The Man I Used to Forget Love CHAPTER 2

The words were ice. She watched them land.

“You’re throwing away everything we built because of one night?”

“I’m throwing away the lie. Everything else was already gone. I just didn’t see it until your hands were in her hair.”

He reached for her. She stepped back.

“Don’t.”

He dropped his hand.

“I love you,” he said. The words sounded practiced, as though he had rehearsed them in the elevator. “I’ve always loved you. Jessica was..stress. The pressure of the partnership. I didn’t know how to handle it.”

“You handled it by buying her diamonds with money we didn’t have while telling me we couldn’t afford a better ring.”

Silence stretched. Somewhere down the hall a door closed. A distant siren rose and fell.

Liam’s shoulders sagged. For the first time since she had found them, the calculation was gone entirely. What remained looked like a man who had finally understood the size of the thing he had broken.

“I don’t know how to fix this,” he said.

“You don’t.”

She began to close the door. His hand came up, not quite touching the wood.

“Rica. Please. Don’t end us like this.”

She looked at him really looked for the last time. The man she had once believed would be the architecture of her life. The man who had taken every quiet sacrifice and spent it elsewhere.

“It ended the moment you chose her over the truth,” she said. “I’m only making it official.”

The door closed. The lock clicked. She stood there with her head resting against the cool wood and listened to the sound of his footsteps as he walked away. It was not until the sound of the elevator’s chiming and the opening and closing of the doors left her in total silence that she could breathe.

She walked back to the bed. Outside, the city went on without her, cold and oblivious. She read the three words that she had typed on her phone in the middle of the night before.

Never again.

And then she wrote a fourth line after it, each letter written out with finality.

The woman who waited has disappeared. The woman who remained is now free.

It started to rain outside, the rain drops making their way down the glass. In this empty room, Rica Bloom sat quietly for the first time in five years.

Not the future she had planned.

Something better.

Something hers.

Three weeks ago Rica Bloom found herself standing in the all-glass conference room at Whitestone Capital pretending that her hands weren’t shaking.

The city below through the floor-to-ceiling glass appeared cleaner at this distance, the East River a narrow ribbon of pewter beneath September’s late afternoon sky. Inside the air was redolent of polished wood, cold coffee, and that subtle metallic scent of ambition. She had come in forty minutes early, just as she always did – early enough to commit the floor plan to memory, and the name of each office, and the cadence of the assistants who walked with the grace of survivors. The position was temporary: executive assistant to the CEO while his full-time assistant healed from her surgery. Her agency had called it an “out-of-area assignment.” Rica had referred to it as survival. Rent was due. The nights at the hotel were eating into her dwindling reserve of cash. She couldn’t afford pride any more.

Her charcoal sheath dress, which had been purchased second-hand from an expensive boutique, was smooth against the front of her body; she had flattened it out the previous night. She saw herself reflected in the glass – she looked together and put-together, but the woman reflected inside the glass was still walking on thin ice above deep waters.

Derrick White stepped into the room exactly at nine o’clock, as if the building itself had been waiting on him. Tall and dark, he had the kind of haircut that only men who served in the military had. A suit that likely cost more money than her last six months combined. His eyes were like winter water, both clear and cold. He didn’t smile. He didn’t even shake her hand. He merely looked at her with the same expression one looks at a balance sheet.

"Ms. Bloom, you’re early."

"I like to be prepared, Mr. White."

“Good.” He set a slim folder on the table between them. The movement was economical, exact. “Then prepare yourself for the fact that I do not tolerate excuses, surprises, or emotional displays in this office. You will anticipate what I need before I ask. You will keep my schedule airtight. You will not gossip, flirt, or attempt to impress me with personal stories. Clear?”

“Crystal.”

Something flickered across his face almost interest. Almost. The corner of his mouth tightened, then smoothed. “The previous temporary assistant lasted four days. The one before that lasted six. Do better.”

“I intend to.”

He studied her for another three seconds, the kind of scrutiny that felt like being weighed and measured without consent. Then he turned to the wall of windows overlooking the East River. “My nine-thirty is the Chen acquisition. Brief me.”

She was precise, without the chatty fluff that had doomed the previous two temps. She had stayed awake all night reading through all the publicly available information, all the rumors and analyst reports in the secure computer the agency provided her with. Once she finished, Derrick gave her a nod - that was all the approval she would get this morning - and left her with a pile of contracts and the very distinct feeling of having made it through a storm while standing absolutely still.

By Friday she had made it through five days. By Wednesday of the next week, ten days. Derrick White turned out to be exactly what he was supposed to be: cold, exacting, not interested in the private affairs of anyone he employed. He never inquired about how she spent her weekends. He never remarked on the dark circles under her eyes or the flat tone when she mentioned some names.He simply expected excellence and received it. She learned the cadence of his days the way other people learned the weather: the early calls to Hong Kong, the mid-morning silences when he stared at the river as if it owed him answers, the late afternoons when the door to his office stayed closed and the air outside it grew thin with tension.

She picked up lessons unintentionally as well. Like how one time, when a junior associate brought him some not-so-good news, his left hand twitched. Like how even though he never shouted at anyone, entire spaces fell silent whenever he spoke. Like how once, when she handed him a new term sheet and their fingers touched ever so slightly, he paused in his tracks for half a second as if she had been an unpredictable factor in an equation.

Then, suddenly, on the eleventh day, when everyone had gone home and all there were left were the noises made by the vacuuming and elevators and cleaning crews, he called for her to come into his office.

“Sit down.”

She did. It was an expensive leather chair, warm from the person who’d been in it before. Derrick stood, keeping his hands in his pockets, looking down at her steadily. Lights from the city could be seen pricking the windows behind him. He seemed like a man who would own the view and be contemplating giving it to the person in front of him.

“I know who you are.”