Chapter 15
Professional Distance
The return to London was a sombre affair.
The Eurostar hurtled them not towards a future, but back into the confines of a painful reality.
The silence in their taxi from St. Pancras was a physical weight.
When they reached her flat, Luca didn't ask to come up.
The goodbye was a chaste, desperate kiss on the pavement, his hands framing her face for a moment too long before he turned and walked away.
The next forty-eight hours were a blur of agony. Isla knew what she had to do. She spent a day drafting her resignation, the words feeling like carving a piece of her own flesh onto the page. She cited "new creative opportunities," the standard, hollow corporate euphemism for a broken heart.
She emailed it to Luca and Anya on a grey Tuesday morning. The response from Luca was immediate and brutal in its professionalism.
Luca.Thorne@: Received. HR will be in touch regarding your notice period and final projects. We wish you the best in your future endeavours.
It was signed Luca Thorne, Creative Director. Not Luca. Not I love you. Not please don't go.
She had asked for professional distance, and he was giving it to her with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel. It was what she had demanded, but the reality was a cold, crushing loneliness.
The office, when she returned to clear her desk, was a mausoleum. People avoided her eyes, their pity a subtle, suffocating blanket. Luca was locked in his office, his back to the glass wall, on a seemingly endless call. He never looked out.
As she packed her personal effects—a favourite mug, a stack of inspiring postcards, the vintage emerald dress carefully folded in its box—she felt his absence like a phantom limb.
This was the space where they had built something extraordinary, both on the page and between them. Now, it was just an empty desk.
Her final task was to hand over her projects to a quietly stunned junior editor.
When she was done, there was nothing left to do but leave.
She took one last look at the bullpen, at the light spilling from his office, and walked towards the elevator, her career at Chroma ending not with a bang, but with the soft, final click of the closing doors.
She had chosen to set them both free. But standing on the pavement outside the towering glass building, the London rain beginning to fall, freedom felt an awful lot like freefall.