraid of breaking something fragile.

“Still kicking. Literally,” she answered. “Doctor says everything’s fine. I feel like an overinflated yoga ball, but whatever. Tom’s still leaving wet towels everywhere like he’s trying to cultivate mildew as a lifestyle.”

“That’s…great,” he replied softly. “About the baby. Not about Tom’s towel situation.”

“Thanks,” she drawled. “I’ll tell him you’re praying for our linen.”

He smirked, then hesitated, the silence thickening slightly. “You doing okay, though? Like…really?”

“Define ‘okay,’” she returned dryly. He could hear the exhaustion beneath the humor, the slight catch of breath that betrayed how tired she really was. “I don’t sleep much, Tom keeps snoring, I keep plotting his demise. You know. Marital bliss.”

He huffed a laugh. “Ah, the romance lives.”

“Barely,” she admitted, her voice dropping a notch. Then, after a pause, she added more quietly, “I’ve been calling you more since…well, you know. The whole thing in December and then a few weeks ago.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, his tone almost apologetic. “Sorry for that. Spiral season, limited edition even.”

“Roman,” she said, her voice steadier now, all pretense stripped away. “You scared me, you scare all of us when you go off the grid like that.” He exhaled slowly, watching the steam curl from his coffee like smoke from a fire he couldn’t quite put out. “I know. I didn’t mean to, just…needed quiet.”

“Well,” she continued gently, “try finding it without disappearing next time, okay?”

He didn’t answer right away, then, simply, “Noted.”

Another pause stretched, the kind that wasn’t uncomfortable, just dense with things unsaid.

“Kendall’s in the desert again,” she remarked suddenly, her tone shifting. “Literally…some kind of retreat-slash-‘recalibration.’ He sent a picture of himself looking like he’s found either God or peyote. Hard to tell.”

Roman smiled faintly. “Good for him. Maybe he’ll stay there.”

“One can dream,” she replied, dry but fond. Then, a little warmer: “Connor and Willa are…whatever they are. He’s talking about turning the ranch into a museum of American resilience.”

He snorted. “Oh my God.”

“I know, she’s humoring him, obviously. But I think she likes him. It’s weirdly sweet,” she admitted, the affection in her voice reluctant but real anyway. “Guess we’re all growing,” he murmured, almost to himself.

She caught the shift in his tone. “And you?” she prompted, “You sound…not terrible. Which, you know, counts as progress.”

“Yeah,” he said after a small pause. “Trying…failing a little less today.”

“That’s something,” she replied softly. He could almost hear her smile again, faint and uncertain, but there nonetheless.

He could tell she wanted to ask why he sounded different, why his voice had that thread of calm threaded through the fatigue. She didn’t though. Instead, she just said, quieter this time, “Whatever it is, keep doing it.”

He swallowed, feeling the echo of last night’s call still running under his skin, steady and persistent. “Yeah,” he murmured. “I’ll try.”

“Good,” she added lightly. “Anyway, I should go. I’ve got a meeting with the midwife and a husband who thinks parenting is a brand exercise.” He smiled at that, his expression small but real. “Say hi to both of them.”

“Will do,” she replied, and then, more gently, “Don’t vanish, okay?”

“I’ll try not to,” he said quietly.

When the line went dead a moment later, he stayed at the counter, the phone still warm in his palm. The apartment felt different again, hollow, but not abandoned.

He thought of Gerri again then, how she had sounded like herself last night; controlled, careful but still softer…almost unbearably so.

He wasn’t sure if that was better or worse.

The thought lingered through the day. He showered, dressed without conviction, stared at emails he didn’t answer. He couldn’t stop picturing her somewhere in the city - her hair in her typical french twist, her expression calm, maybe even a little distant - pretending that the call had been nothing more than a formality. Maybe it had been, maybe it hadn’t.

He kept hearing her voice too, the brief falter before she’d said goodbye, that single uneven breath that had broken her composure. He replayed it until it felt less like memory and more like a space he was still inhabiting.

Maybe she’d wanted something from that call, maybe not. Maybe it was simply her version of grace:  carefully measured, meant to comfort but not invite.

He didn’t know. All he knew was that the silence left in her wake no longer felt like a void. It was charged now, faintly electric, threaded through with her presence, her precision, her restraint, her voice. Even the loneliness had texture again.

He sat by the window as the afternoon light stretched thin and gold across the floorboards; the kind of light that made the world seem distant but possible. He closed his eyes, felt the warmth touch his face, and for the first time in months, he didn’t brace against the stillness.

It wasn’t peace exactly, but something that resembled it in shape.

Waiting, he realized, no longer felt like punishment.
It felt like the smallest, most impossible beginning.

Part III - “Between Words”

Two days later, the light in his apartment was fading by degrees, the kind that didn’t so much disappear as lose conviction. A gray evening, thin and exhausted, pressed against the windowpanes; the city was a half-drowned murmur beyond them. Roman had been sitting at the table for an hour, maybe more, doing nothing except half-listening to the refrigerator hum, half-watching the slow tilt of a glass of water he’d forgotten to drink. He was still in the same shirt from the morning, sleeves rolled to the elbows, collar wrinkled where he’d pulled at it.

He hadn’t planned to text her, at least he’d told himself that multiple times - out loud once, even - because the sound of it made it feel like a decision rather than a collapse. But the day had been all edges, everything ordinary felt slightly too sharp. The memory of her voice, the even, low calm of it over the phone, kept breaking through at the most inconvenient moments: when he reached for a towel, when the elevator doors opened, when he caught his reflection in the glass and didn’t like what he saw.

He’d dreamt of her again too, though it hadn’t been anything coherent; just a sense of nearness, a voice threaded with quiet that felt both familiar and unbearable. He’d woken from it with the taste of her name in his mouth, and for a while he’d just lain there, waiting for the world to start.

Now, two evenings later, he was still waiting.

The text screen stared back at him, the same empty white field where courage went to die. He typed a dozen things, then deleted them all.

How are you?
Still alive?
That call messed me up a little.
You sounded…

He couldn’t finish that one.

He leaned back, rubbed a hand over his face, stared at the ceiling until the light fractured into a thousand meaningless shapes. He wanted to say something that didn’t sound like an accusation or a confession. He wanted to sound like someone who’d made peace with everything, not someone who hadn’t stopped replaying her voice for forty-eight hours straight.

Finally, almost against his will, his thumbs moved.

Roman: Hey. You caught me off guard the other night.

He read it back several times, hating how naked it sounded, how civilized….

He’d almost prefer to have written something stupid, something with teeth, sarcasm, deflection. But the truth was, he hadn’t been off guard. He’d been disarmed.

He sent it before he could talk himself out of it, then set the phone face down on the table like it was something that could bite.

The hours stretched long after he sent the text. He made dinner and didn’t eat it, then made coffee he didn’t drink. A movie started on the muted television and ended without him noticing. Every few minutes, he turned the phone over again, checked the screen, and saw nothing.

