Chapter 13: The excuse hurts
The vibration against her hip was a violent shock, a physical intrusion into the haze of the dinner rush. Alice stood in the narrow corridor between the dining room and the kitchen, a tray of dirty dishes balanced precariously in one hand. The buzz was persistent, demanding. She knew, with a sinking, heavy feeling in her gut, who it was.
She set the tray down on a passing busboy's station with a clatter that was too loud, drawing a sharp look from the line cook. Ignoring him, she dug into her apron pocket and pulled out her phone. The screen lit up with a name that had once made her heart race and now just made it seize.
Heath.
She swiped to answer, bringing the phone to her ear, expecting a whisper, a secret summons, a teasing request to meet him in the cellar. Instead, she was greeted by the cold, tinny sound of a pre-recorded message. Her heart hammered a frantic rhythm against her ribs.
"Alice," his voice came through the speaker, clipped and devoid of the warmth she craved. It was his Supervisor Voice. The one he used for inventory meetings and firing staff. "We need to stop this. It's... it's affecting everything. You're not giving your best. I've watched you over the last week. You're distracted, messy. You're not yourself anymore. I can't... I can't do this anymore. It's over. Don't call me. Don't come by the office. We're done."
The line went dead.
Alice stood frozen in the middle of the corridor, the phone still pressed to her ear. The silence that followed was louder than the shout she wanted to scream. She flinched as if he had slapped her, her teeth gritting so hard her jaw ached. Not giving her best? Messy? Not herself?
He had broken up with her via a thirty-second voicemail. During her shift. Using a performance review as an excuse.
Anger flared, hot and bright, trying to burn away the ice-cold hurt. She shoved the phone back into her pocket, her hand trembling. He wanted to talk about her work? About her being "drained"? He had no idea. He had absolutely no idea what it took to drag herself out of bed every day, to plaster on a smile, to serve people like Gareth while carrying the weight of a secret affair that was slowly crushing her soul.
She picked up the tray again, her knuckles white. She wouldn't cry. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction. If he wanted to play the distant boss, fine. She would be the distant employee. She would be a ghost.
The days that followed were a gray blur of exhaustion and enforced distance. Heath avoided her at work, his dark eyes skittering away from hers whenever their paths crossed in the narrow hallway or near the POS terminal. He was professional to a fault—cold, efficient, maddeningly polite. It was a stark contrast to the man who had held her in the wine cellar, who had marked her neck in the bathroom. That man felt like a hallucination.
But she felt the distance too. It wasn't just him. She felt like she was floating outside her own body, watching herself move through the motions of living. She went home, she slept—if the nightmares and the racing thoughts allowed her—she woke up, and she did it all over again. The spark, the wild energy that had defined her early twenties, had been extinguished, buried under layers of guilt and confusion.
