Chapter 1
The day before the transfer request deadline, I found a request that would ship me off to a branch office a thousand miles away.
Landon Wells had submitted it. He was my career mentor and my boyfriend.
Ice shot down my spine as I fumbled to call him.
"Oh, that?" he said, and his voice dripped with indifference. "Lily claims it was just a joke. Just undo it yourself."
Lily was the intern who had glued herself to Landon and insisted that he mentor her.
The phone creaked in my white-knuckled grip during that endless minute of silence.
Five years of grinding my soul into this job had been reduced to a cheap joke.
I did not start any screaming matches, but I methodically packed my desk before I caught the train to exile.
Then Landon's panic attack hit.
"I told you to cancel it," he said. "You ignored me?"
"Yep," I replied.
When that Glenford transfer notice flashed on my screen, I froze and stared at the pixels.
We had a deal that I would remain in his marketing division as his second-in-command, and that career path was something we had blueprinted three years ago.
Then the system showed my one-way ticket south.
If I had checked one day later, it would have been too late to stop it.
I sucked in air that was sharp enough to cut my lungs, and then I called him.
He might as well have been talking about the weather.
He said, "Oh, that? Lily's prank. She wanted to see if you would notice before the cutoff."
"The deadline is still live," I said. "Just undo it."
He brushed it off like he was swatting a fly.
My voice cracked like dry kindling as I asked, "This means nothing to you?"
"There you go overreacting again," he said. "What's your damage? Cancel it and move on. She is just a hyper puppy with no filter."
The notification burned into my vision, and my throat felt sandpaper-dry.
"And if I hadn't seen it?" I said. "Lily Evans hacked the system. HR would crucify her."
Static hissed before his tone plunged below zero.
"Ivy Morgan, you are being psychotic," he said. "It's a goddamn joke. When will you stop witch-hunting her?"
His rant gained hurricane force.
"She's just a kid trying to survive her first job," he said. "Christ, as her mentor, am I supposed to let her drown? Go ahead and file that complaint against me too while you're at it."
The call ended with a jarring click.
I stood frozen as a chill crept through my veins.
Seven years had passed since our campus days, and we had been lovers for five of those years.
Landon was my boyfriend and my career mentor.
Flashbacks hit me like a tidal wave: his bloodshot eyes at three in the morning as he salvaged my career-ending screw-up during my first year, the way he had wrenched that drunk's wrist at the company party only to wrap me in his jacket afterward, and then his heart-melting question, "Be mine?"
Five years of being his shadow had passed.
Everyone said we were a match made in heaven, and we had even picked out wedding colors.
Our future should have been smooth sailing.
Then the cold blue light of my monitor taunted me.
One click would fix everything, yet his words echoed: Just a joke.
Exhaustion punched through me and made my bones ache, and the fight drained out of me like a deflating balloon.