By ten, he’d convinced himself she wasn’t going to answer. Of course she wouldn’t, she was probably in some late-night meeting, or reading briefs, or pretending that whatever had passed between them on that call had been nothing; just some midweek lapse of professionalism. He could almost hear her saying it: Roman, you’re reading into things. I was being polite.

He poured a drink. Then another.

And then, close to midnight-
The vibration startled him.

He fumbled the phone, nearly dropped it, then saw her name.

Gerri: That wasn’t my intention.

He exhaled slowly, the air catching on something in his chest. The words were careful, typical of her. But the delay said something else. He stared at the message for a long time, thumb hovering over the screen. He thought of calling her this time, hearing the tone of her voice when she said it, but the image of her face; composed and guarded stopped him.

He typed instead:

Roman: I just…wanted to hear your voice.

He hesitated before sending it, then did. A few seconds later, the message went from “delivered” to “read.” He waited…nothing.

The silence stretched again, it felt like an invisible hand between them, testing boundaries, drawing invisible lines neither of them had the nerve to erase.

When her reply came, it was almost an hour later.

Gerri: You sound like you’re breaking your own rules.

A faint smile pulled at the corner of his mouth, uninvited. He could hear the tone even through text; the wry, quiet intelligence, the almost maternal irony that used to undo him in meetings.

He typed before he could second-guess it:

Roman: Maybe you were tired of them.

For a moment, he imagined her reaction: that tiny pause before an amused exhale, the almost-smile that never fully reached her eyes.

There was no reply. Not immediately, not for another half hour. But when it came, it was one line, short, clean, and devastating.

Gerri: Maybe I was.

He read it a dozen times once it was delivered. Each time, it changed meaning, sometimes it sounded like an admission; sometimes like regret. Sometimes it felt like nothing more than a moment of weakness neatly folded into text. But it was hers, it was something.

He set the phone down, stared out the window. The city lights blurred into watercolor. He felt absurdly young, he felt like the world had tilted just enough to let him hope again.

He thought of the first time he’d ever made her laugh; really laugh, not the polite half-smile she used on everyone else. It had been years ago, some late meeting gone too long, and he’d said something idiotic just to break the tension. The sound had startled him; it had been so real, so alive. He’d been addicted to it since.

Now, the thought that she might be smiling at her phone, that she might have reread his message once, twice, the same way he did, that was almost too much.

He typed again, something reckless, then deleted it. He didn’t want to ruin it…not yet, not again.

He settled for silence instead, let the conversation rest like something fragile and unfinished.

Sleep, however, didn’t come easily. He lay there, half on his side, the phone a few inches from his hand. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the words again. Maybe I was.

There was something about the simplicity of it, the way she could compress a lifetime into a line and still leave it open-ended. By the time morning began to gray the edges of the blinds, he was still awake, feeling wired, exhausted, and more alive than he’d felt in months.

The next day passed in fragments. He didn’t write to her, and she didn’t write back. But the absence felt different now; less final, more suspended. He found himself moving through the day with a strange lightness, a quiet pulse beneath everything he did.

He remembered something she’d once told him years ago: You can’t keep pretending emotion isn’t part of the job. He hadn’t understood it then, thought she’d meant weakness. But maybe what she’d meant was exactly this, how even silence could hold a conversation if you knew how to listen to it correctly. 

That night, he opened their message thread again. He didn’t type anything this time. Just read. The blue bubbles, her replies; short, careful, deliberate, felt like an old language they were slowly remembering how to speak.

For the first time in months, maybe years, Roman let the quiet be enough. But beneath it, something had shifted. They were no longer entirely on opposite sides of the glass.

And yet, the air between them still trembled with the residue of distance, the kind that didn’t announce itself but pressed softly at the edges, reminding him how easily connection could dissolve if one of them exhaled too hard.

The next morning came with a thin, colorless light, leaking through blinds that hadn’t been fully closed. Roman hadn’t slept much, only drifted between half-dreams where her voice threaded in and out like a song he couldn’t quite remember. He woke before dawn, the phone still near his hand, the faint blue glow of the screen showing her last message:  Maybe I was.

He stared at it again, as if it might change under new light. It didn’t. But his reaction did. The sentence no longer hurt; it haunted instead.

He checked his inbox without reading anything, and let a voicemail from his sister go unanswered. The day slipped past him like a film he wasn’t part of.

By evening, however, he found himself doing what he’d done two nights ago: sitting at the table, elbows on the surface, phone facedown. Waiting. It was ridiculous…childish, even. He hated the feeling of anticipation, hated that he was now timing his silences around hers. But it was something to wait for, and that alone was enough to keep him there.

Around seven, he typed another message.

Roman: Been thinking about that call.

He deleted it. Then wrote again.

Roman: You sounded different.

Deleted again: Too invasive.

Finally:

Roman: Hope your week’s not a total nightmare.

He sent it before his brain caught up, watched the word delivered flicker into being.

The hours were quieter this time. The first night had been all pulse and panic; this one was strangely calm. He didn’t expect a reply, not really. It was enough to know that maybe she’d read it, that she’d paused for half a second and thought of him.

But at nine, his phone buzzed once,  that small, astonishing sound that could rearrange his entire mood.

Gerri: It’s manageable. Could be worse.

He smiled without meaning to. It was so like her: understated, dry, efficient. But he could hear the warmth under it, faint and deliberate, the warmth she rationed carefully.

He replied almost immediately, then forced himself to wait a few minutes before sending it.

Roman: You always say that when things are actually a disaster.

Gerri: Old habits die hard.

Roman: So do some people.

Gerri: I’m still alive, if that’s what you’re implying.

He laughed, really laughed, out loud, the sound startling him.

Roman: Impressive. There were bets.

Gerri: You should’ve put your money on me. You’d have doubled it.

He sat back, staring at the exchange, a slow heat building under his ribs. It wasn’t flirting, not exactly. But the rhythm was unmistakable. The old cadence was back, the give and take, the measured dryness she used to keep him from getting too close but never far enough to stop trying.

He typed something impulsive then,

Roman: Missed this.

He hesitated, thumb over the send button, heart doing something embarrassingly uneven. Then he sent it anyway. The read receipt appeared almost instantly, then nothing. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Half an hour.

He started to think maybe that one had been a mistake; too transparent, too sentimental. He poured another drink and turned on the TV just for noise.

Then, finally:

Gerri: I’m sure you’ve found better entertainment.

Roman: Not lately.

Gerri: That’s not my problem, Roman.

Roman: No, but you sound like you wish it was.

There was no reply for several minutes. Then…

Gerri: You’re reading into things again.

He grinned, a reflexive, private thing.

Roman: Yeah, well. You’re giving me a lot to read.

He waited, no reply came. But the silence didn’t feel like rejection. Instead, it felt like she’d heard him and decided to keep whatever she wanted to say for later.

