Where Would I Go? (Stay or Leave #1)

Chapter One Julian

Briana is already in my office when I return from the client call.

Of course she is.

She’s claimed my chair like it belongs to her—legs crossed in nylon stockings, a pen clenched between her teeth, sharp eyes scanning the project deck on my laptop with the focused quiet of someone who has never once doubted her right to be somewhere.

Her hair is twisted up, half-escaping. She has her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, exposing the translucent skin of her inner arms and the blue map of her veins.

She looks like someone who bleeds deadlines, someone who hasn’t slept properly in days and doesn’t particularly care. Someone who belongs exactly where she’s sitting.

Someone who should know better.

Someone I should never have touched.

Her eyes find mine the instant the door clicks shut. The pen slides out from between her teeth slowly. A smile follows—the one that knows too much.

“You’re late,” she says, and makes no move to leave my chair.

“The call ran long.” My voice comes out huskier than I intend. The room feels smaller, the air heavier. “You could have waited outside.”

“And risk someone seeing me loiter by your door?” She rolls her eyes—practiced, unhurried. “Relax, Julian. Half the building’s at lunch.”

The right thing would be to pull her out of my seat.

The professional thing would be to take my laptop back.

The safe thing would be to put the desk between us and keep it there.

My body pulls me forward anyway.

She turns as I stop before her, the fine wool of her trousers whispering against mine—barely a touch, barely anything. The guilt comes first, the way it always does. Then the heat, and it burns the guilt into fine, colourless ash.

Three months.

Three months of this. Three months of her hands finding mine in the dark, of waking up with her perfume clinging to my collar, of her touch slowly, methodically, erasing the memory of the gold band on my finger.

“I updated the timelines,” she says, turning the laptop toward me. Her voice is crisp, professional. “We need to cut either the client review or the comps next week, or we’ll miss the deadline. Your call.”

I should be looking at the screen.

Instead, I’m looking at her mouth. My hand finds the back of the chair without asking permission, my body already leaning over hers, already closing the distance before my conscience can catch up. The screen glows silver between us. Full of tasks. Deadlines. Things that matter.

I can’t look at any of it.

“Julian.” Briana’s voice drops—that low, familiar warning she’s never once followed through on. Her chin tilts up, her piercing eyes steady on mine. “Door’s not locked.”

“Fuck it,” I murmur.

She doesn’t move. Doesn’t look away. Just holds the moment open between us like a dare she already knows I will take.

What I find in her eyes isn’t warmth, softness, or anything that can be mistaken for it.

It’s hunger. The same stripped, unashamed hunger she brings to a negotiation, to a closing, to every room she walks into with the expectation of a win.

It doesn’t ask for permission. It doesn’t offer any tenderness in return.

It’s the part of her that looks at me—married, meant to know better—and doesn’t hesitate.

The part of her that found the worst part of me, and called it home.

When her mouth finds mine, there is no guilt.

There is no wife, just a phantom, a shapeless memory evaporating into mist, a stranger whose name is gone before I can reach for it. No marriage of five years, no promises made in a damp church while her small hands shook in mine. No vows. No text waiting on my phone about dinner.

There is only this: Briana’s velveteen mouth on mine, her smoked cherry-coloured lipstick, the bite of her fingers twisting into my collar as I press her back into the leather. The world closes in, stripping down to breath and flesh and heat. The terrifying irresistibility of a terrible choice.

Stop.

The thought surfaces only to be drowned out. It is faint, distant, already drifting out of reach, too far from shore.

I know I should.

But her lips part, and whatever’s left of that thought burns away, leaving nothing behind. Not even ash.

“Julian.” Her breath lingers against my throat. “We have fifteen minutes.”

“Ten is all we need.” My hands are already searching for the soft skin beneath her shirt, my mind surrendering willingly, gratefully, to the blank.

Somewhere on the desk, my phone buzzes. Once. Twice. A third time.

I don’t look at it.

That’s what Briana does. She doesn’t make me forget—she makes the forgetting feel like relief.

Like setting down a weight I didn’t know I was still carrying.

She smudges the lines until they dissolve, blots out the promises until they become meaningless.

Until there is only her, and the clean, white, hot silence where my conscience used to be.

Something clatters to the floor behind me. Hard and sharp. Like a gunshot in a quiet room. A piercing sound loud enough to split the moment open. Briana flinches back, hands pushing back against my chest, a breath tearing from her throat. I turn, my eyes wide.

