PART TWO

Outside, the city moved around her as though nothing had happened.

Taxis idled at the curb. A man shouted into his phone. Somewhere above her, forty floors up, a man she had loved for three years was standing in a room that still smelled faintly of her handwriting, and none of the people hurrying past her knew. She stood on the pavement and let the cold air fill her lungs.

Her phone rang. It was her oldest friend.

"Well? Did you actually do it?"

"I resigned."

A long silence. "Are you okay?"

Mia looked up at the glass tower, bright and enormous in the afternoon sun. She thought of his cold voice and his gray eyes, and the careful way he'd said by me. Then she looked down the street.

"I will be."

"So what now?"

"I have no idea."

"You don't sound scared."

"I'm terrified." She laughed, surprising herself. "But maybe it's better than staying somewhere that makes me small."

"Mia," her friend said slowly. "You've been talking about starting something of your own since I met you."

"I know."

"So do it."

She adjusted the strap of her bag. For the first time the idea didn't feel like a dream she was allowed to look at but never touch. "Maybe I will."

She ended the call and started walking. She didn't know where it would lead. She didn't know whether she would succeed, or whether she would ever see Alexander Vale again. But she knew she couldn't spend her life waiting for a man to decide whether she was worthy.

She had spent three years standing behind someone else's success. She wanted something that belonged to her.

,

At six o'clock, the temp left, and the floor went quiet.

Alexander sat alone in his office with the binder open in front of him. Everything was in order. Everything was exactly where Mia had left it, and still something was wrong, and it took him a moment to work out what.

He reached for his coffee, and his hand closed on nothing.

The cup had never been there. The temp had brought one at seven forty-five, and it had been wrong, a little too hot and slightly sweet, and he had pushed it aside. That was nine hours ago.

He sat looking at the empty space on the blotter.

Usually, when he needed something, he could say her name through the open door and she would answer. He knew exactly how it sounded, the quick small yes? from the next room, a tablet already in her hand.

"Mia."

He hadn't meant to say it aloud. The word dropped into the quiet and disappeared.

No one answered.

He looked at the door. For three years she had always answered. He had never once wondered what the sound of it was worth.

He picked up his phone and found her name. His thumb hovered over the screen, and he realized he had no idea what he would say. I'm sorry was too small, and come back was not something a man like him said.

He set the phone down.

It was only then, in the silence, that he understood something he had spent years refusing to look at. She had never simply been his assistant. She had been the person who held his life together, and he had let her walk out of it without once asking her to stay.

,

That night, Mia sat at her small dining table with a notebook open in front of her, the same kind she had carried for three years. On the first page she wrote a single question.

What do I want for myself?

She looked at it for a long time. Then she began to write, and none of it was about Alexander, or Vale International, or the life she'd lost. It was about herself: the things she loved, the things she was good at, the things she could build.

For the first time in years, the future belonged only to her.

She had no idea how far she could go. But she was finally ready to find out.