He went to bed lighter that night, and for once, he actually slept. 

The following day was strange however. The world seemed suddenly too detailed - the cracks in the kitchen tiles, the way the morning light hit the rim of his mug, the smell of dust on warm air. Everything felt newly alive, like his senses had been dialed up a notch.

He tried to work: half-hearted attempts at responding to old emails, deleting drafts of things and thoughts he’d never send. But his focus drifted constantly to the phone.

By noon, he caved.

Roman: You working all weekend again?

A full hour passed before her reply.

Gerri: Possibly. Why?

Roman: Just checking if I’m the only one with no social life.

Gerri: You’re not special.

Roman: Ouch.

Gerri: You’ll live.

Roman: Debatable.

There was a pause long enough that he thought that was the end of it. Then…

Gerri: You always did have a flair for melodrama.

Roman: You liked it.

Gerri: I tolerated it.

Roman: That’s your version of affection.

Gerri: Don’t psychoanalyze me, Roman.

He let a beat pass.

Roman: Too late.

It felt almost dangerous, this ease between them. Like stepping onto thin ice and finding, to his surprise, that it held. He stared at her last message, the way her name looked on the screen, clean and familiar. It hit him then; this was the closest thing to intimacy he’d had in months, maybe even in years..

He wondered what she was doing at that moment, if she was sitting at her desk, unread papers beside her, pretending not to check the phone. If she’d smiled, just barely, before composing her reply.

He thought, again, about calling. He didn’t though. Instead, he left the thread untouched for the rest of the evening, letting it rest in that soft, unfinished place between closeness and restraint.

On Sunday morning, she texted first.

Gerri: I assume you’re not up before noon.

He blinked at the message, disoriented, then laughed.

Roman: You assume wrong. Been up for hours.

Gerri: Doing what?

Roman: Soul-searching. Laundry. Same thing though.

Gerri: I’d pay to see that.

Roman: Careful, that sounds suspiciously like interest.

Gerri: Don’t get ahead of yourself.

He could almost hear the soft, restrained rhythm of her voice, the way her sarcasm always carried a thread of warmth she never, ever admitted to.

Roman: You texted me first.

Gerri: I was bored.

Roman: You have a lot of other people you could text when you’re bored.

Gerri: Most of them wouldn’t reply with laundry metaphors.

Roman: You say that like it’s a bad thing.

Gerri: It’s…distinct.

Roman: You mean charming.

Gerri: Don’t push it.

He didn’t, he didn’t need to. The exchange hung there, balanced perfectly between them, light but meaningful, the kind of conversation that said more in what it didn’t reveal.

He found himself smiling into the screen, the room suddenly warmer for reasons that had nothing to do with the sun.

By Monday evening, the rhythm between them had become a quiet undercurrent to his days. They didn’t text constantly, but enough to mark time, a few lines in the afternoon, a pause, a reply after dark. 

Their conversations had changed shape: less guarded now, the silences less sharp. Sometimes she sent a photo of something ordinary; her desk covered in papers, a coffee cup beside a legal pad, once even a view of the skyline from her office window. No words, just an image. He’d stared at that one too long, imagining her there, arms folded, expression unreadable.

He replied with a picture of his own: the view from his apartment window, the city lights soft and grainy through the glass.

Roman: Could use your office lighting.

Gerri: Could use your view.

He paused over that one. It wasn’t flirty, not exactly…but it was open.

Roman: We could trade.

Gerri: I think HR would have opinions.

Roman: Screw HR.

Gerri: That’s what got you in trouble last time.

He laughed so hard he nearly spilled his drink at that.

Roman: You remember that?

Gerri: Unfortunately, yes.

Roman: You were too polite to laugh back then.

Gerri: I wasn’t paid to encourage you.

Roman: And now?

There was a long pause. He waited, pulse ticking.Then…

Gerri: And now you’re not on payroll.

He grinned at the screen, the ache in his chest a pleasant one.

Hours later, he lay in bed staring at the ceiling, the faint glow of the phone screen lighting his face. For the first time in what felt like years, he didn’t feel the usual emptiness gnawing at the edges. Instead, there was something like quiet anticipation, fragile, unreal, but ultimately alive.

He scrolled back through their messages, rereading the thread from the beginning. Her voice - even in text - still carried its careful rhythm: precision laced with something softer, something she’d never fully let him see. But it was there now, glinting in the corners, impossible to miss.

He thought about the call again; the way she’d said his name, quiet, deliberate. The pause before she’d hung up, that fraction of breath where neither of them had known what to say.

He wanted to hear her voice again, he still wanted to ask if she meant what she’d written: Maybe I was. He wanted to ask what it meant to her, if she’d thought about him as much as he had in the days since, in the times they didn’t text each other, if she anticipated his messages like he did hers.

Instead, he typed one more message.

Roman: Can I call you again sometime?

Minutes passed. First ten, then twenty.

He started to think that maybe that was too forward, that he’d pushed the fragile thing too far too fast. He stood, pacing, running a hand through his hair, muttering something under his breath that might’ve been a curse or a prayer.

Then the phone lit.

Gerri: Maybe.

Just that: One word. But it was everything.

He exhaled, half laughing, half shaking his head, as he typed:.

Roman: I’ll take that as a yes.

Gerri: Don’t.

Roman: Too late.

He set the phone down after that, not wanting to ruin the symmetry of it; the half-promise, the almost-invitation.

And for the first time in a long time, he slept without waking even once.

By the morning, the world felt lighter. Not fixed, not even healed but open. Like something that had been asleep in him had shifted, a door unlatched.

He didn’t know what would come next. A meeting, maybe. Or another silence that stretched too long. But for now, it didn’t matter. Because for the first time since everything had fallen apart, he no longer felt entirely alone inside his own thoughts.

Gerri was there, not physically, not even in words most of the time, but in the quiet spaces in between.

And somehow, that was enough. For now.

The day was a blur then. Roman moved through the hours like someone waiting for a sound, the vibration of a phone, the pulse of her name lighting up the screen. He told himself not to expect anything. And yet, when her next message came through - early afternoon, ordinary in its timing - his chest tightened as if something had physically entered the room.

Gerri: You’re quiet today.

He stared at the words for a long time, the faint sarcasm beneath them, the ghost of how she used to say things like that; dry, measured, but carrying something warmer beneath the surface.

Roman: Didn’t want to overdo it, didn’t want you to call HR.

The dots appeared, disappeared. A long pause. 

Gerri: You’ve been unemployed for months. There’s no HR to save me.

He laughed out loud, a real sound this time, which startled him. It had been too long since she’d made him laugh like that, the kind that hurt a little because it reminded him of what it used to feel like to be alive.

Roman: Tragic. Guess we’ll have to settle our ethical issues off the record.

Another pause. Then:

Gerri: That sounds dangerous.

