Sign it."
Two words. No please. He his not even looking at my face Not even the countless eye contact.
Elara Voss stared at the manila folder sitting between them on the mahogany conference table. Her hands were very still on her lap, hidden her tears at the table's edge so he couldn't see them. She'd taught herself that much in the last three months — how to make herself unreadable.
She looked up at Callum Reid.
He stood by the floor-to-ceiling window of his thirty-second-floor office, one hand in the pocket of his slate-grey suit, his back angled away from her, watching the city below. He'd always been handsome in a way that felt almost punishing — the kind of face a room recalibrated around the moment he walked in. She used to press her palm against his chest just to feel his heartbeat, just to confirm he was real and hers.
He wasn't hers anymore.
He hadn't been hers since the accident.
"Callum—"
"We've discussed everything there is to discuss." His voice was level. Practiced. "The terms are fair. Your attorney confirmed it. There's nothing left to say."
"I wasn't going to argue the terms."
He turned then — just slightly, catching her in his peripheral vision. Those grey eyes, which had once softened every time they landed on her, were the eyes of a man looking at a problem he needed to close.
"Then what?" he asked.
Elara pulled the folder toward her. The paper inside was crisp, white, professionally notarized. The dissolution of a five-year marriage reduced to numbered clauses. At the bottom of the last page, a line. Her name printed beneath it.
Elara Reid.
The last time she'd sign it.
She picked up the pen.
"Is she moving in this week or next?" she asked quietly. She didn't look up.
A pause. Brief. Controlled. "That's not your concern."
"Humor me."
Longer pause. "Next week."
She nodded as though this information meant nothing — as though it wasn't sliding between her ribs with surgical precision. She set pen to paper.
"I planted the garden myself," she said. "Three weekends. The lavender along the south fence, the roses by the gate. All of it." She kept her voice very even. "I only ask that whoever tends it now doesn't tear it all out. That's all. Just — let the lavender stay."
Silence.
She signed her name.
The pen made a small, final sound against the paper.
She closed the folder. She slid it back across the table. She was careful not to let her fingers touch his.
She stood, smoothed the front of her coat, and picked up her bag. She had decided — at three in the morning on her sister's bathroom floor — that she would not look at the framed photographs in the hallway. She held to that decision now.
She walked toward the door.
"Elara."
She stopped. Her hand was on the door frame. She didn't turn.
"I'm sorry," Callum said.
The words were genuine. She almost wished they weren't.
"I know you are," she said softly. "That's the saddest part."
— ✦ —
She made it to the elevator.
She made it through the lobby.
She made it to the pavement outside, into the cold November air, where no one was watching — and then she stood very still and breathed in and out exactly four times.
Not five. Not three. Four.
That was the deal she'd made with herself. Four breaths. Then forward.
She started walking.
She did not see, in the office above, the folder she'd signed slip from the edge of the table where Callum had left it — did not see it tip and fall and flutter open across the marble floor. Did not see what came loose from between the pages.
A photograph.
Small. Unposed. Both of them laughing at something no one else would remember, his hands cradling her face, her eyes bright, their wedding day caught in a single moment neither of them knew was being photographed.
It lay face-up on the cold floor of the office.
Callum stood at the window.
He did not look down.
The photograph lay there untouched for three minutes.
Then Callum turned. His eyes dropped to the floor. He saw it.
Something moved across his face — a flicker, too fast to name — and he crouched and picked it up. He stared at his own hands in the photograph. The way they were holding her. The way someone holds something they are afraid to lose.
His brow creased.
"Strange," he murmured.
He set the photograph face-down on his d
esk and went back to work.
He didn't throw it away.