Interlude 3
Mia’s Tale: reception knows all
It’s not every day you meet someone and just know. Not love-at-first-sight know. Not even soulmate know. That’s Hollywood junk. But know, like this one’s going to matter.
There are very few people I let into the messy corners of my life.
Alicia King somehow slipped in without knocking.
She’d walked into Tommo over two months ago, looking like a porcelain vase someone had dropped and carefully glued back together.
The kind of quiet that doesn’t ask for pity and the kind of pain that doesn’t whine.
I knew that look: I’d seen it in the mirror after Talia’s dad passed suddenly, and I was left with a three-month-old and a broken soul .
But Alicia? She didn’t crumble or rage: she walked in, soaking wet, shoes destroyed.
Nodded at the cactus and asked for the staff Wi-Fi code, and I liked her immediately.
I didn’t ask questions, not then. You can always tell the difference between people who are fragile and people who’ve been forged through shit.
Alicia’s pain was the second kind. Still healing, sure, but she had that pilot spine under the surface: that need to chart her own way back, even if it was stormy.
So when she dragged me to that lingerie store, cheeks pink, babbling about “enhancement” and “armor,” I knew.
Knew it wasn’t just about lace and satin, or about finding something to wear under her sweater—it was about remembering there was still someone under her scars.
She’d tried to play it off, all jokes and fake emergencies, but I’d seen that look before.
In mirrors, in post-breakup brunches, and finally in women who are preparing themselves to be seen again after being invisible, or broken, for too long.
She hadn’t said his name. She didn’t have to.
I’d been at Tommo long enough and seen the glances: the ghost of a smirk from the IT room and the way Paul-fucking-Andersen suddenly took longer coffee breaks and checked the front desk more often than network diagnostics required.
And I’d seen the way she pretended she didn’t notice—except she did, because she noticed everything—that was her curse and her superpower.
He was charming, sure: that mix of old soul and boyish recklessness that made women forgive him too fast. And he’d had his office stories: short ones, fun and forgettable ones; the closed doors and longer silences.
But he looked at Alicia differently. Like he was trying to memorize her before someone took her away, it seemed she wasn’t just a chapter.
Still… I worried. Because I saw her and him, and I just couldn’t tell yet if it was real or if it was just different—if he was the storm or the eye of it.
There was a difference: one took you whole and never let go, the other just delayed the wreckage.
I hoped he knew which one he was playing at, because Alicia wasn’t like the others: she was made of sharp things—and soft things.
She was the only woman I’d met who could crack a joke with half her body still remembering pain.
She was treating fear like a muscle: something she was slowly training back into strength.
It was hard to make friends when you were a single mom, and harder still to find the kind of friend who didn’t just listen, but saw and let you be messy and kind, and furious in the same sentence.
Alicia never once asked me to pretend, so I wouldn’t start now.
I worried because when women like her fell, they didn’t just scrape their knees—they fell hard, breaking their souls.
But, in the end, they didn’t bounce back; they transformed.
And I knew what it cost to come out the other side.
So yeah, I’d stand by her. I’d pick out lingerie and order two lattes and joke about garter belts and rogue cactuses.
But I’d also keep my eyes open, because Paul Andersen might not know it yet, but he was standing in front of someone he’d only meet once in his goddamn life.
And I really, really hoped he didn’t fuck it up.