Healed by My Second Chance

Chapter 5 — Melody

The lobby smelled like fresh flowers and money—which was to say that it barely smelled like anything at all. Just clean air and something floral pumped through the vents to make people forget they were standing inside a box of glass and steel.

I wasn’t supposed to be up there. Kitchen staff used the service entrance around the back, but Priya had asked me to take a forgotten catering order up to the twentieth-floor conference suite.

I said yes before I thought about it because saying yes to Priya was easier than explaining why I didn’t want to go.

The elevator upstairs was nothing like the one we used in the back. There were no scuffed walls and no faint smell of grease that never quite washed out of the carpet.

This one had mirrors on three sides and soft lighting that made everyone look a little more expensive than they were. Somewhere around the tenth floor, I caught my reflection. I was still wearing my kitchen apron, and my hair was coming loose the way it always did by the afternoon.

I felt exactly as out of place as I was.

The truth was, I did want to be there.

Some stupid, hopeful part of me had been looking for an excuse to see the upper floors since the day before. Since "I would have remembered you". Since the five words I still hadn’t managed to put down.

I found the conference suite, dropped off the trays, and was halfway back to the elevator when I heard his voice.

Kane’s voice.

It came through an open door farther down the hall, low and even, carrying the same controlled tone he had used with his assistant that first day.

I would have recognized it anywhere by then, which should have frightened me more than it did.

I should have kept walking. I told myself that was exactly what I was going to do.

My feet had other ideas.

Through the gap in the door, I saw Kane sitting at a long table. A woman in a cream suit sat beside him, her hand resting on his forearm as though it belonged there.

The suit probably cost more than I made in a year.

She was beautiful in the specific, engineered way that money made people beautiful. Every hair was exactly where it should be, and every gesture had been rehearsed until it looked natural. Even the way she held her coffee cup seemed practiced, as though someone had once corrected her for holding it incorrectly and she had never allowed herself to slip again.

“...told you, the caterer’s changing the menu again,” she was saying, sounding bored, as though she were discussing the weather. “I don’t care what they serve as long as it isn’t salmon. I’m so tired of salmon at these things.”

She complained the way people did when nothing in their lives was actually wrong.

“I’ll have someone handle it,” Kane said.

“You always do.”

She said it fondly, the way you spoke to someone you had known for a long time—someone whose habits you had stopped questioning years ago.

I didn’t need anyone to tell me who she was.

I already knew, the way you knew a bruise would hurt before you touched it.

A fiancée.

Priya’s warning from the day before came rushing back. Something in my chest went very still and very cold, like the moment before you dropped something you couldn’t afford to break.

Kane’s eyes lifted.

He found me through the gap in the door.

For one second—one full second, longer than the one in the kitchen—we simply looked at each other.

I didn’t know what he saw in my face. I knew what was happening in mine: heat climbing my neck, followed by humiliation, as though it had been waiting patiently for its turn and had always known it would get one.

Kane didn’t say anything. He didn’t move toward the door or excuse himself. He didn’t do any of the things I had apparently, stupidly, been hoping he would do from the moment I heard his voice.

He looked away first.

I made it to the elevator before the tears came, which felt like a small and useless victory.

I pressed the button four times as though that would make it arrive faster. While I waited, I watched my blurred reflection in the mirrored doors—apron and all—looking exactly like what I was.

“Rough day?”

A man inside the elevator glanced at me, not unkindly, merely making conversation.

“Something like that,” I managed.

I thought about I would have remembered you throughout the ride down, turning the words over one more time.

Except they looked different now.

Not a promise. Just a man being polite to the help for half a second before he remembered exactly who he was supposed to be—and who I wasn’t.

A word kept circling somewhere I didn’t want to look at directly.

Not mate. I knew what that felt like—or thought I did—from the stories other wolves told.

This was bigger than that. Older, perhaps, or simply louder.

I didn’t have a name for it yet, and I wasn’t sure I wanted one. Naming it would make it real, and real things could be taken away.

I didn’t cry in the kitchen. I didn’t cry in front of Priya, who took one look at my face and, for once, didn’t ask any questions.

I saved the tears for the walk home, where no one I knew could see me being stupid enough to cry over a man who had looked at me for one full second and then turned away as though it had cost him nothing.

The city looked different on the walk back than it had that morning. The same streets. The same storefronts beginning to close for the evening.

Everything felt smaller somehow.

Or perhaps I did.

I passed the bakery with the yellow awning without even glancing at the window display, which should have told me how far gone I already was.

I told myself it didn’t matter.

I told myself many things that week that turned out not to be true.