CHAPTER 5
1411 Words
Memory Lane
The bottle was nearly empty. Tristan tipped it anyway, watching the last of the amber liquid cling stubbornly to the glass before finally sliding free. He drank it without pausing, without tasting it, like he was afraid stopping would give the memories permission to breathe.
The penthouse was dark—intentionally so. Only the city bled light through the floor-to-ceiling windows, cold and distant, like a world that had never cared whether he survived or not. Midnight had passed. Maybe it was closer to dawn. Time had stopped being linear the moment Victoria Blair walked back into his life.
The couch creaked softly as he leaned back, head tipping against the leather.
It always started the same way.
With the door.
Not the one in this penthouse—but a cheap apartment door years ago, chipped paint, bad lighting, a place that smelled faintly of coffee and books and her.
Victoria standing in front of him.
Hands clenched at her sides. Shoulders straight. Eyes too calm. “We need to break up.”
Even now, the sentence landed like a blade sliding between his ribs.
Tristan squeezed his eyes shut, breath hitching. She hadn’t cried. God, that was the part that still destroyed him.
No trembling lips. No tears threatening to fall. No hesitation. Just that quiet, terrible composure, like she’d already grieved whatever they were about to lose and was simply there to inform him.
“What?” he’d laughed, the sound brittle and wrong even to his own ears. “That’s not funny, Vic.”
“I’m serious,” she said. Two words. Final. Clean. “This can’t continue.”
He remembered stepping closer, panic rising too fast, too sharp. “Did I do something?” His voice had cracked on the last word. He hated that part most—the sound of himself unraveling.
“No.”
The answer had been immediate.
“Then what is this?” he demanded. “What changed?”
She didn’t look at him. Not really.
“I need to focus on my future.”
The words sounded practiced. Polished. Like something she’d rehearsed until it no longer hurt to say.
“What about us?” he asked, desperation clawing up his throat.
“There is no us anymore.”
That was it. No explanation. No argument. No chance to fight for her. The memory still knocked the air from his lungs.
Tristan dragged a hand down his face, breathing hard. He could still see it with painful clarity—the way she picked up her bag, the way she walked past him, the way the hallway swallowed her whole without mercy.
She didn’t look back. That was the detail that haunted him. The first night after she left, he didn’t sleep.
He sat on the edge of the bed until sunrise, phone clutched in his hand, staring at the last message she’d ever sent him.
I’m sorry.
That was it. Two words to erase everything.
By morning, he was calling her. Over and over. Voicemail. Again. Again.
He went to her dorm. She wasn’t there. He went to her favorite café. Her library. The places she liked to study when she needed quiet. Nothing. It was like she’d been wiped from the map.
By the second week, panic had taken root in his bones. He skipped classes—not to party, not to rebel—but to search. He drove across campus, across the city, then farther when rumors whispered she’d transferred, that she’d gone home, that she’d left the state.
He followed every lie like it might save him.
“She just left,” people told him.
No one just leaves, he thought. Not without saying goodbye. Not without a reason.
By the third week, food tasted like nothing.
By the fourth, his hands shook when he tried to hold a glass of water.
Sleep came in fractured pieces, nightmares filled with her walking away over and over again, each time faster, each time farther.
He lost weight too quickly. His clothes hung wrong. His reflection scared him.
His parents noticed then. Not with concern. With irritation.
“You’re embarrassing yourself,” his father snapped. “Chasing a girl who clearly didn’t want you.”
“She’s not just a girl,” Tristan shouted, voice raw. “She’s—”
“A problem,” his mother interrupted coolly. “And she solved herself.”
That was the night he shattered a glass against the wall and didn’t even feel the cut on his hand.
The hospital room smelled like disinfectant and quiet failure.
Tristan stared at the IV in his arm, the heart monitor beeping steadily, mocking him with proof that his body still worked even when his soul felt hollowed out.
“Severe exhaustion,” the doctor said. “Malnutrition. Acute stress.”
He laughed weakly. “So I’m dramatic.”
The doctor didn’t smile. “You’re lucky. Another few days like this and we’d be having a very different conversation.”
Lucky.
He turned his face toward the window, eyes burning.
Victoria never came.
No call.
No message.
No sign she even knew he’d collapsed trying to find her.
That was when the pain shifted.
Something inside him hardened.
After the hospital, his parents didn’t ask what he wanted. “You’re leaving the country,” his father said. “Immediately.”
“I’m not done looking for her,” Tristan snapped.
“Yes, you are,” his mother said. “This obsession ends now.”
They called it recovery. A new environment. New tutors. Distance from distractions. A clean break.
Tristan called it exile. He fought them at first—refused to unpack, refused to engage. He stayed awake at night staring at his phone, waiting for her name to light up the screen.
He won't forget the day he rushed out in the middle of snow storm because one of his friends told him he saw someone like Vic near the downtown coffee shop. He rush without warning, without preparation. Only for his car to slip and almost cost him his life. To this day he still bore the scars from the surgery that nearly kill him and his parent's sanity.
She never reached out. Weeks passed. Then months. Desperation turned to rage. If she cared, she would have tried.
If she loved him, she wouldn’t have vanished. If he mattered, she wouldn’t have left him to rot.
So he rewrote the story. Not because it was true—but because it hurt less than wondering what had really happened.
He stopped believing in permanence. Stopped trusting words. Stopped letting anyone close enough to destroy him like that again.
By the time he returned years later, Tristan Moore was no longer the reckless college kid who loved too loudly and too deeply.
He was colder. Sharper. Careful. Built from scar tissue and silence.
The bottle slipped from his hand and rolled across the floor, stopping near the window. Tristan didn’t move to retrieve it.
Victoria’s face rose in his mind again—not the girl who left him broken, but the woman now sitting outside his office every day, composed and distant, like she’d never shattered him at all.
She walked back into his life like nothing had happened. Like he hadn’t almost died searching for her. Like he hadn’t been rebuilt from the wreckage she left behind.
His fingers curled into fists. You don’t get to do that, he thought bitterly. You don’t get to disappear and return untouched.
That was why he was cold. Why he was ruthless. Why every word he spoke to her felt sharpened with restraint.
Because if he let even one c***k show—if he allowed himself to wonder whether she’d suffered too, whether there was more to the story than abandonment—everything he’d buried would come flooding back.
And he wasn’t sure he’d survive it.
Tristan pushed himself upright and crossed the room, opening a fresh bottle. The sound was too loud in the silence.
He poured another drink.
“To you,” he muttered, voice rough. “For teaching me that love doesn’t leave scars you can see.”
He drank.
Outside, the city carried on, oblivious.
Inside, Tristan Moore sat alone with a past that still bled—and a woman who had returned like a ghost, unaware that the man she now worked for was built from the ruins of loving her too much.
- Writer