He could almost hear her voice once again; that subtle tone she used when something amused her but she didn’t want to admit it. He typed and deleted a dozen responses before settling on one that felt like him but not too much.

Roman: You started it.

The reply took longer this time, long enough that he imagined her sitting in her too-tidy apartment, reading and rereading, maybe smiling in that quiet way that never quite reached her mouth but lived in her eyes.

Gerri: You should’ve expected that by now.

Something in the air changed after that, not dramatic but real. The silences between messages were less heavy. The rhythm started to find itself again, tentative but familiar. They weren’t talking about the past, not really. They were circling it, brushing the edges of it, as if testing whether it still burned.

By late evening, he was sitting on the couch, legs stretched out, TV on mute, phone resting against his knee. He typed:

Roman: You ever think maybe we were better when we didn’t talk?

There was no answer for several minutes, and he regretted it instantly, too sharp, too exposed. But then the reply came:

Gerri: No. We were just quieter.

He stared at it, that perfect Gerri line: precise, edged, but carrying more tenderness than she’d probably meant to show. He could almost feel her stillness behind it, the way she used to watch him when he wasn’t looking, like she was cataloguing him. And before he could stop himself, before the part of him that always warned against vulnerability could intervene, he sent another message:

Roman: You should call me again.

The typing dots appeared, stopped, appeared again.

Gerri: You’re very sure of yourself.

Roman: I’m not. That’s why I want you to.

He waited, the room felt too small, the air too still. Then, the vibration, that low hum that went straight through him.

Her name on the screen. He answered even before the second ring.

“Hi,” he said, too quickly, voice rougher than he’d meant.

A soft breath, a pause. Then, “You don’t waste time, do you?” Her voice sounded steadier this time, the kind of steadiness that made him ache because he could hear the effort behind it.

“Didn’t want you to change your mind,” he replied.

“I almost did.”

“Why?”

A small sound; half a laugh, half an exhale. “Because I knew you’d ask me that.”

He leaned back into the couch, smiling despite himself. “So predictable, huh?”

“Unsettlingly so,” she said, but there was warmth now, subtle yet unmistakable. “How are you?”

It was the simplest question, but the one that lodged in his throat. “I’ve been worse,” he said after a moment. “You?”

“Functioning.”

He laughed softly, “Wow. You always know how to paint a picture.”

“Don’t mock my emotional literacy, Roman.”

“Never. I’d fail the test.”

That earned him a quiet sound, not quite laughter, but close. It slipped through the receiver like something she hadn’t meant to let escape, a soft exhale that caught against her composure. He could hear her trying not to give him too much, that slight controlled pause afterward, as if reclaiming the silence was safer than letting him hear her smile. It was exactly how she used to be with him, all precision and restraint until something cracked and her laugh would slip out, low and real and devastating.

Roman shifted on the couch, elbow hooked over the backrest, phone pressed to his ear. He could feel the warmth of it against his skin. “Are you still working with Karolina?” he asked, voice casual but edged with the faintest tremor. He just wanted to keep her talking, to stay inside the sound of her.

“I am,” she replied, steady, a hint of dryness softening the words. “She’s…perceptive.”

He let out a breath through his nose, almost smiling. “She always was.”

“She asked about you a few times,” Gerri added after a pause, not teasing, not accusatory, just quietly factual.

That startled him; he straightened, thumb brushing over the phone’s edge. “Yeah?” he said, too fast.

“She said you probably weren’t dead,” Gerri went on, her tone lighter now, “but you were ‘spiritually unavailable.’”

He barked out a laugh; quick, rough, unguarded. “That sounds like her.”

“She’s not wrong,” Gerri said, and though her voice was even, something in it softened; a delicate rounding at the edges that reached him more deeply than the words themselves. Roman smiled faintly, eyes half-shut. “I’m trying,” he said, the sentence barely above a murmur,“I mean, not to be spiritually unavailable.”

“I can hear that,” she replied, quiet but sure, as if she really could, as if the shift in him, small and uncertain, was audible somehow.

They both went still after that and the silence thickened but not uncomfortable, not even sharp, just full somehow. He could hear the faint sound of her breathing, the careful rhythm of it, like she’d turned away slightly from the phone, thinking.

“You sound better,” she said at last, her voice low, considered.

He hesitated, before asking “Better?”

“Less…brittle.” She said it gently, as though testing whether the word would hurt him.

He swallowed. “Guess I ran out of things to break,” he murmured, trying for humor but landing somewhere softer, somewhere like the truth.

She didn’t reply right away. When she did though, her voice came quieter, almost kind. “That’s not how it works, Roman.”

Her tone made something flicker in his chest; not quite pain, not quite comfort either but that strange middle ground he always seemed to find with her. He stared up at the ceiling, jaw tight. Maybe not for you, he thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead, he let the quiet stretch again, both of them sitting with it like a shared object neither wanted to put down.

When she spoke next, it was lighter, a gentle pivot, like she’d decided to pull them both out of whatever gravity they’d stumbled into. “You’re not drinking tonight, are you?”

He laughed softly, rubbing a hand over his face. “What, are you monitoring my sobriety now?”

“Just asking,” she said, her voice carrying the faintest hint of amusement. “You used to have terrible timing with phone calls after whiskey.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, smiling, “tonight’s just coffee. I’m trying to be a functioning adult.”

“Dangerous territory,” she murmured, the warmth returning.

“I know,” he replied, “Might relapse into being reasonable.”

That earned another small laugh, a real one this time, quiet but bright enough that he closed his eyes and just listened. The sound rolled through him, disarming and familiar, and for a brief second, he let his head fall back against the couch, let himself feel it. The sound did something to him, something that felt like air returning to lungs that had forgotten how to breathe.

“Hey,” he said after a while, voice low, softer than before. “I was thinking…maybe we should talk in person. You know, before I ruin this new streak of emotional progress.”

There was a pause long enough for him to imagine her raising an eyebrow, he could almost see it then, that micro-expression she used when considering something against her better judgment. “You think that’s a good idea?” she asked finally, her tone carefully neutral, but with that undercurrent of curiosity he recognized.

“No,” he said at once, half-laughing. “Definitely not.”

She made that half-laugh again, a quiet exhale, a smile hidden in her voice. “Then why suggest it?”

He sat forward a little, rubbing the back of his neck. “Because I don’t want to wait another six months to accidentally hear your voice again.”

Silence. Then, a shift; something gentler, slower. “That’s dangerously close to sincerity.”

He smiled, a small, tired smile that felt unbearably real. “I’m sick, Gerri. Might need professional help.”

“I’m sure you do,” she murmured, her tone low, almost fond. “But fine. We can… meet.”

He blinked, surprised by how quickly the breath caught in his chest. “Yeah?” he said, tentative, almost disbelieving.

“Don’t sound so shocked.”

“I’m just verifying I didn’t hallucinate that,” he replied, voice barely holding together a laugh.

