The Summer We Forgot to Say Goodbye

Chapter 6 — Rumours

By Tuesday morning, the photo had a name attached to it that wasn't Amelia's Sinclair's Secret Girlfriend? and a headline confident enough to erase every question mark that should have been sitting in front of it. By Wednesday, three more outlets had picked it up, each one slightly less careful with the facts than the last, until the story had less to do with anything that had actually happened and more to do with how good it looked as a headline.

Amelia found out how bad it had gotten from Charlotte, who burst into her room at 7 a.m. holding her phone out like evidence at a trial.

"Okay, before you panic," Charlotte said, in the exact tone of voice that guarantees panic, "you should know you're currently the second-most-searched name in the business section of three different news apps."

"I don't want to see it."

"You have to see it. Ignoring it doesn't make it not exist, it just means you find out about it from someone at the coffee machine instead of from me, and I promise I'm gentler about this than the coffee machine will be."

Amelia looked. It was worse than she'd braced for not because any of it was true, but because of how convincingly it had been assembled to look true: the lobby photo, a screenshot of her LinkedIn, a line from an old interview Adrian had given about "surrounding himself with people who challenge him," recontextualized to sound like something else entirely.

She went into work anyway, because not going in felt like confirming something, and because Amelia Hart did not, as a general rule, let a headline decide her schedule for her.

The office was different that day. Not openly hostile nobody said anything to her face but different in the way a room goes quiet half a second after you enter it, conversations recalibrating themselves around your presence instead of continuing through it. She caught two people looking at their phones and then at her, in that order, more than once before ten a.m.

Noah, at least, treated her exactly the same, which she suspected was a deliberate choice on his part rather than an accident.

"For the record," he said, sliding a coffee onto her desk without being asked, "nobody who actually works with you thinks any of that garbage is real. Which is not the same as nobody talking about it. But it's something."

"It's something," Amelia agreed, wrapping both hands around the cup the way she had around another one, a week and a lifetime ago, in a café that felt increasingly like it belonged to a different, simpler version of her life.

The message arrived at 2:47 p.m., through the company's internal messaging system, from an account with no name attached and no photo just a blank gray avatar and a single line of text sitting in her inbox like something left on a doorstep.

You should resign before this gets worse for both of you. Some of us actually earned our place here.

Amelia read it four times. She checked the sender field twice, hoping it would resolve into something a glitch, a name, anything that would make it a person she could reason with rather than a shape in the dark. It didn't. Whoever had sent it had done so carefully, through an internal system that logged every message, which meant either they didn't know that, or they didn't care, or worse, and this was the possibility that made her stomach drop they were confident enough in their position that being traced didn't frighten them at all.

She sat very still at her desk for a long moment, the cursor blinking in an empty reply box, and thought about every version of herself that had gotten her this far: the girl who'd walked into an interview with a rehearsed smile, the woman who'd sat on the floor of her own hallway and refused to fall apart completely, the version who'd told Adrian, in a text three days ago, that she needed to survive this on her own or it wasn't worth having.

She closed the message without replying. She did not resign.

She did, however, screenshot it, save it to a folder she quietly titled Documentation, and go back to work with a version of focus that had nothing left in it but the steady, cold determination of someone who had just decided exactly how this was going to end and it wasn't with her walking away.