It was over faster than I expected.
Something had been alive inside me, and now it wasn’t. The emptiness was suffocating.
I’d told myself I wouldn’t cry. My body didn’t listen.
It was dark by the time I left the clinic.
My phone wouldn’t stop buzzing. Graham.
My rideshare driver called at the same time.
I picked up the driver’s call.
Five minutes later, I was in the car.
My phone lit up again. Graham.
It hit me that this was the first time I’d ever ignored his call.
When I finally picked up, his voice was even. Almost. There was something strained underneath.
“Where are you?”
“What do you need?”
He exhaled.
“This morning, I was out of line. I’m sorry.”
Graham, apologizing. That was new.
But then his voice shifted, and there it was: the real reason he’d called.
“I need you back at the office tonight. The Apex account blew up, and Camille doesn’t know the first thing about it. I’ve never handled the field side. You have. Walk her through it.”
“I’ll have HR reinstate you first thing tomorrow morning. Same salary we talked about.”
“No, thank you, Mr. Whitaker.”
“I don’t work for you anymore. Find someone else.”
A pause. Then his voice dropped, low and careful.
“Mara. Come on. Stop this.”
“If it’s about the commission, I’ll talk to Camille. Fifty-fifty split. That work?”
“No.”
Dead air.
“Have you already lined something up? Because any company that hires you is going to figure out you’re pregnant, and then you’ll see how fast they find a reason to let you go. You’re better off here.”
A threat disguised as advice.
I smiled to myself.
“That’s not your problem anymore.”
Any trace of warmth drained out of his voice.
“You know me, Mara. If you make this messy, you’re the one who gets hurt.”
I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror. Pale. Hollow.
But my eyes were steady.
“Graham. Do you honestly think you know me?”
“I held back because I chose to. Not because I couldn’t hit back.”
“Every time I went along with you, that was my choice.”
“So who the hell do you think you are to me now?”
He hung up. Exactly like I knew he would.
It still felt good to say.
The first thing I did when I got home was change the door code and delete his fingerprint.
His ego would keep him away after what I said. I knew that much.
But I couldn’t live with knowing he could still walk in whenever he wanted.
I spent the next week in bed.
I hired someone through an app to cook and keep the place from falling apart.
Most days I just pointed the projector at the bedroom wall and watched movies until I fell asleep.
Nobody knew how much I loved movies.
For me, they’d always been a luxury.
I grew up broke. Lost both my parents young. Some semesters I couldn’t even cover textbooks.
In college, it was either a part-time shift or the library. There was no in-between.
Then came Graham.
Entry-level pay, manager-level work.
Even the relationship, five years of it, had felt more like an arrangement than a love story.
I kept my phone on silent the entire week.
I didn’t check my messages until the day the cook’s last shift ended.
A week out, and my old coworkers were messaging me more than they ever had when I sat ten feet away.
I opened them one by one.
Almost every single one was a complaint.
Camille was power-tripping. An intern forgot to refill her water bottle once, and she held up the kid’s placement paperwork out of spite.
Nobody could find her during work hours.
Someone on maternity leave spotted her getting her nails done at a high-end mall in the middle of a Tuesday.
When she couldn’t prep for meetings, she made the entire department pull all-nighters until they dumbed the material down enough for her.
She refused every site visit, citing a headache, bad weather, allergies, or whatever excuse was handy.
Eventually she pulled the Sutton family card, and Graham had to go out to the sites himself.
I actually laughed out loud at that one.
The cook glanced over. It was the first time she’d seen me laugh, and something in her face softened.
She wasn’t the chatty type, but on her way out she stopped at the door.
“Honey, all those movies? You’re going to wreck your eyes.”
“And don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re too young to be cooped up in here all day. Get some fresh air. It’ll do you good.”
Something shifted in me.
After she left, I opened a travel photo on my phone. One click led to another, and I was up past midnight, scrolling through photos of the Pacific Northwest, somewhere I’d never been.
I booked the flight before I could talk myself out of it.
No more waiting for someone else’s light to find me.
I was going to find my own.