Chapter 20 Miles
Miles
My name is on the door.
MILES COVINGTON, PARTNER. The letters are brass.
Someone — Richard's assistant, probably — had them made this week, and now they're screwed into the oak door of my new corner office on the thirty-second floor.
The office has a view of the city. It has built-in bookshelves and a mahogany desk and a leather chair that costs more than most people's rent.
I stand in the doorway and look at it and feel absolutely nothing.
Richard shakes my hand in the hallway. "You've earned this, Miles.
" Marcus Thorne claps me on the shoulder.
Lauren Chen sends a firm-wide email. People I've worked with for years stop by to congratulate me, and I smile and say thank you and it's like watching someone else do it from very far away.
The motions are correct. The words are right. There's nothing behind any of them.
At my new desk, I open the partnership agreement.
Fifty-three pages. Compensation structure, equity stake, voting rights, governance responsibilities.
The culmination of everything I've worked for since I was sixteen years old, lying in a hospital bed, deciding that if what the surgery took couldn't make me valuable, my brain would.
I read the first page and think about Ray's basil plant.
The one on the windowsill in his kitchen, the one that's somehow thriving despite the state of his apartment.
I wonder if he's been watering it. I wonder if the pasta sauce he makes comes out the same without the fresh basil or if he's been using dried.
I close the agreement. I put it in my desk drawer. I turn and look out the window at the city I just conquered. The view is beautiful. I would trade every square inch of it for the smell of garlic burning in a kitchen that isn't mine.
My phone buzzes.
Mom: Congratulations sweetheart!! Dad and I are so proud of you. Dinner Sunday? Also — Dad's colleague Gerald has a son, very nice alpha, just made VP at Mercer. Should I give him your number?
I read the text and put my phone face-down on the desk.
Gerald's son. A very nice alpha. Like the partnership, like the corner office, like the view — another piece of the life my parents have been assembling for me since the doctor said barren and they decided the best response was to pretend it didn't change anything while quietly adjusting every expectation downward.
They've never said it out loud. They don't have to.
The dinners, the setup alphas, the gentle nudges toward men who are nice and stable and understanding — which means men who won't mind that I can't give them children. Men who'll settle.
I don't want a man who'll settle. I want a man who crushes tomatoes with his bare fingers and leaves his hoodie on the chair and brings me coffee from the good place without being asked. I want a man whose scent makes me stop screaming for five goddamn minutes.
I want Ray, and I can't have him, and the partnership was supposed to make that okay and it doesn't. It doesn't make anything okay. It's brass letters on an oak door and a leather chair and a view of a city I don't care about, and I am so angry I could put my fist through the window.
I don't put my fist through the window. I go home.
The apartment is clean. It's been clean — I spent the first night after the stairwell scrubbing every surface like I could scour Ray out of the grout.
The kitchen counter where he never cooked.
The couch where we held hands. The bathroom mirror I've been avoiding because I look like shit and I know it and looking confirms it.
I clean again anyway. There are dishes in the sink — a coffee mug and a plate from this morning's toast that I didn't eat — and I wash them with more force than dishes require.
I dry them and put them away and wipe the counter and wipe it again.
The apartment is immaculate, silent. It smells like cleaning products and nothing else.
It used to smell like nothing and that was fine. Nothing was the goal. I built a life that smelled like nothing on purpose because scent is intimacy and intimacy is vulnerability and vulnerability is how you get destroyed.
Now nothing smells like what it is: absence. The absence of cooking. The absence of another person. The absence of the pepper-and-ozone scent that I've been recalibrating to for weeks and now can't find anywhere except—
I don't think about the pillow. Not yet.
The anger comes in waves. It's not the clean, cold anger I'm used to — the professional fury that makes me lethal in a courtroom. It's messy and hot and it doesn't have a single target. It hits everything.
I'm angry at Ray. For being easy. For walking into my life with his wrinkled shirts and his stupid grin and making me want things I spent twelve years teaching myself not to want.