And the world stops.

Nora stands still in the doorway. Her knuckles are frigid where she grips the doorframe. She isn’t moving. Isn’t blinking. Her eyes are wide and completely, horribly empty, as if something behind them has shut down.

At her feet, the lunchbox. The lid lies skidded away. A dark red sauce bleeds into the carpet. Slow and rich and spreading. A ghastly wound against the beige, a wet mess that no amount of scrubbing will ever truly erase.

My lunch.

She brought me my lunch.

The cold slams into me, a full-body drop, like plunging through ice. My hands drop from Briana’s waist; her skin suddenly feels clammy. Like raw chicken. The heat of the moment is gone. Every trace of it.

I can’t find it. I can’t find any of it. My lungs have forgotten how to work.

“Nor—”

Her name dies in my throat.

I lurch forward, putting distance between myself and Briana, as if I could cross back over some line. As though a few steps could make me someone else.

Nora’s eyes drop to the spilt food on the ground and linger there. The red stain darkens against the carpet. Her expression remains unreadable. No anger, no sorrow, no shock. Only a smooth, untouchable calm that hollows the chilly office room.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Her voice is very quiet, and very far away. “Someone will have to clean that.”

I stare at her.

The words land wrong. All of them—the gentleness, the apology, the composure. None of it fits. None of it makes sense.

She’s apologizing.

She’s apologizing.

“Nora—it’s not—it’s not what it looks like.” The words fall out of me, clumsy, reflexive, the oldest lie in existence. I step toward her, one hand outstretched, reaching for something I’ve already lost.

She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t step back. Her eyes stay fixed on the floor as if I’m not worth the direction of her gaze.

Why isn’t she screaming?

The thought claws through me, half plea, half panic. Why isn’t she throwing something—tearing this room down to the studs, cursing my name until these walls have no choice but to remember it? Why isn’t she making me feel the size of what I’ve done?

Why isn’t she making this loud, making this a fight, giving me something to brace against?

Why won’t she look at me?

She’s in shock, I tell myself, desperate for anything solid. That’s all. No one goes through this kind of wreckage without falling apart. No one is this calm when their life breaks open.

“Nora, please.” My voice cracks down the middle. “Just let me explain.”

A long moment passes.

Slowly, she raises her head.

Her eyes find mine.

And there is nothing there.

No anger. No hurt cresting behind her eyes, no shadow of betrayal waiting to break the surface. None of the things I told myself I’d face someday. None of the reckoning I half-believed I deserved.

Just absence. A vast emptiness where my wife used to be.

“I’m sorry for interrupting,” she says, her voice perfectly, frighteningly level. “You forgot your lunch. I thought I’d bring it. I did knock. I called, too. No one answered, so I let myself in.” A brief pause. “I should have knocked harder.”

“Don’t.” The word comes out broken. “Don’t you dare apologize. Nora—please—”

But she is already turning away.

She doesn’t run. She doesn’t slam the door.

She simply turns and walks. Each step is measured, unhurried, like someone who has just finished a meeting and has somewhere else to be.

Her shoulders don’t shake. Her hands don’t reach for the wall.

She doesn’t look at me or at the woman still breathing behind me.

She looks at nothing.

She simply leaves.

That, more than anything, undoes me.

This is wrong. All of it, wrong. This isn’t grief. This isn’t fury. This is worse—a ghost wearing her face, moving through the room with a calm so complete it has its own sound, its own weight.

I stand frozen.

My mind refuses the scene. Keeps offering it back, unprocessed. I had braced myself for the storm—her voice, her tears, something I can reach into and grab hold of, something I can fight. But she gave me nothing, and the absence of it knocks the ground clean out from under me.

Then a primal instinct snaps the paralysis and I lunge after her.

The elevator lobby is empty, doors sealed shut.

I take the stairs two at a time, my shoulder catching the wall on the landing, the sound of my own footsteps too loud in the concrete stairwell.

I crash through the parking lot door just in time to catch her taillights flaring red at the exit.

I fumble the keys. Drop them. Snatch them off the asphalt.

By the time I get my keys into the ignition, my hands are shaking. I pull out after her. One lane back. Clinging to the only thought I have left: that she’s going home. That she hasn’t already made a decision I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to undo.

That I haven’t just destroyed the best thing I ever had and left it bleeding into the carpet of my office floor.