Healed by My Second Chance

Chapter 6 — Kane

I told Roman I wasn’t going back down there.

I believed it for exactly four days.

I spent those four days sitting through meetings I couldn’t focus on and signing contracts without really reading them. During a dinner with Lilith, I answered three of her questions with the wrong name in my head before I caught myself.

Roman noticed.

He didn’t say anything, which was somehow worse than if he had.

On the fifth day, I found a reason. A real one, at least on paper—a supplier complaint routed through the wrong department, something that could have been handled by literally anyone in the building except me.

I signed off on handling it myself before I allowed myself to think too hard about why.

The kitchen was quieter that late, with most of the dinner rush already cleared out. I found Melody stacking chairs in the back, her sleeves pushed up and her hair coming loose from whatever she had used to tie it back that morning.

She saw me before I said a word.

Something crossed her face—hope, perhaps—before she quickly buried it beneath something more careful.

“Mr. Eclipse.”

“Kane.”

I had already told her that. She said my name as though she didn’t quite believe she was allowed to use it.

“Kane.”

Better.

I told myself I would say what I had come to say and leave. Something about the complaint. Something professional.

Five minutes, and then I would be gone.

Instead, I asked whether she had eaten. She said no, and somehow that led to the two of us sitting in the empty dining room after closing. Melody was perched on a counter with a plate of whatever the kitchen staff hadn’t sold that night, while I stood across from her like an i***t who had forgotten how his own legs worked.

“You know this is strange, right?” she asked around a bite of something that smelled like garlic and butter. “The owner of the building, eating leftovers with the dishwasher.”

“I own the building. I don’t own the leftovers.”

That drew a laugh from her—a real one that seemed to surprise even her.

Something in my chest turned over so sharply that I had to look away.

We talked for an hour.

Maybe two.

I don’t remember most of what we said. I only remember that it was easy in a way nothing in my life had been easy in years. There was no angling, no positioning, no calculation about what the conversation was actually for.

She asked what I had wanted to be before I became whatever I was now.

I told her the truth, something I hadn’t admitted to anyone in a decade.

A marine biologist.

She laughed at that too, but not unkindly. She reacted as though it were the most human thing she had learned about me all night.

She talked about her mother for a while, carefully avoiding the edges of the subject in the way people did when something still hurt years later.

She didn’t ask about my mother.

I didn’t offer.

It wasn’t the right moment, and some part of me was relieved not to be asked.

At some point, Melody mentioned the cot in the back room, the one the staff used when a shift ran double and going home wasn’t worth the trouble.

She explained it almost apologetically, as though she needed to justify why a grown woman would rather sleep four feet from a walk-in freezer than pay for a cab home.

I didn’t ask why she didn’t simply take the cab.

I already knew the answer, and I didn’t want to make her say it aloud.

I should have left an hour before I did. I knew it the entire time and stayed anyway, telling myself that each additional minute would be the last.

I meant it less every time.

Melody was reaching to clear the plates when I caught her wrist.

Not hard. Barely a touch.

She went still.

So did I.

The air between us changed into something with weight.

“Kane.”

My name, barely more than a breath.

I should have let go. Every reason I had—Lilith, the merger, my father’s voice inside my skull reciting exactly what I stood to lose—was still there. Every reason was still true, arranged in perfect order.

None of it mattered.

Not with Melody looking at me as though I were something worth wanting rather than something with a company attached to it.

I kissed her instead of answering, and whatever remained of my good sense went with it.

She kissed me back as though she had been waiting for it even longer than I had. One of her hands tightened in my shirt, pulling me closer instead of pushing me away.

I didn’t hold back, and neither did she.

Every place I touched her felt like something I was choosing deliberately. I already knew I had no right to want her as much as I did.

I wanted her anyway.

At some point, she said my name again, more softly this time, and I held on to the sound as though it might never come again.

It didn’t—not in the way I would have wanted.

Not after that night.

I woke before dawn in the small room off the kitchen where she slept between shifts. Her head rested on my chest, and one hand lay loosely against my ribs as though she had fallen asleep still holding on.

For a few minutes, I allowed myself to imagine another version of my life.

One in which I stayed exactly where I was. The merger fell through, the Hendersons found another alliance, and my father’s ghost stopped whispering about legacy long enough for me to be nothing more than a man who had found the one thing he actually wanted.

Then the sun began to rise, and the version of my life that really existed rose with it.

Grey light came through the small window. A refrigerator compressor hummed somewhere on the other side of the wall. The building held the particular silence that existed only before it opened.

I dressed in the dark so I wouldn’t wake her.

I told myself it was kindness.

It wasn’t.

It was cowardice wearing kindness like a coat. I knew it, and I left anyway..