Chapter 7: Work and Women (Year 2)
Kelvin
I started dating again six months after Anna left.
It wasn't about love. It wasn't even about wanting anything real. I just got tired of going home to silence. Of eating dinner in front of spreadsheets. Of waking up in the middle of the night with her name still stuck in my throat.
So I said yes when a coworker set me up with someone.
Her name was Lydia. She worked in marketing and liked jazz bars and old French movies. She had this dimple when she smiled and a way of talking with her hands like everything she said mattered. She kissed me outside a bar on our second date, and I kissed her back because I wanted to want her.
But all I could think was: Anna never wore perfume like this. Anna's kiss was softer. Anna tasted like whiskey and cinnamon and sin.
It wasn't fair. To Lydia. To me.
But I kept trying.
There was Lauren after her—funny, sarcastic, sharp in all the ways I usually liked. She called me out on my walls and joked that I had the emotional availability of a houseplant. I almost let myself believe it could work with her. We made it two months. Until she asked me one night over dinner why I always seemed a little… elsewhere.
"You look at me," she said, "but you're never fully here."
She wasn't wrong.
The truth was, every woman I met, I measured against someone I pretended I didn't still think about. Someone who disappeared without looking back, but still lived in the shadows of every almost I tried to build.
I didn't talk about Anna.
Not to my coworkers. Not to dates. Not even to Josh, who still had no clue about what happened that night—or that it had been me she touched, me she moaned for, me she left behind.
The guilt was a constant. I hated myself for still wanting her. For dreaming of her. For remembering how she looked at me in the firelight, even if I was just the wrong brother in the right moment.
So I poured everything into work.
I moved up faster than most of the guys in my division. Promotions came with applause and bonuses, and I let them fill the parts of me that were still bleeding. I pretended it was enough.
But I kept her necklace.
Tucked away in a drawer I never opened unless I was drunk or honest.
I told myself it was nothing. A relic. A reminder of what not to do. But the truth was, some nights I held it like it was the only proof I hadn't imagined the whole damn thing.
Dating became routine. I knew how to be charming. I knew how to smile the right way, touch the right places, say the right things. But it always ended the same.
Because they weren't her.
And I hated that I still wanted the girl who left me with no answers and all the weight.
I started thinking maybe I didn't need love. Maybe I wasn't built for it. Maybe ambition was enough.
So I bought a nicer suit. Booked longer hours. Took on projects that kept me too busy to remember the sound of her laugh. I made myself important. Successful. Unshakable.
But even then—even after Lydia and Lauren and all the half-versions of happiness—I couldn't stop wondering what might've happened if she'd stayed.
If she'd picked me.
And meant it.