Chapter 13
Pauline
Jack Specter walked off the elevator Monday morning, and my heart did something stupid and giddy that I absolutely had not given it permission to do.
I was at my desk, pretending to review notes when I heard it—the familiar chime, the slide of doors, that particular quality of silence that fell over a room when someone important entered.
His grey suit was crisp. His hair was slightly damp like he hadn’t bothered to fully dry it from the shower. That walk he had—confident and unhurried, like the world was going to arrange itself around him and he was simply giving it time to comply. My grandmother would call it “big man energy.”
My pulse kicked up. Every nerve ending I possessed seemed to orient toward him, which was mortifying and cliché and absolutely beyond my control.
Then I noticed something was different.
He didn’t look at me.
Not a glance as he crossed the newsroom. Or even a nod of acknowledgment. There was none of that loaded eye contact we’d perfected over the past weeks.
He looked through me. Past me. Like I was a desk or a filing cabinet or one of those sad potted plants HR had scattered around to boost morale.
I told myself it was a coincidence. He was busy. He had things on his mind. The morning was hectic and he probably just hadn’t seen me sitting here, even though I was directly in his line of sight.
The editorial meeting proved me wrong.
He addressed the staff about budget allocations, standing at the front of the conference room with that easy authority.
His eyes moved across the assembled journalists, making contact, holding attention.
He asked Gerald about the investigative team’s progress.
He complimented one of the senior editors on her fresh perspective.
He made a joke about quarterly projections that made everyone laugh, and since when did Jack Specter crack jokes in meetings?
When his gaze swept toward my section of the table, it didn’t pause. Just continued smoothly past, like I was empty air.
I sat there with my pen frozen over my notepad and felt something cold settle behind my ribs.
The meeting ended. I gathered my things slowly—papers I didn’t need, notes I’d barely taken—giving him time to approach. To say something. To acknowledge that I existed in his universe.
He walked out without a backward glance.
I stood in the hallway afterward, watching him disappear around the corner, and tried to understand why this felt like being erased.
By Wednesday, I’d developed a theory.
Jack Specter had somehow mastered the art of making me invisible while remaining perfectly visible to everyone else. It was almost impressive, if it wasn’t making me slowly lose my mind.
I tested it. I’m not proud of this, but I tested it.
I positioned myself by the coffee machine when I knew he’d be coming through. He walked past, poured himself a cup from the pot I was literally standing next to, and left without a glance. No excuse me. Nothing.
I lingered in the hallway outside his office, pretending to check my phone. He emerged, spoke to his assistant about rescheduling a meeting, and walked right by me—close enough that I caught the scent of his cologne—before continuing on like I was wallpaper.
I even tried the direct approach. I had a legitimate reason: a progress report on the data that Gerald wanted submitted to the executive team. I printed extra copies.
His assistant waved me through. “He’s free. Go ahead.”
I stepped inside. Jack was behind his desk, reviewing something on his laptop. He looked up when I entered, and for one heart-stopping second, his eyes met mine. I felt it—that electric current that had always run between us, that awareness that made my skin prickle and my breath catch.
Then his expression went blank. Polite. Professional.
“Wells.” Not Pauline. Just Wells. Like I was any other employee. “What can I do for you?”
I handed him the report. “Gerald wanted you to have this. Progress update on the investigation.”
He took it and flipped through the pages with efficient attention.
I stood there watching his hands—capable, elegant hands that I remembered on my face, in my hair, pressing against the small of my back—and waited for something.
Acknowledgment. A question. Any indication that I was more to him than a delivery service.
He set the report down and looked up with those blue eyes that gave away absolutely nothing.
“Anything else?”
My throat felt tight. “No.”
“Then you can leave.”
Four words. Delivered without malice, without heat, without anything at all. Just a dismissal. Clean and complete.
I walked out of his office with my spine straight and my face composed and my heart somewhere around my shoes. His assistant gave me a sympathetic look that suggested I wasn’t the first person to leave that room feeling quietly demolished.
Back at my desk, I stared at my computer screen without seeing it.
He was giving me exactly what I asked for.
So why did my chest ache like something had been carved out of it?
