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Marzipan watched me get dressed from her perch on the bureau, her yellow eyes tracking every movement. When I reached for the blazer, she meowed once. A warning, maybe. Or judgment.

“It’s just a blazer,” I told her.

She slow-blinked.

At 7:15 AM, I stood in the facility parking lot. It had been two days since everything fell apart. I had coffee from the chain place three blocks away instead of my usual spot. I couldn’t go back to the other one, not when I could picture him in this parking lot, holding a cup with my name on it with a purple sticky note.

Thanks for not giving up on me. —B

I’d given up two days ago in a hallway. Smart, Crim would say. Cowardly, whispered the part of me that had memorized every word of his late-night texts. I didn’t know which voice was right.

The facility looked the same. Glass and steel, the Purple Punishers logo above the entrance. I’d walked through the staff entrance door plenty of times, but today my feet wouldn’t move.

Professional mask, I reminded myself. I’d spent years perfecting it. One heartbreak wasn’t going to crack it now.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I ignored it.

The concealer I’d layered under my eyes this morning was supposed to hide the fact that I hadn’t slept. Marzipan had curled against my belly around 2 AM, purring loud enough to drown out the noise in my head. Even that hadn’t worked.

I appreciate everything you did. Getting me back on the ice. That’s your job, right?

I forced myself to walk inside the building.

My office smelled like the lavender hand lotion Patty kept on her desk.

I dropped into my chair and pulled up the patient schedule for the day. Fedor at 8:30. Mikael at 10:00. Veskar at 1:00. A full roster, all of the orc hockey players needing tape or adjustments or someone to tell them they were healing on schedule.

All of them needing me to do my job.

An email notification popped up mid-morning.

Subject: Opportunity - Denver Sports Medicine Institute

I hovered my mouse over it, then clicked.

Dr. Lundrig,

We’ve been following your work with the Purple Punishers, particularly your rehabilitation protocol for adductor and hip flexor injuries. The timeline you achieved with goaltender Brashe Kedish has generated significant interest in our organization.

I stopped reading. Started again.

We would like to invite you to interview for a position as a Physical Therapist in our internationally ranked athlete division, Friday if you can fit it into your schedule.

Three days from now?

The words blurred. I scrolled down to the salary number.

Forty percent more than I made now.

A sound came out of me. It wasn’t quite a laugh. More like air punched from my lungs.

This was everything I’d wanted.

Before.

The thing he’d reduced to “just your job” and the competence he’d dismissed with a handful of words in a hallway was giving me an escape route.

I could leave and prove my worth somewhere else. Somewhere he wasn’t.