Nicholas Wolfe had stopped playing subtle weeks ago, and I noticed the shift long before he said anything.

He started arriving early, earlier than any executive had to, and lingered near the elevators like he was waiting for something or someone. He took the long route to meetings, walked slower past my desk, paused a fraction longer at the break room door like he might find some excuse to talk to me.

He didn’t touch me. He didn’t push me. But the air between us had changed completely. It had become something heavy and sharp, cutting into every careful excuse I tried to wrap around myself.

The tension finally broke one morning when I passed his office with a file clutched too tightly to my chest. Usually, I kept walking, kept my head down, pretended not to feel his stare burn between my shoulder blades. But today, he didn’t let it pass.

“Elena,” he said, and there was no mistaking it for a greeting.

I stopped mid-step, freezing in the doorway, my heart thudding against my ribs like it was trying to escape the conversation I knew was coming. I looked at him — or at least at his hands, steady over a stack of papers, giving me one last chance to run if I wanted to.

“You’ve been aloof for weeks,” he said, voice low but certain. “And if you tell me it’s ‘just work’ again, I’m going to start thinking I imagined every second between us.”

I swallowed against the knot in my throat, feeling like my feet had been cemented into the floor. “You didn’t imagine anything,” I said, and I hated how cracked my voice sounded even to my own ears.

He finally lifted his eyes to mine, and the look he gave me was so painfully earnest it made my hands tremble.

“Then what are you doing?” he asked, the words softer but so much heavier.

I clutched the file tighter, like paperwork could anchor me against the truth. “I’m trying to breathe.”

He stood, slow and deliberate, moving around the desk like he was preparing for a conversation neither of us knew how to survive. “That’s not breathing,” he said. “That’s hiding.”

“I don’t expect you to understand,” I said quickly, my voice snapping sharper than I meant it to.

“I would try,” he replied immediately, the conviction behind the words hitting me harder than any accusation could have.

“I don’t want you to.”

The lie came too easily, too practiced after so many years of learning how to push away the people who could hurt me the most.

Nicholas closed the distance between us with two long steps, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from him, close enough that my excuses started to crumble at the edges.

“You think this doesn’t matter to me?” he asked, voice lower now, rough around the edges like he was trying to hold something back. “You think I’m just circling you for fun?”

Before I could gather a response, laughter echoed down the hallway behind me.

Daniel.

That sickly-sweet laugh he used to cover the cracks in his ego carried down the corridor like a reminder of everything I had been trying to forget. I stiffened instinctively, my heart jumping into my throat.

Nicholas’s gaze flickered past me, darkening.

“He’s still bothering you?” His voice dropped even further, dangerous now.

I couldn’t find my voice fast enough.

Nicholas moved closer still, lowering his tone to a near-growl. “Why do you let him near you?”

“I don’t—” I started, but he cut me off, his anger heating the air between us.

“You don’t stop him either.”

“Nicholas—”

“So that’s it?” His hands curled into fists at his sides. “Is that what this is about? You still want him?”

The accusation landed harder than any slap. I wasn’t ready for the hurt written so plainly across his face — not anger, not jealousy. Hurt.

I wanted to tell him the truth right there, to tear myself open and bleed it all out — that there were lives growing inside me, that it wasn’t Daniel’s, that it was him, always him, even when I was too scared to admit it.

But the words stuck like glass in my throat.

I couldn’t shatter the fragile line we were both standing on, not like this.

So I did the worst thing I could have done.
I lied.

“I never stopped loving him,” I said, forcing the words out through numb lips, hating myself with every syllable.

Nicholas didn’t argue. Didn’t even demand an explanation.

He just… went still.

He nodded once, slow and mechanical, as if he’d expected this moment all along but it still managed to carve something out of him.

“Thanks for the clarity,” he said quietly, the words slicing cleaner than any scream ever could.

Without another look, he turned, walked back into his office, and closed the door behind him with a finality that broke something deep inside me.

I stood there, alone in the empty hallway, feeling the world tilt around me — not dramatically, not loudly, but the kind of tilt you don’t even realize is happening until everything inside you is already falling.

And as much as I wanted to pretend otherwise, I knew this was my fault.

I had broken the only thing that had ever felt real.
And for what?

Fear. Guilt. Cowardice.

The silence that followed tasted like ashes.

And I told myself over and over again that it was better this way.