Better Off Alone

Chapter 10

(Rebecca's POV)

Tuesday.

I pick up the red pen and draw a line through the circle. One down. Two to go.

The office is quiet this morning. Half the floor is in a meeting I wasn't invited to, which is normal. The other half is at lunch, which is early. I don't mind. Quiet is good. Quiet means nobody asks me to fix the printer, or unjam the copier, or explain for the fourth time how to merge cells in a spreadsheet.

I organize Sean's inbox, because the temp Alexander hired to shadow me can't seem to understand that Sean wants client emails sorted by priority, not by date. I flag three that need responses by end of day. I update the meeting notes from Friday. I print the contracts for the Whitfield deal, double-sided, stapled in the upper left corner, because Sean hates right-corner staples. He never told me that. I figured it out in month two when he restapled a fifty-page report in front of me without saying a word.

Two more days of this.

I catch myself thinking about the jasmine candle. About whether Sean noticed it's almost burned down. About whether he'll know to buy the same brand or if he'll get the wrong one and the whole living room will smell like synthetic vanilla.

I stop myself.

I'm about to leave in less than forty-eight hours.

Sean Clark's preferences aren't my problem anymore.

My phone buzzes. I glance at it, expecting a meeting reminder from Alexander.

What I get is Eric.

Hey — Stanford University is hosting a new robotics exhibition this week. Some impressive stuff. Want to check it out? I can pick you up after work.

My thumb hovers over the screen.

Six years ago, Eric and I would go to exhibitions like this the way other people go to movies. It was our thing. Every new showcase, every prototype demo, every weird basement expo where grad students showed off half-built drones and machines that could sort M&Ms by color. We'd walk through the aisles, and Eric would point at things and say, We could do that better, and I'd say, We already did, and we'd argue about it over cheap coffee until one of us admitted the other was right.

I haven't been to an exhibition in six years. I haven't looked at a circuit board. I haven't read a journal paper. I haven't touched a soldering iron or opened a CAD file or done anything — anything — that made me feel like the person I was at nineteen.

Because I was too busy ironing shirts. And cleaning humidifiers. And steeping tea for exactly four minutes.

I type back.

I'd love that. Pick me up at 5?

His reply comes in four seconds.

I'll be there at 4:55. Don't make me wait.

I almost laugh. Almost. The sound catches somewhere in my throat, not quite ready to come out. But it's there. Closer to the surface than it's been in a long time.

I put my phone down and look at the calendar. Two red circles left. Wednesday. Thursday.

Two more days of left-corner staples and oat milk coffee and lights adjusted two levels up at 3 PM.

Two more days, and then I walk out of this building and I never come back.

I pick up the Whitfield contracts and carry them to Sean's empty office. His chair is pushed back, crooked, the way he always leaves it. His desk is cluttered — he's hopeless without someone organizing it, and the temp is too scared to touch anything.

I set the contracts in the center of his desk. Aligned. Squared. Perfect.

The last ones I'll ever prepare for him.

I turn off the light and close the door.

Back at my desk, I open my personal email. There's a newsletter from the International Robotics Association — I never unsubscribed, even after six years of not reading it. The subject line catches my eye: Stanford University Exhibition: Breakthroughs in Neural-Interface Robotics.

Neural-interface. Brain-computer integration. The next frontier.

Something moves in my chest. Not the dull ache I've been carrying for weeks. Something sharper. Brighter. Like a pilot light catching after being out so long you forgot the gas was still on.

I click the article. I read the whole thing. Then I read it again.

My hands aren't shaking anymore.

I look at the calendar one more time. Wednesday. Thursday.

Two more days.

I can do two more days.

(Eric's POV)

I told her 4:55.

I get there at 4:53. Two minutes early. I'm parked across the street from Clark Industries with the engine running and my hands at ten and two like I'm seventeen again, picking up a date I can't believe said yes.

Which is stupid. This isn't a date. Rebecca asked me to drive her to a robotics exhibition. That's it. Two old friends. Lab buddies. Looking at robots together.

This is all that is.

My palms sweat anyway.

I wipe them on my dress pants and check the mirror. Hair's fine. Shirt's fine. I changed three times before I left.

The lobby doors open and she walks out wearing a navy blouse and dark pants, simple, nothing flashy. Her bag is over one shoulder. Her hair is down. She's looking at her phone, not at me, and she's frowning at whatever's on the screen, and she's the brightest woman I've ever met.

She's always been like this. Even back in the lab — safety goggles on her forehead, coffee stain on her sleeve, hunched over a circuit board at 2 AM — she had this thing. Not glamour. Not charm. Just — her. The way she tilts her head when she's thinking. The way her hands move when she's explaining something, fast and sure, like the words aren't enough and she needs her whole body to carry the idea.

I fell for her at first sight in Luke's lab.

She was debugging the NanoStep navigation code, and she'd been at it for nine hours, and she looked up at me with red eyes and said, "I think the problem is me. I think I'm thinking about this wrong." And then she went quiet for thirty seconds, and then she rewrote the entire algorithm from scratch, and it worked on the first run, and she laughed — this big, exhausted, goofy laugh — and I thought, Oh. this is it. I'm done for.

I never told her.

She was focused. She was driven. She had Luke, she had the work, she had a future brighter than anything I could compete with.

And then one day she was gone. Married. Pregnant. Living in some rich man's house in Tennessee.

I couldn't reach her number and she didn't call and I told myself it was fine, she was happy, she chose this.

And just like that, six years went by.