“You didn’t.” Her tone softened almost imperceptibly, as if saying it aloud had cost her something. “We’ll…figure out the when and where.”

He leaned his head back again, eyes closing, hand pressing the phone closer to his ear like he could hold her voice there. “Okay,” he said quietly.

A pause again. Then, her voice, softer now, like it came from further away: “It was good to talk, Roman.”

He nodded, though she couldn’t see it. “Yeah,” he said, his voice low, sincere. “It really was Gerri.”

When the line went quiet and the screen dimmed, he stayed like that, half-reclined, phone still warm against his chest, his breathing slow and even. The apartment felt the same, but something in him didn’t. For the first time in months, the silence felt like a possibility; fragile, improbable, but real. Something shifting back toward life.

Part IV - “The Small Movement of Life”

The message came three days after the call.

Roman had been sitting at his desk, laptop open but untouched, watching the late afternoon light drag itself across the room. The city beyond his windows was half-muted by clouds, all sound filtered into a dull, faraway hum. Papers lay scattered across the desk like he’d been pretending to work. The truth was, he hadn’t done anything productive since she’d hung up; he’d tried though. His inbox was a graveyard of half-written replies; the coffee next to him had gone cold hours ago.

He didn’t even hear the phone buzz at first; it was just a vibration, small, persistent, half-ignored. When he finally looked down, the screen lit his face in a way that felt too sharp, too immediate.

Gerri: Would you want to have coffee? Just to talk.

For a second, he thought it was a hallucination, one of those wishful projections that came when he let himself think too long about her voice. But no…it was there, plain as day.
He read it once, twice. Twenty times.
Each repetition changed it, made it sound alternately cautious, generous, dangerous.

It wasn’t a reconciliation, not really, not yet. But it wasn’t distance either. It was a door cracked open.

He leaned back in his chair, thumb pressed to his lower lip, pulse tapping beneath his jaw. That same old ache of wanting to say the wrong thing just to hear her react, it hit him like muscle memory.

Finally, he typed:

Roman: Okay. Neutral territory. Coffee only, no legal representation.

He hovered, deleted the “legal representation” part, then put it back in. Then stared at it for another full minute, breathing through that familiar thrum of panic before hitting send.

The reply came faster than he expected.

Gerri: Just coffee.

He exhaled, a low, uneven sound that almost counted as a laugh. Just coffee. No flourish, no preamble but something in its spareness landed harder than any apology could. It wasn’t a dismissal nor was it trust, or the first attempt at it.

He sat there a long time after, elbows braced on the desk, hands over his mouth. The apartment hummed around him; the city outside dim and half-alive, the radiator clicking, some distant siren thinning into silence. Everything ordinary suddenly felt charged, alive.

He didn’t realize he was smiling until his reflection caught it. The light from the window had gone gold, fractured by passing cars, scattering in thin lines across his face. He looked tired, yes, but not wrecked. Not the ruin he’d been just mere months ago.

He texted again, before he could overthink it:

Roman: Friday? Late afternoon? I promise to wear real pants.

Gerri: That would be ideal.

Roman: You say that like there’s a chance I won’t.

Gerri: Based on precedent…

Roman: Wow. No faith. Brutal.

Gerri: I’m reserving judgment until after coffee.

He laughed aloud - properly this time - startling himself with the sound once again.

For the next few days, he moved differently. Not like a man waiting for an execution, which had been his default lately, but like someone who’d just remembered he still had a pulse. He cleaned his apartment without realizing it. Answered messages he’d ignored, even called Shiv back without her having to spam call him.

Shiv teased him, said he sounded “suspiciously okay.”
He’d deflected with a half-laugh, saying caffeine was his new miracle drug and maybe he’d finally stabilized his blood sugar or his neuroses, whichever came first.

“Uh-huh,” Shiv had said, skeptical, voice full of that sibling radar that caught every lie he thought he’d disguised. “You’re either in denial or secretly dating a therapist.”

He snorted before replying, “If I were dating a therapist, I’d be dead by now.”

She laughed at that, a sharp, real sound, but when she spoke again, her tone had softened. “Seriously though, Rome. You sound…lighter. Did something happen?”

He hesitated. The impulse to tell her flashed up quickly; something like: yeah, something happened, Gerri texted, we talked, I don’t know what the hell this is but it’s something. But he killed it just as fast, some things broke when you said them out loud, and this one felt too fragile to risk shattering.

“Nah,” he said, voice even. “Just still trying optimism as a new drug. Early side effects include nausea and hallucinations.”

“Keep me updated,” she said dryly, “If it works, I might try it too.”

“Doubtful,” he replied, and hung up before she could ask more.

After that, the days blurred, not fast, not slow either, just suspended. He went through motions that felt faintly borrowed: sleeping better than usual, eating actual food, answering emails. It wasn’t peace exactly; it was more like he’d stepped into some temporary ceasefire with himself.

And threaded through everything, quiet yet constant, was her.
The text, the call, the way her voice had sounded when she said his name, soft and level and real. The words just coffee repeated in his mind like some kind of spell.

He found himself checking his phone even more than usual, pretending it was for news updates or invoices or anything that wasn’t her. Every few hours, he’d scroll back through their thread, just to make sure he hadn’t imagined the tone in her messages, the quiet warmth beneath the formality, the way she sometimes softened the edges of her words like she was letting him back in, just a little.

They texted most days now. Not often enough to call it constant, but enough that his phone had started to feel like a small, pulsing tether. A late headline from a trade site she thought he’d roll his eyes at. A short message about how she’d finally braved the chaos of the grocery store after work. Once, she’d even texted him at ten p.m.: 

Gerri: Forgot how disgusting office coffee tastes after hours. I miss the good machines.

He’d stared at that one for a long time before answering: 

Roman: Still better than mine. Mine tastes like burnt regret.

A beat later she replied: 

Gerri: I’d believe that.

He smiled, actually smiled, then immediately hated himself for it. His heart had done this small, involuntary kick, like a startled animal. He set the phone down, then picked it up again, reread her reply three times, like there might be something hidden between the lines.

By mid-week, she’d sent something more direct. Not sharp, not cold, just curious in that way only she could manage, a mix of observation and quiet concern disguised as dry humor.

Gerri: You sound…different lately. Less…I don’t know. Less brittle?

He read it three times, felt something low in his chest stir, not quite warmth, not quite panic either, more like something in between. His thumb hovered over the keyboard for a long minute before he typed:

Roman: Caffeine. And the occasional nap.

She replied:

Gerri: Ah. A revolutionary wellness routine.

He could almost hear her voice at that, the even tone, the way she stretched her vowels when she was amused.
He typed: 

Roman: Don’t mock self-improvement.

she answered: 

Gerri: Wouldn’t dream of it,

and then, only seconds later: 

You seem better, Roman. I mean that.

