LOVING YOU TWICE

**ELENA** The last time I saw Nathan Cole, I was signing papers that said I never loved him. Today, I signed my name on a visitor's badge in the lobby of Cole Industries — and my hand shook so badly the pen skipped across the C. Five years. Five years since I'd walked out of that hotel room with my mother's voice still ringing in my ears — you'll thank me for this someday, Elena — and I still hadn't found a single day to thank her for. I smoothed down my blazer, the cheapest one I owned that still looked expensive enough for a fortieth-floor interview, and told myself this was just a job. A good job. Senior marketing strategist, six figures, the kind of offer that didn't come twice in this economy. I needed it. My father's medical bills didn't care that Cole Industries used to be the last place on earth I wanted to set foot in. I didn't even know he still ran it. I'd assumed — hoped — he'd handed the company to his father years ago and disappeared into some yacht somewhere, the way men like that were supposed to. The elevator doors opened onto the fortieth floor, and the receptionist's smile was polished and empty. "Ms. Reyes? Mr. Cole will see you now." Mr. Cole. My stomach dropped through the floor. I told myself it was a coincidence. Cole was a common enough name. There were probably a dozen Cole Industries scattered across the country, and I'd simply landed in the wrong one, and in a minute a balding stranger in his sixties would shake my hand and ask about my five-year plan. Then the office door opened, and it wasn't a stranger. He was taller than I remembered — or maybe I'd just shrunk everything about him down over the years to make him easier to carry. The boy who used to steal fries off my plate and fall asleep during study sessions with his head on my shoulder was gone. In his place stood a man in a charcoal suit that fit like it had been sewn onto him, jaw sharper, eyes colder, a Rolex where a cheap watch from his college roommate used to be. Nathan Cole looked at me the way you look at a name on a resume. Nothing more. "Ms. Reyes." He extended his hand. "Please, sit." He didn't recognize me. Five years, and the man I used to fall asleep memorizing didn't recognize my face. I sat. I shook his hand — his palm was warm, and it still did something traitorous to my pulse, which felt like the cruelest joke of the morning — and I opened my portfolio like my hands weren't shaking, like my whole chest wasn't caving in. "Your resume is impressive," he said, flipping through it without really looking at me. "Cornell, then five years at Whitmore Digital. Why leave a stable position for us?" Because I need the money. Because my father is sick. Because you're the only company that called me back. "I'm looking for a bigger challenge," I said instead. "Somewhere I can build something, not just maintain it." He nodded, unimpressed or unreadable, I couldn't tell which. He asked about campaign metrics, about a rebrand I'd led two years ago, about how I'd handle a hostile board. I answered every question on autopilot while some small, humiliated part of my brain kept screaming look at me, really look at me — and another part, the part that still remembered how his name used to taste like a secret, prayed he never would. Then he paused, pen hovering over my resume, and frowned. "Elena Reyes," he said slowly, like he was testing the shape of it in his mouth. "That's an unusual middle initial. R. Elena R. Reyes." My pulse spiked so hard I was sure he could hear it across the desk. "Family name," I said, too fast. He studied me for a second longer than was comfortable — long enough that I felt my carefully built composure start to c***k at the seams — and then he shook his head slightly, like he was shaking off a thought that didn't make sense, and moved on to the next question. I exhaled. It wasn't relief. It was something worse — a strange, aching disappointment that he'd looked straight at the girl he used to call his whole future and seen nothing but an unusual middle initial. **NATHAN** Something about her name wouldn't let go of me. Elena Reyes. I'd read a thousand resumes this quarter. I didn't stop for any of them. I stopped for hers. It wasn't her qualifications, though they were good — better than good. It was the flicker of something in her eyes when I said her name out loud, a fraction-of-a-second flinch she recovered from so fast most people would've missed it. I don't miss things. It's the only reason I'm still sitting in this chair instead of watching some cousin run my father's company into the ground. I studied her while she answered my questions — composed, sharp, giving me exactly what I wanted to hear and nothing more, the way people do when they've learned the hard way that honesty gets punished. She had a habit of pressing her thumb into her palm when she was thinking, like she was grounding herself. I used to know a girl with that same habit. I told myself I was imagining it. Elena's not exactly a rare name, and five years is a long time, and the girl I used to know didn't have a Cornell degree or five years at a marketing firm — she had a full ride to a state school two hours from here and a mother who thought I wasn't good enough for her daughter, which, looking back, might have been the only thing that woman ever got right. I shouldn't have thought about Elena Ruiz at all. I'd trained myself out of it. Five years of not thinking about the girl who signed a settlement agreement and vanished without so much as a returned phone call — five years of telling myself it was for the best, that whatever changed her mind so fast, so completely, wasn't worth chasing. But this woman sitting across from me had the same nervous thumb-press. The same way of tucking hair behind her left ear before saying something she wasn't sure she believed. I ended the interview twenty minutes later than I'd planned. I don't remember deciding to keep her talking that long. "We'll be in touch," I said, standing, extending my hand again. "Thank you for your time, Ms. Reyes." Her hand was smaller than I remembered — no, that was insane, I didn't remember anything about this woman's hands, I'd met her forty minutes ago. She left. I stood at the window of my office and watched the elevator numbers tick downward, and I don't know how long I stood there before my assistant knocked and reminded me I had a board call in ten minutes. I sat back down at my desk. I pulled her resume toward me again. Elena R. Reyes. I typed her name into the search bar of our internal HR system, then stopped myself before I hit enter, because if I was wrong, this was insane — a grown man chasing ghosts through a job application — and if I was right— If I was right, I needed to know exactly what I was about to let back into my life. My phone buzzed. A text from my assistant, Priya: Board's waiting. I closed the laptop. I told myself I'd think about it later. I didn't stop thinking about it for the rest of the day. **ELENA** I made it to the parking garage before my hands started shaking for real. I sat in my car — my ten-year-old car, parked three levels below where his driver probably waited with something German and silent — and I let myself breathe for the first time since I'd walked through those glass doors. He didn't know me. That was good. That was what I'd wanted, wasn't it? A clean start, a job, nothing more. I didn't need Nathan Cole to remember the girl who used to fall asleep in his dorm room with textbooks open on her chest. I didn't need him to remember anything at all. My phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number. This is Priya Malhotra, Nathan Cole's assistant. Mr. Cole would like to move forward. Can you start Monday? I stared at the screen until the letters blurred. Monday. Five days from now, I'd be walking back through those doors — not for an interview, but for a job. A desk. A badge with my name on it, two floors down from a man who used to know every version of me and now knew none of them at all. I should have said no. I should have deleted the number and never looked back, the way I should have done five years ago when it actually mattered. Instead, I typed one word. Yes. I didn't know yet that the biggest lie of my life was sitting three floors above me in a corner office, waiting for a search bar he hadn't clicked "enter" on — and that in five days, both our lives were about to come undone all over again.