Chapter 3

CHAPTER THREE : Everything Gone

~Zella's POV~

The ceiling was wrong.

That was the first thing I noticed when I opened my eyes, the ceiling was wrong, the color was wrong, the light coming through the curtains was wrong, and the bed underneath me was too soft and too wide and smelled like hotel laundry detergent instead of anything familiar. I lay there for a full ten seconds just staring upward while my head throbbed in a slow, deliberate rhythm that felt like someone had installed a drum inside my skull overnight and left it running.

Then the memories started coming.

Not all at once. In pieces, the way embarrassing things always arrive, the phone call with Brynn, Cole's apartment, Dara's voice, the ring coming off my finger. The rain. The road. The cars. A black umbrella appearing above my head held by a man who stood in the downpour and got completely soaked so I wouldn't have to. A bar. Glasses I stopped counting. My own voice saying things I would not have said sober.

'Would you like to sleep with me? Just tonight.'

'Should we get a room?'

I pressed both hands over my face and made a sound that wasn't quite a groan and wasn't quite a word.

My hands flew down a second later, checking. Checking properly, the way you check when you need to know something your memory isn't giving you clearly. I was still in my clothes from yesterday, damp at the edges, wrinkled, but on. Nothing missing. Nothing wrong.

He hadn't touched me.

I lay there and let that settle. A stranger I had kissed at a bar and then basically begged to sleep with me had instead gotten a hotel room, put me in it, and apparently tucked me in and left without taking anything I'd offered. I remembered, vaguely and horribly, vomiting somewhere during the journey up here. I remembered his hand on my back holding me steady. I remembered him saying something low and calm that I couldn't make out anymore.

He had held my hair back while I was sick and then put me to bed and left.

'Please,' I thought, staring at the ceiling. 'Please let me never see that man again for as long as I live.'

Three knocks at the door interrupted that prayer before it was even finished.

I sat up too fast, winced, and said "come in" in a voice that sounded like gravel.

A hotel attendant entered carrying a small tray, a tall glass of hot water with honey and lemon, a folded card beside it. She set it on the bedside table and smiled at me like she saw hungover women in yesterday's clothes every morning of her life, which she probably did.

"The gentleman who brought you in last night asked us to prepare this for you when you woke," she said. "He settled the bill before he left and asked us to pass on that there's a change of clothes in the wardrobe."

I looked at the tray. Then at the wardrobe. Then back at the tray. "He.... he bought me clothes?"

"Yes, ma'am. Is there anything else you need?"

"No. Thank you."

She left quietly and I sat on the edge of the bed holding the warm glass with both hands, looking at the steam rising off it, thinking about a man whose name I didn't know buying clothes for a woman who had vomited on him and asked him to sleep with her twice. I thought about the prayer I had just finished making, that I would never see him again, and revised it slightly. Maybe running into him one more time wouldn't be the worst thing. Maybe thanking him was the bare minimum I owed a person who had done all of that without asking for anything back.

My phone lit up on the pillow beside me. Brynn.

'Girlie where are you?? You didn't pick up last night, I've been calling, are you okay???'

I picked it up and typed back slowly, my head still banging with every movement.

"Don't fly in. The wedding isn't happening."

I put the phone face down before she could reply and finished the tea. Then I opened the wardrobe.

He had bought a simple dress, dark green, the right kind of simple that could pass for intentional rather than emergency. There was a toothbrush still in its packaging, a small bottle of mouthwash, folded underwear with the tags still on. I stood there looking at all of it for a moment and felt something strange move through my chest that I didn't have a name for yet.

Then I got dressed, because whatever I was feeling, I still had a job to get to.

---

I knew something was wrong the moment I stepped off the lift.

The office floor had a particular sound on normal mornings, keyboards, low conversation, phones, the coffee machine running in the break room. Today it had a different sound. Quieter in some places, louder in others, and the specific quality of silence that falls when people stop talking because someone they were talking about just walked in.

I kept my head up and walked to my desk.

It had been cleared.

Not reorganized. Not tidied. Cleared, drawers emptied, monitor dark, the small framed photo I kept of Brynn and me from a holiday two years ago gone from the corner where it always sat. My chair had been pushed in at an angle that meant someone else had been sitting in it.

I stood there for a moment. Then I walked to Cole's office.

His PA, not Dara, someone else, someone I didn't recognize looked up and started to say something but I was already opening the door.

Cole was behind his desk. Dara was beside him, standing slightly behind his shoulder in a way that managed to be both casual and deliberate, like she had been practicing where to stand. They both looked at me when I came in and neither of them looked surprised.

"You cleared my desk," I said.

"Your access has been revoked." Cole leaned back in his chair. "As of this morning."

"You can't just.... Cole, I work here. I have been working here for three years."

"You worked here," he said. "That's finished now."

"Because of last night? Because I walked in on you and..."

"Security." He said it without raising his voice, like he was ordering coffee. "Can you come in, please?"

The door opened behind me. Two men I recognized from the lobby downstairs stepped inside and positioned themselves on either side of me without touching me yet, just present, just waiting.

I looked at Cole. At the complete absence of anything in his face, no guilt, no discomfort, nothing. Like I was nobody. Like I had always been nobody and he had simply stopped pretending otherwise.

"Cole." My voice was steady in a way that surprised me. "You're seriously doing this."

"I'd like you to leave now."

Dara moved then, stepping forward from behind his shoulder, and something about the deliberateness of it made my stomach tighten. She stopped in front of me, close enough that only I could hear her, and she smiled in a way that had nothing warm in it.

"Guess I'll be the one fulfilling your Christmas dream this year." She held her hand up between us. The ring on her finger caught the office light. My ring. The ring I had set on the dresser last night because throwing it felt like wasting energy I didn't have. "He put it on me this morning."

I looked at it for a long moment.

Then I looked at her face.

Then I turned around and walked out before the security guards could decide whether they were supposed to touch me, because I would not be dragged out of a place I had given three years of my life to, I would not give either of them that, I would walk out on my own two feet and I did.

---

I called my aunt from the pavement outside.

I don't know what I was expecting. Shock, maybe. Anger on my behalf. Something that sounded like family. I stood on the pavement with the phone pressed to my ear and listened to it ring and when she picked up I said, "Auntie, Dara is wearing my ring. Cole gave her my ring. Did you know about this? Did you know any of this was happening?"

There was a pause.

"And so?" Her voice was even, unbothered, the way it got when she had already made up her mind about something. "What exactly do you want me to do about it?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

"What did you do to that man, Zella, that he had to choose my daughter? You had six years. Six years and you couldn't keep him. That's not Dara's fault."

The pavement seemed to tilt slightly under my feet.

"She's your daughter," I said. "And she is my cousin. And she..."

"And Cole is a good man who deserves someone who can give him what he needs. Maybe you should be asking yourself why you weren't enough instead of calling here blaming other people."

The line went quiet.

I pulled the phone from my ear and looked at it for a moment. Then I put it in my pocket and just stood there, one hand pressed flat against my sternum like I could hold whatever was happening inside my chest in place if I pushed hard enough. It didn't work. Nothing felt held together. Everything felt exactly as loose and ruined as it was. I stood in the green dress a stranger had bought me and understood, very completely, that there was not a single person in my life right now, not Cole, not Dara, not my aunt, not anyone in that building behind me who was going to tell me I deserved better than this.