Let's Go

Jade

I had already decided I was leaving.

I had the excuse ready before Lena even opened her mouth. Early morning. Spring collection deadlines. My phone was already in my hand, so the departure looked natural and planned rather than what it actually was, which was the most controlled exit I had ever engineered in my life.

I had spent the last forty minutes sitting eight feet from Hayes Calloway, managing every breath I took and every direction my eyes moved and every muscle in my face that wanted to do something I could not afford to let it do. Forty minutes of that was my absolute limit. I was done. I was going home.

Then Lena turned to me with that warm, guileless smile of hers and said, “You’re coming to The Sterling with us, right?”

I looked at her.

She meant it genuinely. That was the thing about Lena that made the whole situation so much more complicated than it needed to be. She had no idea. She was sitting next to Hayes Calloway at a dinner she had arranged, glowing with happiness of a woman in the early stages of something she believed was going somewhere, and she wanted her friend there. It was as simple and as impossible as that.

“I have an early morning,” I said. I kept my voice easy. “Spring collection. I have a supplier call at seven, and I haven’t finished the notes for it.”

“Jade.” She made my name sound like a gentle objection.

“Seriously.” I smiled at her because she deserved a real smile, even when everything else in this room was costing me. “You don’t need me there. Go. Have a good time.”

She looked like she wanted to push back. I watched her weigh it, her eyes moving between me and something just past my shoulder, and then she seemed to decide against it.

The table had begun the slow dissolution that happens at the end of a good dinner. Chairs pushed back. Coats retrieved. The particular low hum of people deciding the order in which to say their goodbyes. I stayed in my seat and let it move around me, waiting for the right moment to stand and leave.

I was aware of Hayes the way you are aware of something at the edge of your vision. Not looking. Just aware. He had said nothing since his two-word response to Lena’s mention of my label. He sat with the stillness of someone who had no investment in how the evening ended, his posture unhurried, his expression the same composed blankness it had been since he walked in.

He had not looked at me once across the entire dinner.

Not once. Not even accidentally, the way people accidentally make eye contact across a table. I was sitting in his direct sightline for forty minutes, and he had looked through me every single time like there was nothing in that chair worth the effort of focusing on.

I pressed my thumbnail into my palm under the table and held it there.

Lena leaned toward him and said something I didn’t catch. He turned his head to listen, and something in the angle of it, the slight downward tilt of his chin toward her, the patience in it, turned something cold in my stomach.

Then he pushed his chair back and stood.

He didn’t make an announcement. He didn’t do anything as deliberate as that. He simply rose to his full height, adjusted the front of his jacket with one hand, and said to the table in general, “Let’s go,” in the same low even voice he used for everything, and then he turned toward the door.

He walked past my end of the table.

Close enough that I could have reached out and touched his sleeve the way I had three years ago outside the Whitmore Grand. Close enough that I was completely within his peripheral vision for the two seconds it took him to pass.

He did not glance down.

He did not pause.

He walked past me the way you walk past a chair, with the same level of awareness and the same level of consideration, and then he was at the door and then he was through it, and then he was gone.

Lena gathered her clutch and followed him with a quick apologetic smile thrown back at the table. The others began filtering out after them in ones and twos, a few of them stopping to say something brief and polite to me on their way out. Nice to see you. Love what you’re doing with Ellis Noir. We should catch up properly. The standard currency of evenings like this passed back and forth without much weight behind any of it.

I smiled and nodded and said the right things back.

And then the room was empty.

The private dining room at Ardsley held twelve people comfortably, and right now it held just me, sitting in the same chair I had been in all evening with my clutch on the table in front of me and the remnants of a dinner I had barely eaten spread across the white linen around me.

I did not move immediately.

The server came in and began the quiet business of clearing the table, and I let the sounds of it fill the room. Glasses lifted. Plates stacked. The soft industry of someone doing their job well and without fuss.

I looked at the empty chair beside Lena’s empty chair.

He had not looked at me once.

I do not know what I expected. I do not know why that particular fact landed the way it did when I had already survived the corridor three years ago, had already survived the number on his phone screen, had already survived every version of his indifference that he had offered me. I knew who Hayes Calloway was. I had known for three years exactly what I was worth to him.

Nothing. I was worth nothing to him.

And yet, sitting in that empty room with the city glittering uselessly outside the windows, I felt the specific exhaustion of a woman who had spent the last three years being completely certain she had moved on and discovered tonight that moving on and not caring were two entirely different things. I picked up my clutch, stood up, and left.