He was pale. Ghostly, sickly pale. The pristine white shirt was wrinkled and untucked. He looked utterly exhausted, physically drained, and profoundly, deeply humiliated.
He didn’t jump up when I entered. He didn’t yell. He didn’t accuse me of poisoning him.
He slowly lifted his head, his eyes hollow. The cell phone trembled slightly in his hand.
“Did you have fun?” he asked. His voice was dry, raspy, stripped of all its usual booming authority.
“A lot,” I replied smoothly, walking over to the coffee table and setting my bag down with a definitive thud. I crossed my arms, standing tall over him.
He looked down at the phone in his hand, his thumb resting over the screen.
“Carolina wrote to me,” he whispered into the quiet room.
### Chapter 5: The Digestion of Respect
I remained silent. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t offer a sarcastic retort. I simply let his words hang in the air, thick and suffocating.
He swallowed hard, staring at the floorboards. “The quote… the date. It’s canceled.”
That actually did surprise me. I expected her to be angry, perhaps demanding an explanation, but an outright cancellation meant she had grown tired of waiting in that lobby. A small victory, though it hardly mattered now.
“Oh, yeah?” I said, my voice dangerously calm.
“Yeah.”
He ran a shaky, pale hand over his face, rubbing his eyes as if trying to wake up from a nightmare. When he looked back up at me, the facade was completely gone.
“Because I understood something today, Elena,” he said, his voice breaking slightly.
I looked at him without saying a word. I wasn’t going to make this easy for him. I wasn’t going to prompt him or offer a bridge of comfort. He had to cross this desert alone.