His throat went dry. For a second, he just stared at the screen, feeling the pulse in his neck pick up like something mechanical winding too tight. Better. The word landed somewhere inside him like it didn’t belong.

He typed and erased ‘I’m not’, then typed ‘Trying’ and deleted that, too. Finally, he sent:

Roman: Guess it happens sometimes.

She didn’t respond right away. A few minutes passed, then her typing bubble appeared, disappeared, and came back again. When her message finally arrived, it was short:

Gerri: Sometimes it does.

He sat there, phone heavy in his hand, the glow of the screen reflected in the dark window. His chest felt too small and he didn't know what to do with the mix of calm and ache that came with her words, the quiet care in them, how unearned it felt. He lay back on the couch after that, eyes half-closed, pulse still elevated. He thought about her voice on the phone the other night, the steadiness of it, the way it had carried a note of something like tenderness under all the restraint. 

He wondered if she was in bed now, if she’d thought twice before sending that last message, if she’d hesitated for the same reasons he always did…because every word between them seemed to ask for something bigger than what it said.

Later, when his phone buzzed again, he grabbed it too fast.

Gerri: Long day. Signing off before I start saying things I’ll regret.

He typed back: 

Roman: Regretful things are my specialty.

Her reply came quickly: 

Gerri: I remember.

And he could almost see her typing that: the half-smile that wasn’t quite forgiveness, the small exhale after saying something that touched too close to the truth. He wanted to say I miss you, but his hands were still. He wanted to tell her she’d been right, that he did sound different, that it was because of her, but the words felt too dangerous, too revealing.

So he settled for: 

Roman: Sleep well, Gerri.

And when she replied, 

Gerri: You too, 

And something quiet inside him unclenched, not fixed, not even healed, just loosened, like the air after rain.

By Friday, he’d memorized the words just coffee like they were a promise he didn’t quite believe but wanted to.
He got there early; of course he did. It wasn’t the kind of thing he could risk being late for. The café she’d picked was neutral enough: upscale but quiet, the kind of place that played soft jazz and smelled faintly of roasted beans and burnt sugar.

He sat by the window, back to the light, one hand curled around a cup he hadn’t touched. The street outside flickered in and out of focus; faces passing, the blur of a city too alive for how suspended he felt. Every time the door opened, his pulse gave a traitorous kick.

He practiced not looking nervous. Failed and tried again.
He’d worn a jacket he hadn’t touched in months: black, sharp lines, something he thought might pass as composed. His reflection in the glass said otherwise: eyes too tired, hair that refused to cooperate, a man pretending not to be waiting for something that might never come.

When she finally walked in, the air shifted.

He saw her before she saw him, the door opening, the low hum of conversation pausing just enough for his focus to narrow. There she was, that familiar silhouette, precise even in stillness; the composed pace that carried the kind of control other people spent their whole lives trying to fake. She paused just inside the entrance, letting her eyes adjust to the low light, scanning the room with that habitual, assessing calm he remembered too well. And just like that, the world condensed into the space she occupied.

It hit him harder than he was ready for.

She looked exactly like herself; elegant, understated, impossible not to look at. Her coat was camel-colored, the fabric catching the afternoon light in muted tones; her scarf a deep slate blue that drew his eyes upward to her face. Her hair was different; shorter, maybe, or just softer somehow, a little less armor and a little more human. And her expression - still composed, still cautious - had that faint touch of weariness he’d only ever noticed when she forgot to hide it.

He didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath until he exhaled, slow, uneven. There it was again, the ache he’d tried to cauterize months ago, stubbornly alive beneath the surface.

She was looking around now, scanning tables, her attention moving in deliberate arcs until it landed on him. And when it did - when her eyes found him - something unspoken passed between them, something that hit him low in the chest, sharp and sudden. She gave him that small, polite smile, the one she’d probably used in a hundred boardrooms, the diplomatic, inoffensive kind meant to contain entire worlds of unspoken things. But this time, it didn’t feel rehearsed. It landed differently.

He stood, too quickly, too gracelessly, his chair scraping against the tile, like his body hadn’t gotten the memo about dignity. His pulse was hammering; his palms had gone damp. He wanted to play it cool, to be the version of himself who could hide behind humor and deflection, but it was gone, all of it. He was just standing there, raw and absurdly human.

She started toward him, the soft click of her heels deliberate but not rushed. For every step she took, his heart seemed to forget how rhythm worked. He caught flashes of her as she moved, the slight sway of her coat, the gold glint of a watch at her wrist, the quiet concentration in her expression as if she was already calculating how to navigate this without breaking either of them. And when she reached the table, she paused, one hand resting lightly on the back of the opposite chair. Up close, the difference hit him harder, the faint lines at the corner of her eyes, the way her makeup was barely there, the almost imperceptible tremor in her breath when she exhaled. She looked composed, yes, but he could tell she’d thought about this, maybe even second-guessed it.

“Hey,” he said, and his voice betrayed him, rougher than intended, lower, like it had been unused for too long.

Her eyes flicked up, and her expression softened, just a little. “Hey,” she replied, softer than his. There was a note of hesitation in it, a small breath between syllables, like she hadn’t quite known what tone to choose until that moment.

The sound of her voice - familiar, measured, low - went through him like something physical. He wanted to sit, to say something funny, to fill the air before it could turn heavy, but for a second he just stood there, caught in that impossible recognition: she’s here.

Her eyes moved over him briefly, taking him in, the way she used to when she was reading a room, or a deal, or him.There was no judgment in it, only observation, and something else he couldn’t name;  not forgiveness, not yet, but not distance either.

She gestured lightly toward the chair. “May I?”

He blinked, realizing he hadn’t even moved. “Yeah, yeah, of course.” He gestured uselessly, almost knocking over the sugar jar in the process. “Sorry. Didn’t..you know. Expect you to look…”

She tilted her head, that small, knowing quirk of her mouth. “Like what?”

He tried to find a safer word than the one that came to mind and failed. “Like that.”

A brief silence, and then, the faintest smile. “You haven’t changed much.”

He sat quickly, partly to hide the way his leg wouldn’t stop bouncing. “Yeah, well,” he said, clearing his throat, “still a work in progress.”

Her eyes held his for a moment, steady and unreadable, before she looked down at her hands, her nails gently picking at the skin like she needed something to anchor herself.

He watched her hands, the way her thumb traced the skin, the faint sheen of her ring, the smallest tremor when she adjusted her grip. She was calm but not untouched. And that knowledge - that she wasn’t as invincible as the world believed - did something to him he couldn’t begin to name.

She looked back up, her expression gentler now. “It’s been a while,” she said.

“Yeah.” His throat tightened. “Feels longer.”

Something flickered in her eyes then, recognition, maybe, or something that looked like understanding. She nodded once, almost imperceptibly. And just like that, the impossible thing happened: they were in the same room again.

