Zachary’s POV
The apartment near Violet's campus sits empty and waiting while I convince myself I haven't made a catastrophic mistake.
I furnish it minimally—bed, desk, couch, the essentials of a space designed for presence rather than permanence. The furniture store delivers on Tuesday, and I direct the movers with the efficiency of someone organizing a corporate relocation rather than constructing a shrine to a woman who told me wanting wasn't enough.
Each purchase feels like another step toward a confession I'm not ready to make.
The bed costs more than it should. I tell myself it's about quality, about supporting my back during the nights I'll supposedly spend here working remotely. The truth is simpler and more pathetic: if she ever sees this place, I don't want it to look desperate.
As if the entire situation isn't already desperate.
I don't tell Adison. Don't tell anyone. The secrecy tastes like protection and cowardice in equal measure—protection because speaking it aloud would make it real, cowardice because I know exactly what Adison would say.
What are you doing, Zachary?
The same thing I've been doing since Violet walked away. Surviving. Poorly.
Work continues in Manhattan with the same relentless pace. Meetings blur into presentations blur into the particular exhaustion of corporate ambition that used to feel like purpose. But now there's something else occupying the edges of my attention, pressing against every moment of focus I try to construct.
The question of when.
When do I tell Violet what I've done? When do I show up at a campus where I have no business being? When does proximity stop feeling like hope and start feeling like intrusion?
I don't have answers. Just the weight of keys in my pocket and an address that burns in my memory like evidence I can't destroy.
Sunday afternoon, I drive to the apartment.
The official reason is practical—checking that the delivery went smoothly, making sure the utilities are connected, performing the mundane maintenance of a space I'm supposedly going to use for work. The real reason sits in my chest like a stone I've been carrying since she left.
I want to be near her. Even if near means parked outside her university like a man who's lost the plot of his own life.
The campus spreads before me through the windshield, all red brick and green lawns and the particular architecture of places designed to launch futures. Students cross the quad with the careless ease of people who belong here—backpacks slung, phones glowing, laughter carrying on autumn air.
I don't belong here.
The realization settles with uncomfortable precision. I'm a thirty-five-year-old executive sitting in a parked car outside a college, watching young people navigate a world I aged out of over a decade ago. The reality of that image makes me grip the steering wheel until my knuckles go white.
What the hell am I doing?
The question has no good answer. Only honest ones, and honest isn't the same as good.
I should leave. Should drive back to Manhattan and pretend this apartment doesn't exist, pretend proximity was never the plan, pretend I'm capable of the distance she demanded. I should be the man she deserves—one who respects boundaries, who takes no for an answer, who doesn't rent apartments twenty minutes from her campus like that's a reasonable response to heartbreak.
I'm reaching for the ignition when I see her.
Violet, crossing the grass with her bag slung over one shoulder, laughing at something the blonde girl beside her said. The sound doesn't reach me through the closed windows, but I can see it in the way her head tilts back, the way her whole body participates in the joy.
She looks lighter than I've ever seen her.
Younger. Freer. Unburdened by the weight she always carried in Manhattan—the performance, the expectation, the constant calculation of how to survive in a world designed by people who never loved her the way she deserved.
This is who she becomes when I'm not there. This is the version of herself she's been building in the space I'm not allowed to occupy.
I should feel happy for her. Should recognize that her lightness is evidence she made the right choice, that distance was what she needed, that my absence has become her freedom.
Instead, I feel the particular ache of watching someone you love thrive without you.
Then I notice him.
Walking beside her, close enough that their shoulders nearly touch. Golden hair catching the afternoon sun. Athletic build evident even in casual clothes. Looking at Violet like she's the only thing worth seeing in a quad full of beautiful young people.
My chest constricts.
He says something, and Violet laughs again—different this time, softer, the kind of laugh you give someone who matters. He reaches out and touches her arm, casual and familiar, and she doesn't pull away.
She doesn't pull away.
The golden man continues talking, and Violet continues smiling, and I sit in my parked car watching the future I wanted disappear into a present I wasn't invited to share.
I don't know who he is. Don't know if he's a friend, a classmate, or something more. Don't know if the way he looks at her reflects reality or just his own desperate hoping—the same desperate hoping that drove me to sign a six-month lease on an apartment I have no business owning.
What I know is this: she looks happy. With him. In a way she never quite looked with me.
I drive away before she can spot me.
The route back to Manhattan is a blur of highway and self-recrimination, my mind replaying the image on an endless loop. Violet laughing. The golden man touching her arm. The easy proximity of two people who belong in each other's lives in ways I never managed to belong in hers.
I wanted to be near her. Wanted my existence close to her, to mean something to prove that distance wasn't the answer, that showing up could matter more than stepping back.
Instead, proximity showed me exactly what I was afraid to see.
She's moving on. Building something. Becoming someone who doesn't need me hovering at the edges of her life, waiting for permission that may never come.
The apartment keys dig into my palm where I've been gripping them without realizing. Six months. I signed a six-month lease on a space that now feels less like hope and more like evidence of my own inability to accept what she's already told me.
Wanting isn't the same as belonging.
She was right. She was always right.
The city swallows me back with its familiar indifference, and I drive toward the apartment I actually live in—the one in Manhattan, the one that doesn't represent a choice I'm increasingly certain was a mistake.
The image of her laughing burns behind my eyes the entire way.
Golden and athletic and looking at her like she's everything.
The man I'm not.
The man she might actually choose.