For cooking me pasta and pouring my wine and holding my hand like it was the most natural thing in the world.
For making the partnership feel like nothing by showing me what something actually feels like.
I'm angry at myself. For letting him in.
For kissing him on the plane and in the bathroom and in my apartment.
For getting on my knees. For sleeping in his bed and pressing his palm against my stomach and not washing the pillow.
For every single moment where I could have stopped and didn't because stopping felt worse than continuing, and now continuing has stopped and stopping feels like death.
I'm angry at my biology. For the pre-bond that won't let me sleep.
For the withdrawal that makes my fingers shake and my skin crawl and my chest ache every time I walk past his empty desk at work.
For the part of me that chose Ray without permission, now punishing me for a decision my brain made that the rest of me disagrees with.
I'm angry at the accident. At the other driver who ran the red light when I was sixteen. At the surgeon who saved my life and took my future. At the word barren and every year I've spent since building a fortress around it.
I clean the stovetop. I reorganize the pantry.
I throw away the takeout menus I keep in the drawer even though I always order the same thing.
I am performing control over my environment because I have no control over myself or my feelings or the fact that the person I love is somewhere in this city doing whatever he's doing and I told him to leave and he left.
Underneath the anger, underneath the scrubbing and the organizing and the vicious internal monologue that reduces every warm moment to a clinical transaction: I miss him.
I miss him so much it's a physical weight in my chest, this dense, heavy thing that the anger can't lift and the cleaning can't remove and the partnership can't replace.
I miss the way he refills my wine without pausing his conversation. I miss the way he says my name — just Miles, soft, like it's enough. I miss the way he looks at me like I'm the most interesting thing in any room, even when I'm being terrible, especially when I'm being terrible.
The anger can't touch those memories. It tries.
It throws words at them — biology, proximity, convenience, temporary — and they don't stick.
The memories are too specific. Too real.
Too clearly the product of someone who cared about me for reasons that have nothing to do with my designation or what I can or can't produce.
The anger burns out around midnight. What's left is worse.
The days blur. I go to work. I sit in my corner office and read documents and attend meetings and people call me Partner and I respond to the title and I am functioning in the way that a machine functions when you turn it on and it runs its program without understanding why.
The pre-bond withdrawal doesn't get better.
It gets worse. My sleep is destroyed — two hours, maybe three, and I wake up reaching across the bed for someone who isn't there.
My fingers shake when I hold my coffee. My temperature swings — freezing in meetings, burning at night, unable to regulate without the signal I was learning to calibrate to.
Food tastes like cardboard. Coffee tastes like nothing.
I'm in mourning for a bond I started and couldn't finish, and the mourning is physical and relentless and no amount of willpower can override it.
You didn't let him answer.
The voice is louder now. It shows up in the shower. At my desk. Lying in bed at three in the morning staring at the ceiling. It's not dramatic — it's just there, quiet and persistent, like a notification I can't clear.
He said this isn't over. He said give me a second. You pushed him out before he could finish.
I argue back. He would have said what everyone says. The careful goodbye. The gentle letdown. The this doesn't change anything that changes everything.
You don't know that. You never let him try.
I pull the covers over my head and I don't sleep and the voice doesn't leave.
The next day I go to work. I sit in my corner office and open a case file for a new client and I read the first paragraph four times and I can't tell you what it says.
The words are there — I can see them, I can identify them as English — but my brain won't process them.
My brain is too busy tracking the absence of a scent in the hallway outside my door.
Ray's desk is empty. He's been reassigned to another floor, another partner, another life.
I did that. I resolved it. Jennifer Albright sent me a confirmation email: Garcia, Raymond — transferred to Litigation Support, effective immediately.
I read the email and archived it and sat in my leather chair and stared at his empty desk through the glass and everything in me reached toward it like there was a rope attached to my sternum being pulled through the wall.