For a moment neither of them spoke. The sound of the café filled the space instead, the low hum of conversation, the mechanical hiss of the espresso machine, the faint rattle of cutlery. She had set her bag neatly by her chair, gloves folded on top of it with that quiet precision she did everything with. He had watched her movements too closely, not in a way he meant to, just the way one does when something once lost is suddenly real again.

He cleared his throat. “So,” he started, “is it…weird that I’m kind of nervous right now? Because I feel like that’s…weird.” She looked at him, that small tilt of her head he remembered too well, the one she used in meetings when someone said something both obvious and slightly self-aware. “A little,” she admitted,“But then again, so am I.”

That startled him enough to make him laugh; not loudly, just a soft exhale that felt like a break in something. “You? Nervous? I don’t buy it.”
“I can assure you,” she said, dry but with warmth underneath, “I’m human.”

“Big news. Should I alert the press?”

“Only if you want to get sued.”

And there it was; that familiar rhythm. The rhythm of old banter like a language they hadn’t forgotten. It came haltingly at first, but then easier, smoother.

A server came by shortly after; they both ordered coffee, their old defaults. When she said black, he felt an absurd relief, as if it meant something, continuity, maybe. The drinks came quickly, and for a while they just sat there, hands curling around the warmth of their cups.

He studied her, not out of intent, just compulsion. She looked so entirely herself it made something ache in him. The small gold studs in her ears, the soft line of her throat where the scarf had been, the faint tiredness under her eyes that she still somehow wore with grace. Time hadn’t taken anything from her; it had just made her…quieter, maybe. More inward.

“So,” she said, voice low, “how have you been?”

He gave a small laugh that didn’t quite make it to a smile. “Oh, you know. Great, thriving. Meditating on mountaintops, rescuing orphans, that kind of thing.”

Her mouth curved. “You forgot the yacht.”

He looked up. “I always forget the yacht.”

“Tragic.”
“I’ll add it to the list of my personal failings.”

She laughed softly, that low, unguarded sound that hit him somewhere deep, somewhere he didn’t like to look at directly. It made the air between them easier somehow, looser.“Seriously, though,” she said, still smiling. “You seem…better.”
“Define ‘better.’”
“Less…” She stopped, searching for the word. “Less brittle.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Brittle. That’s flattering.”
“I meant it as progress,” she replied, that old firmness sliding back into her tone. “You were..” She stopped herself, her eyes flicking away. “You were in a bad place. We both were.”

He nodded, quiet. “Yeah. That’s…true.” Silence again, but it wasn’t suffocating this time. Just thoughtful. He leaned back slightly, testing the edges of humor again. “So, are you going to ask how many therapists I’ve traumatized since then, or…?”
She smiled into her cup. “Wouldn’t want to overwhelm the conversation this early.”
“Good call, build suspense.”
“Exactly.”

Their eyes met over the rim of their cups, and she smiled, really smiled this time. The kind that reached her eyes. It startled him how familiar it felt, that small burst of warmth that always came with making her laugh, like the rhythm between them had never been erased, only muted for a while.

She shifted slightly in her chair, leaning an inch closer. “I’ve missed your sense of humor. It’s…” she hesitated, the corner of her mouth twitching, “not as bad as I remember.”
He grinned. “I’ll take that as the highest compliment you’re capable of.”
“Don’t. I could still retract it.”
“Too late,” he said. “I already engraved it on a plaque.”

She shook her head, trying not to smile, but the effort was useless. “You haven’t changed.”
He wanted to say, I have, you just wouldn’t like how. But instead he said, “Neither have you, still terrifying in that deceptively calm way.”
“Good,” she said simply. “Consistency matters.”
He laughed, low and genuine. 

Something in his chest eased then, almost imperceptibly. They weren’t back where they were - they couldn’t be - but there was something recognizably them here, and that was enough to make the room feel a little less hollow.

At one point, she reached for her cup and brushed against his sleeve, the lightest contact; accidental, probably, but his whole body registered it. He felt the heat crawl up the back of his neck, and tried to disguise it with a sip of coffee. If she noticed, she didn’t let on, only glanced at him with that quiet, assessing composure that made him feel both seen and flayed open.

“So,” he said after a moment, “I guess this is the part where we talk about the weather or politics or…Swedish tech guys.”

“I vote for the weather,” she said immediately. “Less dangerous.”
He smirked. “Right, until it storms.”
She looked up at him then, slow, deliberate. “It always does, doesn’t it?”
He froze for a second, caught between wanting to laugh and wanting to look away. But she was still smiling, faintly, and somehow that broke the tension.

The conversation wandered after that, not to heavy places, but the small, nothing things that build quiet bridges: half-finished thoughts, offhand jokes, dry observations about the people around them. It was ordinary, absurdly so, and that was what made it feel almost miraculous.

Every few sentences, he caught himself thinking, This shouldn’t be this easy. But it was, it was easy in the way old habits are; muscle memory of knowing exactly when to talk, when to listen, when to tease. At one point, she said something so unexpected - some sharp, perfectly timed remark about the couple arguing at the next table, that he couldn’t stop himself.

The couple had been whisper-fighting for ten minutes straight, all sharp gestures and performative sighs, the kind of quiet domestic implosion that didn’t belong in a place with linen napkins. Gerri’s eyes flicked toward them, coolly appraising, and she murmured just loud enough for him to hear, “They’re fighting over something small. He forgot an anniversary, maybe. Or she found a receipt. Either way, he’ll end up apologizing in a few hours for something he didn’t even understand.”

Roman blinked, surprised, then huffed a short laugh through his nose, “That’s…freakishly specific.”

“Experience,” she said dryly, sipping her coffee, gaze never leaving the window. “And he’s losing, look at his posture; that’s a man who’s just realized dinner’s already a disaster.”

Roman turned to glance at the couple again, trying to stifle his grin. “Oh, yeah, he’s toast. Look at him, nodding like he’s signing a plea deal.”

That did it, the sound burst out of him before he could stop it; a laugh, unfiltered and loud, startling enough that the couple looked over. He immediately ducked his head, biting back another laugh, but Gerri was already giving him that look, brows arched, the corners of her mouth curved upward in something dangerously close to amusement. “Subtle as ever,” she said, voice low and dry as dust.

“Sorry,” he said, still grinning, eyes bright. “Forgot we’re in public.”

“I noticed.”

He looked at her then, properly looked, and she smiled, really smiled, unguarded and quick. It was small but it hit him like a shot of warmth straight to the chest nonetheless. For a moment, everything around them blurred into background noise; the soft jazz, the hum of conversation, the faint sound of spoons against porcelain. 

He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten what it felt like to make her laugh, to see her eyes light with that fleeting mix of amusement and disbelief, like she was letting herself enjoy something she shouldn’t.

She looked away first, tracing the rim of her cup with one finger, and he caught the faintest pink at the edge of her cheek. That tiny, human thing - color, warmth - felt like proof that this wasn’t just politeness, that something alive still existed between them.

