TEXT MESSAGE THREAD — Saved to Drafts, Never Sent
Nadia to Roman, December 19th, three years ago
“I know we said it was just a favor. I know we had rules. But somewhere between holding your hand in front of your family and watching you laugh at dinner like you actually meant it — I forgot which parts were real. I’m deleting this. You’ll never see it. That’s probably better.”
I found the draft again the morning I landed in Aspen.
I hadn’t meant to open it. My phone was low on storage and I was clearing old files in the back of a rideshare, half-asleep, and there it was. Three years old. Still sitting in my drafts like a bruise that never fully healed.
I stared at it for a long time. Then I put my phone face-down on my knee and watched the mountains grow closer through the window.
The ski lodge was everything the company brochure promised: timber beams, stone fireplaces, the smell of pine and woodsmoke threading through the cold air. My firm had booked the whole property for a four-day winter retreat. Forty people, shared meals, team-building sessions I already dreaded.
I checked in, got my key, and told myself I was fine.
I was not fine.
Because Roman Baranowski was standing at the far end of the lobby.
He had his back to me, talking to someone from the strategy team, and for one disorienting second I thought I’d imagined him. Then he turned slightly, and I saw the line of his jaw, the way he pushed a hand through his hair when he was listening — that specific, unchanged gesture — and my stomach dropped clean through the floor.
He’d transferred to the London office eighteen months ago. Nobody had told me he’d transferred back.
I took my key card and walked very calmly to the elevator.
Inside, alone, I pressed my back against the wall and breathed.
Three years ago, Roman and I had been junior analysts at the same firm, friends in the easy, low-stakes way that office proximity creates. His family’s annual Christmas gathering was a big affair — aunts, cousins, grandparents who asked pointed questions — and his most recent breakup had been fresh enough to sting. He’d asked me, almost as a joke, if I’d come as his girlfriend. Just for the weekend. Just to give him breathing room.
I’d said yes because I thought I could handle it.
I was spectacularly wrong.
We’d been good at it, that was the problem. Too good. We’d slipped into the rhythm of it without effort — finishing each other’s sentences, his hand finding the small of my back without thinking, the way he’d looked at me across his mother’s dinner table like I was something he’d been keeping safe for a long time.
I’d told myself it was just performance.
Then I wrote that unsent message on the train home and realized I’d been lying to myself for three days straight.
Two weeks later, before I could figure out what to do with any of it, he’d taken the London transfer. We’d exchanged a handful of emails. Polite. Professional. The kind of correspondence that quietly closes a door without ever naming the door.
And now he was here. Forty feet away. In Aspen.
I lasted until dinner.
The lodge dining room was warm and loud, long tables set with candles, the fire going in the stone hearth at the far wall. I found a seat near the middle, sandwiched between colleagues, and was doing an admirable job of pretending to be interested in a conversation about quarterly projections when I felt the chair beside me pull out.
“This seat taken?”
Roman’s voice. Low, careful. Like he already knew the answer might be complicated.
I looked up. He looked exactly like himself, which was somehow the most disarming thing about him — no dramatic change, no easy distance. Just Roman, watching me with those steady dark eyes.
“Sit down,” I said.
He did. We made it through the appetizers with careful small talk. London. The new projects. How long the flight back had been. Normal things. Safe things.
Then the person on my other side got up to refill their wine, and we were briefly, quietly alone in the noise.
“Nadia.” He said my name like he’d been holding it in his mouth for a while.
“Don’t,” I said. Not harshly. Just honestly.
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