Chapter Text
The passing of days after was a strange kind of grief. There was no great rupture, no clean before and after — just time, slow and stubborn, pressing forward until the concept of time blurred. The city kept its pulse. Seasons circled like clock hands. And still, sometimes, it would all come back without warning.
Not sharp — not something that bled — but slow and corrosive, like rust creeping over something once bright.
Two years passed, and somehow they did and didn’t.
You told yourself that you’d made the right choice. That walking away was the only way to reclaim whatever fragments of yourself had survived the wreckage of Alchemax. That staying would’ve meant losing the parts of you that still believed in truth.
Time had a way of softening everything. It dulled the color, blurred off the edges of memories. But it didn’t erase the way she felt. That stayed, buried somewhere under everything else.
But some nights, alone in sterile hotel rooms or in transit between one lab and the next, you’d catch yourself wondering if it could have been different.
If you had stayed.
If the two of you could have communicated.
If there had been something left to save.
You never let yourself linger on the thought for too long.
Instead, you and Grant Sen came to an agreement.
The work was transient, demanding, and beautifully consuming. You could disappear into it — become a machine of productivity.
It took on its own rhythm. Grant Sen’s lab became a revolving door of brilliance and chaos, the kind of place that demanded pieces of you without apology. You took it willingly. Contract work, short bursts of intensity — it suited you. It meant you could leave when you needed to, stay when you wanted to. You liked the freedom in that. Freedom to move. Freedom to vanish. Freedom to say no without the taste of guilt burning your tongue.
You traveled. Cities blurred. Airports became confessions. You learned the art of solitude in hotel rooms — how to fold yourself into the quiet, how to exist without checking who might follow your work, your name, your presence. Some nights, the light of a television would flicker against the ceiling and you’d wonder, for a second, who was watching you from another part of the world. But you never said his name. You stopped letting it burn a hole through you.
Life, as it intended to, kept unfolding. New lessons, hard truths. There were changes. You stopped pretending that you didn’t need help. It started small — a conversation, a phone number scribbled on a napkin. It felt like a sin, a taboo; sitting between some four walls. Your issues felt trivial. You didn’t return for nearly a month after a particularly rough session. But then you realized not addressing it felt more like failure than baring your deepest personable secrets and flaws.
Becoming a better person was never said to be easy.
You just went. You talked until the words came out less like fire and more like something human. You learned to sit in discomfort without letting it define you. And when that didn’t work, you started journaling again, though you didn’t call it that. Notes, phrases, fragments. Sometimes you wrote down thoughts you couldn’t say aloud. Things like: I am allowed to be uncertain. Or trust isn’t a promise, it’s a practice. Or I don’t like the person I’ve become. You didn’t realize at first how much of your handwriting trembled, how many times you crossed out the word safe before you left it on the page.
Life, as most knew it, grew busier. There were new places, new faces. Everywhere and nowhere, all at once.
Your name started to echo — quiet at first, then steady. Papers cited, invitations extended, interviews requested. The kind of recognition you used to chase in your career but now regarded as something dangerous. You learned that ambition could be tender, too. That it didn’t have to consume you to be real.
And it felt good sometimes.
Fulfilling. Satisfactory.
You stopped trying to find information about Project Genesis. Every attempt to find mention led nowhere — every inquiry, every favor called in, met with polite dismissal, uncomfortable silence or complete confusion. Lydia was your only connection and you were too unsure to ask. It wasn’t your business.
Oh, Lydia. Heartbroken to hear of the broken engagement, but still determined to have you attend the wedding. A friendship that bloomed from a sham of an engagement was the most ironic thing ever. Maybe one day you’d tell her the truth. .
You never asked about Miguel directly. You didn’t have to.
His shadow lingered in every conversation anyway.
Still, as months folded into a year, and the world shifted beneath your feet, you found yourself changing in ways you hadn’t expected.
You got better at saying no.
You learned to enjoy your own company again.
You discovered new things — how to cook on an induction stove, how to find comfort in noise, how to be content in silence—
How to stand up for yourself and say enough is enough.
You stopped waking up angry. That felt like progress.
But grief had a way of looping back on itself — quiet, circular.
There were moments it still found you. Late nights, the hum of a foreign city outside your window, the empty side of a bed that hadn’t felt like his in a long time. Sometimes you dreamed about him — never clear, never kind. Just the outline of his shape, the familiar weight of his voice saying your name like it meant something again. You’d wake up with that ache in your chest, raw and useless. You’d try to shake it off, tell yourself you were over it.
You weren’t. Not really.
But it was okay. The ache grew quieter.
It became something you learned to live around, like an old injury that only hurt when it rained.
Manageable.
You’d started consulting for academic labs, taking guest lectures when you could. Your reputation grew faster than you could keep up with. There were headlines now — interviews, recognition, quiet admiration. The kind of things you used to think would fill the hole he left behind.
They didn’t.
You told yourself that this was what growth felt like — uneven, uncomfortable, occasionally lonely.
You told yourself that love, in its truest form, wasn’t supposed to destroy you. That walking away from someone didn’t always mean you stopped caring.
And maybe that was the hardest part to reconcile:
You loved him.
You knew that now.
You would probably always love him — in a way that was inconvenient and unfixable and too real to ever completely vanish.
But you couldn’t trust him.
And that was the end of it.
Some truths are too sharp to touch twice.