The days blurred together.
And when Jack came to the office, he interacted with everyone else normally—he was present, engaged. Just not with me.
With me, he was a wall. Perfectly polite, professionally appropriate, and completely impenetrable.
I called my grandmother Thursday evening, curled up on my couch with Meatball’s giant head in my lap. She’d been having a good week—her speech therapy was progressing better than the doctors had anticipated, which I took as a positive sign.
“You sound distracted, baby girl,” she said. “What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing. Work stuff.”
“Mmhmm.” That tone again, the one that meant she wasn’t buying what I was selling. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with that boy, would it? The one you said bought your newspaper?”
“He didn’t buy it for me.”
“I didn’t say he did.”
I scratched behind Meatball’s ears. He made a sound of pure contentment. “We are currently not even on speaking terms.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“Fine. It’s fine. It’s what I wanted.”
She was quiet for a long moment. I could picture her in her hospital bed, wearing her favorite cardigan, giving me that look she’d given me my whole life—the one that said she loved me too much to let me lie to myself.
“Baby girl,” she said gently. “It’s been seven years. Don’t you ever get tired of running?”
Friday evening, the newsroom emptied around me, colleagues drifting out in pairs and clusters, until I was alone with my laptop and a story that refused to cooperate.
I rubbed my eyes and checked the time—nearly nine o’clock. The cleaning crew had already come and gone. The building had that hollow feeling it got after hours, all empty hallways and humming machines.
I saved my work and started gathering my things. Enough. I could finish this at home, away from this building and everything it reminded me of.
That’s when the lights went out.
No warning. No flicker. One second I was reaching for my bag, the newsroom bright and familiar around me. The next, absolute darkness swallowed everything.
I froze. The silence was immediate and complete—no hum of computers, no whir of the air conditioning, nothing except my own breathing, suddenly loud in my ears.
I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Couldn’t see the desk I’d been standing next to.
I couldn’t see anything at all.
My heart started pounding.
It’s just a power outage. The backup generator will kick in any second. Just wait.
I counted to ten. To twenty. To thirty.
Nothing happened. The darkness pressed against me, thick and heavy, like something with weight and intention.
I fumbled for my phone, my hands shaking so badly I nearly dropped it twice before I managed to turn on the flashlight. The thin beam cut through the black, but instead of helping, it made everything worse—shadows jumping at the edges, familiar shapes twisted into something threatening.
The desks looked wrong. The walls seemed closer. The ceiling felt like it was pressing down.
I hated the dark. I had always hated it since I was eight years old.
It came back the way it always did—not as a memory but as a sensation. The smell first.
Antiseptic and floor cleaner and something underneath both that I would later learn was grief, though I didn’t have the word for it then.
I was eight, and I was sitting in a plastic chair in a hospital corridor, and the chair was too big for me, my feet didn’t touch the ground, and no one had told me anything.
Adults moved past in soft shoes, speaking in voices they thought I couldn’t hear.
Both of them. The impact alone.
Someone made a phone call. Someone else brought a blanket I didn’t ask for. The fluorescent lights above me buzzed and flickered, and I stared at them because they were the only thing I could control—keeping my eyes open, keeping the light in.
Then a woman I didn’t know—a social worker, I think, though I didn’t know that word either—came and turned them off. “Try to sleep, sweetheart,” she said, and she meant well. I know that now.
But the darkness that fell when those lights went out was not the same darkness other children knew.
It was the darkness that meant my mother’s voice was never coming back.
It was the darkness that meant my father’s hands would never lift me again.
The darkness that ate parents whole and left their children sitting in plastic chairs with their feet dangling above the floor, waiting for someone to come and say it was a mistake.
It was just waiting and waiting in the black.
My grandma always found me in the dark. She’d just gathered me up, her arms strong and sure, and she said.
“I’m here now, baby girl. Grandma’s here.” And after that there would be a nightlight. Always a lamp left on. Something to push back against the thing that lived in the silence.
But there was nothing now. Just my phone’s weak beam and the shadows it couldn’t reach and the panic clawing its way up my throat.
Move. You have to move.