Chapter 3 - The Number No Longer in Service
Nico called back eleven times.
I answered none of them.
On the twelfth, I turned the phone off.
For nearly three years, Nico’s name lighting my screen had meant everything stopped.
Dinner.
Work.
Sleep.
Friends.
Once, I left a dentist’s chair halfway through a cleaning because one of his men told me Nico had been injured.
Another time, I stood in the freezing rain outside a private club for forty minutes because he said he would be “five minutes.”
He came out forty-seven minutes later.
I hadn’t complained.
Now his calls accumulated unanswered.
Eleven red notifications.
I stared at them.
Then I deleted the entire call history.
It was a small act.
It felt enormous.
Elena came by that evening carrying groceries, shampoo, toothpaste, and enough suspicion to interrogate anyone who approached the hallway.
“You need towels,” she announced.
“I have one.”
“You need more than one towel to rebuild your life.”
“I’ll write that on a pillow.”
She looked around.
“This place is terrible.”
“It’s perfect.”
“The refrigerator sounds haunted.”
“It has personality.”
“The lock is questionable.”
I stopped smiling.
Elena noticed.
“Did he find you?”
I nodded.
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you scared?”
That question was complicated.
Was I scared of Nico?
No.
Was I scared of what happened to my identity when he entered a room?
Yes.
“I don’t think he’d hurt me.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
I looked away.
Elena sat beside me.
“You can love someone and still need distance from them.”
“I know.”
“You can miss him and still stay gone.”
That one hurt.
“I know.”
“And if he comes here?”
“I’ll decide what I want.”
“Good.”
She handed me a toothbrush.
“Now rebuild your empire.”
My empire began with a résumé.
It was humiliating.
I opened an old email account and found the last résumé I had used three years earlier.
Norah Bennett.
Junior commercial interiors strategist.
Two promotions in four years.
Project management certification.
Recommendations from clients.
Software qualifications I had nearly forgotten.
I stared at the woman described on the page.
She sounded busy.
Ambitious.
Useful.
I remembered her.
I had been twenty-six when I met Nico.
He had walked into a hotel renovation site I was helping manage because his investment company owned part of the property.
He wore a charcoal suit.
No tie.
No introduction.
Everyone around him seemed to know who he was.
I didn’t.
“You’re standing where a wall goes,” I told him.
He looked behind himself.
“There’s no wall.”
“There will be Monday.”
He stepped aside.
That was how it started.
Later, he told me nobody spoke to him like that.
I said maybe he needed better friends.
He laughed.
For the first year, Nico loved that I challenged him.
By the third, I had stopped challenging anyone.
When had that happened?
There was no single day.
That was the danger.
People imagine losing themselves happens dramatically.
It doesn’t.
Sometimes it happens through a thousand reasonable choices.
Dinner canceled because he was late.
A work trip declined because he might need you.
A friend ignored because your partner dislikes being alone.
A promotion refused because travel would create problems.
Eventually, your life becomes a room built around someone else.
And you forget you were ever the architect.
By midnight, my résumé was updated.
At 8:00 the next morning, I submitted nine applications.
At 9:15, Nico arrived at the weekly rental.
I knew it was him before he knocked.
Three soft taps.
Nobody else knocked like Nico.
Controlled.
Patient.
Certain the door would open.
I remained seated.
Another knock.
“Norah.”
My heart reacted before my mind.
A painful, stupid rush.
I crossed the room but did not open the door.
“What do you want?”
“To see you.”
“You found me. Congratulations.”
“Open the door.”
There it was.
The command.
I closed my eyes.
“No.”
Silence.
Then, softer, “Please.”
Nico did not say please.
Almost ever.
I leaned my forehead against the door.
“Why are you here?”
“I want you home.”
“You already said that.”
“You belong—”
He stopped himself.
Too late.
My eyes opened.
“I belong where?”
Another silence.
“That came out wrong.”
“No, Nico. It came out exactly the way you think.”
“I didn’t mean what you heard.”
I laughed once.
“You didn’t know I was there.”
“I was talking to Arthur.”
“Yes.”
“I was angry.”
“At what?”
He had no immediate answer.
That was because he hadn’t been angry with me.
He had been protecting his pride from a friend who dared imply he needed someone.
“You meant it when you said it.”
“I don’t.”
“Now.”
My voice cracked despite my effort to control it.
“You don’t mean it now.”
“Norah—”
“What were you going to do Friday?”
Silence.
“Tell me.”
“What?”
“You said you’d forget my name by Friday. What were you going to do? Wake up and suddenly not remember who slept beside you for three years?”
His breathing became audible through the door.
“You want me to say I was an idiot?”
“No.”
“Cruel?”
“No.”
“Then tell me what you want.”
“I want you to understand why I left without making me explain it until my pain becomes convenient for you.”
The hallway remained silent.
Then he said, “You left your ring.”
I looked at my bare hand.
It wasn’t an engagement ring.
Nico never proposed.
It was a diamond band he had given me after our second anniversary.
“Everything you bought me stayed.”
“Why?”
“You really don’t know?”
“Tell me.”
I swallowed.
“Because if I took any of it, you would tell yourself I left with something.”
He said nothing.
“I needed you to see that I left with less than I had before I met you.”
That landed.
I heard it in the silence.
Finally, Nico said, “Can I see your face?”
My hand touched the lock.
For one dangerous second, I almost opened it.
Then I remembered the woman in the oven reflection.
Pale.
Quiet.
Invisible.
“No.”
He exhaled.
“All right.”
I waited for anger.
It didn’t come.
“I’ll go.”
His footsteps moved away.
I stood behind the door until they disappeared.
Then I looked through the peephole.
Nico walked alone toward the stairs.
No guards visible.
No threats.
No pounding on the door.
He left.
I should have felt relieved.
Instead, I slid down against the door and cried.
Because leaving someone you no longer love is one thing.
Leaving someone you still love because staying is destroying you is another.
Across the street, inside a black sedan, Arthur watched Nico emerge from the building.
Nico entered the passenger side.
Arthur studied him.
“How bad?”
Nico stared through the windshield.
“She wouldn’t open the door.”
Arthur started the engine.
Nico didn’t move.
Finally, he said, “Cancel everyone following her.”
Arthur looked at him.
“Everyone?”
“She knows.”
“Knows what?”
“That I found the number. The room. Everything.”
“That is what you do.”
Nico looked at him.
“No. That’s what I do to people I consider problems.”
Arthur understood.
“And she isn’t one.”
Nico turned toward the building one last time.
“No.”
For once, he said it correctly.
“She’s someone I hurt.”
Arthur drove away.
But neither man noticed the gray sedan parked half a block behind them.
Inside it, another man lowered his camera.
He had photographed Nico entering my building.
He had photographed him leaving.
Then he sent the images to someone saved in his phone under a single initial.
R.
The reply came immediately.
May you like
So that’s where she is.
---