By the time two years had passed, the world had reshaped itself around your absence. You were no longer the woman who left New York in a haze of betrayal and heartbreak. You were steadier now. Calmer. Still a little lonely, but no longer lost, nor angry.
One late evening, an email found you.
The sender’s name made your pulse skip.
You didn’t need to open the details to know what it meant — who would be there.
Who you’d have to face again.
You sat there for a long time, staring at the glowing screen as the sun sank behind the city. Your reflection hovered faintly over the text, a ghost of yourself caught between then and now.
You thought about the last time you saw him — the distance, the silence, the look in his eyes when he realized what he’d broken.
And then you thought about the woman you’d become since.
You took a breath.
The cursor blinked.
Outside, the day slipped quietly into night.
You didn’t know if you’d accept.
You didn’t know what you’d say if you did.
All you knew was that, after two years, the quiet between you was no longer empty.
It was full — of everything you couldn’t say, everything you’d learned, and everything that might still be waiting on the other side of that door. You smiled, but it wasn’t triumph. It was something else. Something gentler.
There was version of you who once stood beside him would’ve never believed you’d make it here on your own.
You began typing a response:
Hi! Thank you for reaching out to me. I’d love to headline this year’s Nexus—
𒌐𒌐𒌐
The Nexus looked different now. Sleeker. Colder. Its new atrium stretched three stories high, sunlight pouring through its glass ceiling and scattering across polished floors. Everything was too clean, too deliberate — like the place had tried to scrub away any trace of what had come before.
She stood near the edge of the main floor, half-hidden behind a suspended display of holographic prototypes. She was the name on everyone’s tongue, the keynote scientist whose work was reshaping her field. The irony of it didn’t escape her. Two years ago, she’d have given anything to be seen this way. Now, it felt strange. Like wearing someone else’s skin.
She’d arrived early, too early maybe. The hum of conversation rose around her — investors, engineers, journalists, all dressed in that sharp, glassy way people did when they wanted to look important. Her badge was clipped to her blazer, a quiet declaration of who she’d become. Every so often, someone would stop to greet her, to shake her hand. She smiled, thanked them, drifted. But the noise all felt far away.
It had been two years since she’d walked away from Project Genesis. Two years since the engagement had ended — the one built on strategy, on trust that never fully existed. She hadn’t seen him since. Not once. Not even a glimpse. The no-contact had been mutual, necessary, almost surgical in its precision.
Until now.
Miguel appeared like a ghost breaking through fog — tall, deliberate, too composed for a man who carried that much regret in his shoulders. His hair was shorter now, threaded with gray that caught the light. He looked older, sharper around the edges, as though time had carved him into something colder. But when he saw her — really saw her — the coldness cracked.
He didn’t move at first. Neither did she. Their eyes met across the room, and in that suspended instant, the air shifted. The years between them folded in on themselves. Every word left unsaid, every fracture in their story, hovered in the space like static.
He started toward her — slow, uncertain. The crowd seemed to blur, dimming around them as though the room itself knew this was not for anyone else.
She didn’t step back. She didn’t step forward, either. Her heartbeat was steady, her breath calm, her face unreadable. And yet, something small and fierce stirred beneath her ribs — the ghost of what she’d once wanted from him.
When he finally stopped, he left a polite distance between them. Close enough that she could smell the faint trace of cologne and ozone. Far enough that neither had to flinch.
“Dr. O’Hara,” she said. The formality landed softly, but with weight — a quiet reminder of the boundaries that now existed between them.
He returned the greeting, voice low. Controlled. But there was reverence in it, too. A note of something like sorrow.
They stood there for a while, saying nothing. Around them, the event swelled and carried on — laughter, low conversation, a distant announcement echoing off glass. But they were apart from it all, cocooned in a silence that only the two of them could hear.
He looked at her — really looked. The way she held herself now. The steadiness. The light in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. She’d rebuilt herself piece by piece, and he could see the work in every measured breath she took. It humbled him. It hurt.
She, too, took him in. The lines on his face, the exhaustion in his gaze, the small ways regret had softened him. She wondered, briefly, if he’d stayed with the project. If he still justified what he’d done. If he still believed that protection and deception were the same thing.
The question didn’t make it to her lips. It didn’t need to. She already knew the answer — or maybe she didn’t want to.
He was the first to speak. “You look well.”
“I am.” A simple truth, though it trembled faintly on its edges.
Something in his expression flickered — pride, maybe. Or mourning. “I’m glad.”
She nodded, and the silence settled again. A silence that knew its own weight.
A vibration in her pocket—upon checking it, a coordinator reminding her of call time.
When her eyes found him again, they were softer. Not forgiving, not entirely — but tempered. At peace with the ache.
“Good to see you again,” she said, barely above a whisper.
Miguel’s jaw tightened. He nodded once, eyes flicking over her face like he was trying to memorize it. “Likewise.”
And that was it. The moment broke.
She turned, walked away. Each step steady, unhurried. Her name rippled through the air like light through glass — clear, strong, undeniable.
Miguel watched until she disappeared into the brightness of the stage lights, swallowed by the hum of applause. His hands curled at his sides, a futile attempt to keep something from slipping through his fingers that had already long since gone.
He’d lost her. But more than that — he understood now that he’d had her once, and that might have been enough.
She didn’t belong to his story anymore.
But he’d spend a long time remembering how it had once felt when she did.