They stayed like that, easy in the moment, the earlier tension quietly dissolving under the slow comfort of recognition. It didn’t feel like old wounds or unfinished sentences now. It felt like breathing again. He leaned back slightly, still watching her. “You’ve still got it, by the way.”

“What?”

“The whole terrifying insight thing. You see a couple for five seconds and immediately psychoanalyze them. It’s like a party trick, a deeply unsettling party trick.”

She tilted her head, mock-thoughtful. “It’s a skill, useful in corporate environments. Or cafes, apparently.”

He smiled. “And you say you’re human.”

“I said I can be,” she corrected, a hint of laughter threading through. “I never said it was my default state.” He grinned. “Fair, I think I’m allergic to being normal, too.”

She shook her head slightly, the faintest laugh slipping out. “You always were.”

There it was again, that rhythm they used to fall into without thinking, the small back-and-forths that had always been half-verbal sparring, half something gentler. It wasn’t forced, it wasn’t nostalgia. It was instinct.

When she looked at him again, something in her expression softened , not into pity, not even caution. Recognition, most likely. “You seem lighter in a way,” she said, after a moment, the same way she had said that he seemed better. “Not…completely okay, but…less guarded.”

He hesitated, caught off-guard by how steady her tone was, not prying, just observant. “Maybe I just ran out of energy to pretend otherwise,” he said quietly. “It’s exhausting, you know. Keeping everything…upright.”

Her mouth curved faintly. “You were always good at pretending, until you weren’t.”

He looked down at his hands then, tracing the edge of the saucer. “Yeah, well. Turns out there’s a limit to performance art.”

That earned him another smile, this one softer, quieter. “It suits you, though. The honesty.”

He looked up then again, and their eyes met; long enough for him to feel it, that strange electricity under the calm. It wasn’t like it used to be, that sharp pull that scared him half to death. It was gentler now, steadier. But still there, always there and never leaving.

She broke eye contact first, glancing out toward the street again. “It’s strange,” she began, after a moment. “Seeing you like this.”

“Like what?”

“Still standing,” she said simply. “After everything.”

He let out a soft laugh that wasn’t really a laugh. “Yeah. Low bar, huh?”

“Not really,” she replied, and there was something almost tender in the way she said it. “Some people don’t make it that far.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. So he didn’t. He just watched her, memorizing the small movements like the way her fingers brushed her cup, the way her hair shifted when she turned her head, the faint creases at the corner of her eyes when she smiled. All the details he’d forgotten to keep.

The light outside had shifted, late afternoon gold filtering through the glass, washing over the table in warmth. She looked impossibly calm in it, poised but human, and for a moment he let himself imagine what it would be like to see her like this every day, the ordinary miracle of it.

They drifted into smaller things again after that; inconsequential talk that somehow felt essential. She asked if he’d been reading anything lately. He told her the truth - no, not really - and she pretended to look disappointed. He mentioned Karolina in passing, and she rolled her eyes in that familiar, affectionate way that told him she still saw through everyone, even now.

The conversation meandered, light and looping, filled with little silences that didn’t hurt anymore. At some point, she made a comment about the café’s minimalist décor,“They always think beige is a personality” and he laughed so hard he nearly spilled his coffee.

When he looked up again, she was smiling too, shaking her head, and something in his chest went dangerously soft. For a few minutes, it felt like they’d stumbled into a different timeline; one where nothing had broken, one where the months between them had only stretched, not snapped.

And by the time the coffees were half-empty, the awkwardness had dissolved completely, leaving behind something quieter, steadier, not quite peace, but the echo of it.

He looked at her across the table, at her hands resting lightly on the saucer, at the faint lines at the corners of her eyes that softened when she looked at him, and felt a weight he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying begin to lift.

Whatever this was - whatever it could be - it didn’t feel like an ending anymore. It felt like the first small movement of something returning to life. For a long time, neither of them spoke once again. The silence wasn’t awkward now, not really. It had changed shape; had become something close to peace, or, at least, the outline of it. A space that didn’t really need filling.

Then, maybe because the quiet was too gentle, too forgiving, he felt the words rising in his chest like something solid and burning.“Gerri,” he said, and his voice was low, rougher than he meant it to be.

She looked up at him, and it was strange how easily she could still undo him, just by meeting his eyes.

He tried to speak, stopped, and tried again. “I need to say…” He swallowed, glanced down at his hands. “I’m sorry.”

The words landed between them like something heavy and irrevocable. She didn’t move for a moment. Not even a breath. She just looked at him - really looked - as if she were trying to decide whether to let herself believe it.

He could feel the pulse in his throat, the air thinning. “For everything,” he added quietly, “For the things I said. The things I didn’t. For being…” He gave a helpless, crooked sort of smile. “For being me, I guess.”

A long pause. Then she exhaled, not sharply but slowly, like the sound of something loosening after too long. Her eyes dropped to her cup. When she spoke, her voice was soft, almost thoughtful,“You think you’re the only one who made mistakes?”

He looked at her, startled. “I know,” he replied. “I know you…”

But she shook her head gently. “No,” she interrupted. “You don’t.”

Her tone wasn’t cold. It wasn’t forgiving either, it was something more complicated; weighted with memory, fatigue, yet tenderness too. “You were cruel sometimes,” she said. “You hurt me. But I let myself…stay too close to it, to you.” Her eyes flicked up to his again, steady now. “That’s on me.”

He wanted to say something, anything, but the words dissolved before they could form.

And then, as if a door had opened somewhere behind her eyes, it all came rushing back. Not in fragments this time but in full scenes, vivid and intact: the phone calls that went on too long, the jokes that were really confessions, the hotel rooms, the glances across rooms full of people, the night in the villa when she walked past him and didn’t look back.

He felt it all too, the weight of everything they hadn’t said, everything they’d buried. “I never wanted to hurt you,” he said at last, and it came out raw, unguarded, almost boyish. “I was…” He stopped, laughed once, softly. “I don’t even know what I was doing half the time.”

Her gaze softened then, just slightly. “You were grieving,” she added quietly. “And angry, and lost.”

“So were you.”

“Yes,” she admitted, almost whispering. “So was I.”

They sat there for a long moment, looking at each other, not with the tentative curiosity from earlier, but with the unmistakable recognition of people who had once been inside each other’s orbit completely, who had been broken by the same gravity. “I meant it,” he said finally, voice steady this time. “I’m sorry.”

And something in her expression shifted, a flicker of pain, then something warmer, almost luminous. She nodded, not trusting herself to speak at first.

When she did, her voice was quiet, but sure. “I know.”

It wasn’t forgiveness, not entirely. But it was something close to it like the beginning of it. And in that small, fragile silence that followed, the air between them changed again, fuller, heavier with history, but gentler somehow. As if the apology had opened a door they’d both been afraid to touch.

For the first time in what felt like years, Roman let himself breathe all the way in.