Better Off Alone

Chapter 5

(Rebecca's POV)

"I'm sorry," I say. "I should have—"

"You don't owe me an apology." He sets his cup down. "But I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer me honestly."

I wait.

"Why haven't you responded to my emails?"

I open my mouth. Close it.

"Why did you block my number?" Still, nothing.

"Say something." Eric leans forward. "Rebecca, why did you cut us off? Why don't you come back?"

"Come back where?" I finally ask.

"To the lab." He says it gently, but his eyes are serious. "You were the most talented person in that program. Luke still talks about you. He brings up your nanobot design every semester, shows it to his new students. They don't believe one person built it."

I look at the table. There's a ring of condensation from my cup, a perfect circle on the wood.

"I've been busy," I say.

"Busy doing what?"

Being a wife. Being a mother. Being invisible.

Ironing shirts with the creases exactly right. Cleaning humidifiers until my hands crack. Making coffee that nobody else can make but nobody ever thanks me for. Standing in doorways while someone else holds my son.

"Just... busy," I say.

Eric doesn't push. But the silence after that word is heavy, and we both know it's not an answer.

I take another sip of coffee and close my eyes.

Behind my eyelids, I see a different version of myself. Nineteen years old. Hair pulled back in a messy knot. Safety goggles pushed up on my forehead. Standing in Luke's lab at Sandford University at 3 AM, hunched over a circuit board the size of a dime.

The nanobot project. NanoStep. Took eight months of no sleep, bad cafeteria food, and the kind of focus that blocked out the entire world. We built robots smaller than a grain of sand. Tiny, beautiful things designed to navigate blood vessels, break apart clots, deliver medicine right to the source. I programmed the navigation system. Eric built the hardware. Luke called us crazy until the prototype worked. And then he called us geniuses and cried.

We won first place at the International Pioneer Robotics Competition. I was nineteen, holding a trophy that was almost as tall as me with my goggles still around my neck and felt like I could build anything. Solve anything. Be anything.

The judges said our design could save thousands of lives. They were wrong. It saved more. Hospitals in eight countries use a version of that tech now. People with blocked arteries, people who would've needed open-heart surgery, people who were running out of time — they got more time because of something I built when I was too young to know what impossible meant.

That was me. That was me.

I open my eyes. Eric is watching me.

"You're thinking about the lab," he says.

"How do you know?"

"Because you got this look. Like you're somewhere else. Somewhere better." He sets down his cup. "Rebecca, you don't belong where you are. You know that."

I do know that. I've known it for a long time. I just kept telling myself that love was worth more than a career. That if I tried hard enough, if I gave enough, Sean would see me. That being a good wife was enough.

But Sean doesn't see me. He sees through me. And the place I left empty when I gave up everything to fill his house — Eric filled it. He took my design and built a company and changed the world while I was cleaning humidifiers and ironing shirts and standing in the rain outside a coffee shop with nowhere to go.

"You're always welcome back," Eric says. "Any time. No conditions attached. The door is always open for you."

The door is always open for you.

Simple, clean, no prove yourself first. No if you're serious this time. No don't come crying to me. Just — the door is always open for you.

I nod. My throat is too tight to talk.

Eric reaches across the table and squeezes my hand once, quick. Then he lets go.

"I have to get to a meeting," he says. "But please call me. Don't disappear for another six years again."

"I won't."

He stands. Pauses. Looks at me one more time with those dark, steady eyes. Then he walks out into the rain, umbrella up, and he's gone.

I sit alone in the coffee shop for another ten minutes. Then I pick up my phone and call Connie.

She answers on the second ring, which means she was already holding her phone, probably scrolling through legal briefs in bed.

"It's nine o'clock, Becca. If this is about Sean's dry cleaning, I swear—"

"Conn." My voice is steady. Steadier than it's been all day. "Help me draw a divorce agreement."

Silence. Three full seconds of it. I can hear Connie breathing, and I can hear the shift in that breathing, the way it goes from annoyed to alert to shock.

"Say that again," she says.

"I’m done, Connie. I want to divorce Sean.”

More silence. And then, just when I’m wondering if the line got cut off, Connie laughs.

Not a mean laugh. Not a shocked laugh. A laugh like someone who's been holding her breath for six years and finally, finally gets to let it out.

"Thank god. You've finally come to your senses."

I lean back in my chair. The rain is still falling. My clothes are still wet. Somewhere across town, in a house full of golden streamers and a painting I’m not in, a birthday party is probably winding down.

My son won't notice my absence. My husband won't find the lemon that rolled across the porch, or the wet footprints on the front step. They won’t see any sign that a woman who loved them came home and left in silence.

But I was there. And something inside me — something old and quiet and nearly dead — just moved.

Like a heartbeat coming back to life.

"How fast can you have it ready?" I ask.

"For you?" Connie says. "Yesterday."

I almost smile. This time, it reaches my eyes.