Another day came with the same small routine for Abigail. As usual, her chocolate drink had gone cold at her desk. There was a stack of proofs to sign, the clack of keyboards that marked the office’s steady heartbeat. Abigail half expected Kai to appear the way he always had, carrying a sudden, unignorable storm of apology and insistence that would wear her down until she let him back in.
But he did not come.
Not today, the next morning, not the morning after that. There were no traces of him nor his secretary, Ben. Not even a trace of the cologne she still sometimes tasted in her sleep. A week passed. Seven ordinary, relentless days of looking up at every noise as if it might be his footsteps. She told herself the silence was what she had wanted.
Freedom, she repeated to herself. Pea
