EPISODE 4

His office felt different with the door closed. Smaller. The city through the glass behind him looked less like a backdrop and more like an audience.

“She saw your text,” he said.

Amara had already guessed this. Still, hearing it said out loud arranged itself differently in her body. “Okay.”

“I am not angry at you. I want to be clear about that. I left my phone unlocked. That is on me.”

She looked at him. He looked tired in a way that was not about sleep. There were things behind his eyes that she did not have the context for because she did not have nine years of history with him. She had two months.

“What happens now,” she asked.

“I do not know.” He said it the same way she imagined he had said things to Shade. With the particular honesty of a man who had stopped pretending to have answers. “She and I have to have a real conversation. About what we are actually doing. I should have had it before now.”

“You told me it was not the end of the story.”

“I know what I said.”

“Did you mean it.”

He looked at her for a long moment. The kind of look that made her chest hurt. “Yes.”

“Then say that to her,” Amara said. “Whatever you decide, say the true thing. She deserves that. And so do I.”

She walked to the door. He did not stop her this time. She went back to her desk and finished her work with the focused, closed-off professionalism of someone who had learned very young how to function inside pain.

Tola left a chocolate bar on her desk without saying anything. Amara unwrapped it quietly and stared at her screen.

Whatever Dami Coker decided in the next few days was going to determine the shape of her next year. Maybe longer. And she had absolutely no control over any of it.

That night she lay in bed and thought about Shade’s face as she walked to the elevator. Composed. Hurting. Dignified.

Amara did not hate her. That was the complicated part.

She could not even manage it.

PREVIOUS EPISODE 3