Chapter 19
Elena
Thursday morning I arrive still carrying some of Wednesday with me.
I drop my bag, pull up my screen, send him the Singapore scheduling note I flagged last night, important, time-sensitive, the kind of thing that actually matters, and then I go to his door and knock.
“Good morning,” I say.
“Good morning,” he says. Correct. Level. The exact tone he uses for the rest of the building.
He looks back at his screen. I go back to my desk and think: okay. Fine. That’s fine.
I am possibly mixing up my reality and my fiction again.
I’ve been writing this story since before any of this started, Patrick and the version of me inside it, working through scenarios I was too anxious to let myself want in real life.
In the story we’re approaching the wedding.
I know that sounds unhinged. It is, a little.
It started as a coping mechanism and turned into something I genuinely love and now I can’t stop, and the problem is that the further it goes the harder it is to keep the two timelines from bleeding into each other.
Real Patrick says good morning in a normal tone and fictional Elena reads it as a sign of emotional withdrawal and bridal grief.
I need to get a grip.
He invited me to dinner. I said I couldn’t. That’s a thing that happened between two adults who have a clearly defined arrangement, and he was very polite about it, and now it’s Thursday and he’s being professionally courteous and there is nothing wrong here.
I send three emails. I update two calendars. I handle a question from HR with the focused efficiency of someone who has absolutely nothing on her mind.
The thing about yesterday is that I don’t regret it.
I’ve been turning that over since I woke up this morning, expecting to find the regret somewhere, waiting for the part where I feel guilty for choosing the audition over him.
But it’s not there. What’s there instead is something warmer and quieter and more mine, which is the memory of standing in a room downtown with ten other people, holding sides I’ve had memorized since Sunday, and saying Masha’s first line out loud.
The director’s name is Okonkwo. He’s thirty-two, intense, speaks almost entirely in questions during notes.
He watched me through the whole read with his hands pressed together under his chin and when I finished he said, who told you to do that with the last beat?
and I said no one and he said good and wrote something down and didn’t look up again.
I don’t know if I got it. I won’t know for a week, maybe two. But that’s not actually the point.
The point is that for forty minutes I was not weird, anxious, wrong-job Elena who sleeps on her sister’s couch and can’t manage an inbox.
I was Masha, and on stage it doesn’t feel like imitation, it feels like power.
It always has. The panic that stalks me in ordinary life has nowhere to go when I’m playing someone else.
The fear gets a script. The chaos gets timing.
I’d forgotten how completely it works, how entirely I disappear into it, and coming out the other side of the read felt like surfacing from water.
I didn’t get home until nearly ten. Nadia was already asleep, she’s been doing flower market runs starting at four, working herself into the ground for a contract she’s been chasing all quarter, and I didn’t wake her.
I just stood in the dark living room with my jacket still on and let the night settle over me and thought: I’m doing it.
It’s happening. Both things at once, the job and the work that actually matters, and I am not drowning in either of them.
She would have been proud of me.
She would have pointed out that she told me so about the sex-with-no-attachments thing.
She’s been saying for years that I get too attached, that I don’t know how to keep the emotional distance, that I need to learn to take something for what it is without turning it into a whole story.
And here I am, doing exactly that. Taking something for what it is.
She would have been insufferably smug about it and also genuinely proud, which is Nadia’s specific brand of love.
Thursday is fine. I can do Thursday.
I draft his eleven o’clock prep materials and leave them on his desk while he’s on a call, which is the clean way to do it, no conversation required, professionally correct, exactly how this floor worked before the hotel room and the way he touched me and held me like he didn’t want this to end.
That was two days ago. I am not thinking about it.
By the time he comes out for his twelve-thirty, I’ve handled the Singapore time-zone scheduling conflict, moved two calendar items, and composed an email to Bergamo in language that sounds considerably more like Patrick than like me, which at this point is just a skill I have.
He takes the prep materials without comment. He nods once. He goes back in.
A nod and silence. That’s the whole day.
I eat lunch at my desk and I read through the sides again, just to have something to do with my brain that isn’t this floor.
Friday.
I come in Friday already in a slightly different mood, which I recognize as a warning sign and choose to ignore.
I’m wearing the blue dress again, the one from Wednesday, because it went well on Wednesday and I believe in wearing things that go well.
I bring coffee. I am going to be professionally excellent and privately unconcerned and the weeks of almost-daily sex we had are going to remain exactly what they were.
He’s already in when I arrive.
I know because the light under his office door is on. He came in before I did, which is not unusual for Patrick, but this particular Friday it registers differently, the way things register when you’re paying too much attention to someone’s patterns without admitting that you’re paying attention.
Good morning, I say to his closed door, internally.
By noon he hasn’t come out.
By two he’s sent me three messages, all work, all the exact tone he uses for everything and everyone in this company.
I sit with this for a minute. I examine it carefully, the way you examine a mole you’ve had since birth that might look slightly different today. I ask myself: is it different, or am I looking at it differently because of Wednesday? Is he being distant or am I being sensitized?
The answer I arrive at, after honest examination, is: both, probably. He is being slightly more careful than usual, slightly more contained. And I am reading it as punishment, which may or may not be accurate but is definitely how it feels.
I don’t like how it feels.
By four o’clock I’ve started cataloguing evidence the way I do when I’m pretending not to spiral.
Yesterday’s good morning versus today’s silence.
The door that hasn’t opened once for a non-work purpose.
The three messages, all functional. The specific absence of the look he gives me when he’s standing in the doorway thinking I’m not watching.
He’s keeping his distance. Carefully. Politely. With a precision that feels, if I am being honest, like someone who knows exactly what they’re doing.
I close my laptop at five on the dot, which I never do.
I put my jacket on, I pick up my bag, and I walk to the elevator without stopping by his office.
I have done that every single day since my first week here, said goodbye, a small professional nothing, two words.
Today I don’t, the elevator doors close and I stare at my own reflection in the polished metal. I am furious.
Not the quiet kind. The kind that sits in your chest like a coal, specific and hot and completely clear about its origin.
He asked me to dinner and I said no. I was right to say no.
I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
I have nothing to apologize for, not one single thing, and if he is punishing me for it by turning back into the man he was before any of this started, cold, contained, professionally correct, perfectly managed, then he can go straight to hell with that.
That is not what I signed up for. That is not what I said yes to. And I am not going to stand at his office door like I owe him an explanation for having a life that exists outside this building, outside him, outside the box I built to keep us both safe.
The lobby rushes past. The street outside is cold and bright and indifferent.
I walk into it still furious but underneath the furious there is something else, something softer and worse that I am absolutely not looking at, because looking at it would require me to admit that the reason I’m this angry is that I care whether he looks at me, but I told him I didn’t, and I need that to still be true.