Naomi went to bed at midnight.
I stayed on the couch.
The apartment was dark except for the blue glow of my laptop screen. Miso had abandoned me for the warm spot on Naomi's pillow. The city hummed outside the window — distant sirens, a car alarm, the low thrum of a world that kept spinning even when mine had stopped.
I should have slept.
I couldn't.
My fingers moved before my brain could stop them. I opened a new browser tab and typed three words into the search bar:
how to disappear
The results were bleak. Witness protection programs (not available to divorced nobodies). Vanishing off the grid (requires cash I didn't have). Changing my name (costs money, requires paperwork, leaves a trail). Faking my own death (illegal, also requires money).
Everything required money.
I had four hundred twelve dollars.
I closed the tab. Opened another. Typed:
how to start over with nothing
More bleakness. Shelter listings. Food bank locations. Articles about the working poor, written by people who had never been poor a day in their lives.
I closed that tab, too.
My cursor hovered over the search bar. I didn't know what I was looking for. Hope, maybe. Or permission to give up.
Instead, I typed:
Julian Farrow
The results exploded across my screen.
News articles. Business profiles. Tabloid photos. A Wikipedia page. A LinkedIn profile that probably had more followers than my entire hometown.
I clicked on the first article — a feature from Forbes magazine, dated eighteen months ago.
JULIAN FARROW:THE VISIONARY WHO BUILT AN EMPIRE ON BROKEN RULES
The photo accompanying the article was stark. Black and white. Julian Farrow stood in front of a floor-to-ceiling window, arms crossed, looking at the camera like he was looking through it.
He was younger than I expected. Thirty-two, the caption said, but he could have passed for twenty-eight. Dark hair, neatly cut but not fussy. A jawline that could cut glass. His suit was expensive but understated — no flashy tie, no pocket square. Just dark wool and quiet confidence.
But it wasn't his clothes that made me pause.
It was his eyes.
Even in black and white, even through the grainy pixels of my laptop screen, his eyes were arresting. Light-colored — gray, maybe, or pale blue. The kind of eyes that seemed to hold a secret.
The kind of eyes that felt familiar.
I stared at the photo for a long time.
Where had I seen him before?
Not in person. I'd never been to a Farrow Industries event. Derek's company was a subsidiary of a subsidiary — we were small fish in a very large pond. Julian Farrow wouldn't have noticed us if we'd set ourselves on fire in his lobby.
But his face tugged at something in my memory. A half-glimpse. A shadow. A feeling I couldn't name.
I shook my head. I was exhausted. My brain was playing tricks on me.
I scrolled down.
The article was long — a deep dive into Julian's rise. He'd inherited Farrow Industries at twenty-five, after his father's sudden death. The company had been hemorrhaging money, drowning in debt, weeks away from bankruptcy. Everyone expected him to fail.
Instead, he'd fired the entire C-suite, liquidated two failing divisions, and pivoted the company into renewable energy and biotech. Within five years, Farrow Industries was worth three times what it had been at its peak.
He was ruthless, the article said. Cold. Calculated. He had no known romantic relationships. He attended galas alone and left alone. His employees feared him. His competitors respected him.
And yet.
The article mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that Julian Farrow was a private person. He gave few interviews. He had no social media. He lived in a penthouse in the same building as his office — a building he'd designed himself.
A man who builds his own walls, the writer had noted, is a man who doesn't want to be seen.
I scrolled further.
There was a photograph of Julian at a charity event. He was standing in a crowd of people, but somehow separate from them — an island in a sea of smiling faces. His hands were in his pockets. His expression was unreadable.
And his eyes were doing that thing again. Looking at the camera. Looking through it. Looking at me.
I closed the laptop.
My heart was beating too fast.
It's nothing, I told myself. You're sleep-deprived and traumatized. You're seeing things.
But I wasn't.
There was something about Julian Farrow. Something I couldn't explain. Something that made my skin prickle and my stomach clench.
I lay down on the couch, pulled the blanket over my head, and closed my eyes.
His face lingered behind my eyelids.
Those eyes.
Where had I seen him before?
I didn't sleep.
At 4 AM, I gave up and opened the laptop again. Not to google Julian Farrow — I'd done enough of that. Instead, I opened the email from his HR department.
Mr. Farrow is looking forward to meeting you.
I read the sentence ten times.
Looking forward.
Those two words. So simple. So ordinary. But they burned in my chest like a brand.
No one had looked forward to seeing me in years. Derek had looked past me. His colleagues had looked through me. Megan Cross had looked at me the way you look at a piece of furniture you're planning to replace.
But someone — Julian Farrow, or whoever had sent this email — was looking forward to meeting me.
It was probably nothing. A form letter. A standard phrase that HR used for every candidate.
But what if it wasn't?
What if, somewhere in that cold, glass tower on the other side of the city, there was a person who actually wanted to see me?
I typed a response to the email — not the one I'd already sent, but a new one. A confirmation.
"I'll be there at 10 AM. Thank you again for the opportunity."
I hit send before I could change my mind.
Then I closed the laptop, curled up on the couch, and stared at the ceiling until the sun came up.
At 7 AM, Naomi found me still awake.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Thanks."
"Did you sleep at all?"
"Some."
She didn't believe me. But she didn't push. Instead, she made coffee — strong, dark, the way I liked it — and sat down next to me.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked.
"The interview."
"Are you nervous?"
"Terrified."
"Good." She took a sip of her coffee. "Fear means you care. And caring means you're still alive."
I looked at her.
She looked back.
"Naomi," I said, "have you ever seen a face and felt like you knew it, even though you'd never met the person?"
She frowned. "Like déjà vu?"
"Something like that."
"Once or twice. Why?"
I shook my head. "No reason."
But there was a reason.
There was a man with gray eyes and a cold reputation, and something about him made me feel like I was standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down at water I'd fallen into once before.
I just didn't know why.
And that — more than the divorce, more than the money, more than the forty-seven rejections — was what scared me most.