The transfer paperwork was already signed.
I knew that because I had been the one to countersign it — Ronja Aune, Senior Logistics Coordinator, Auckland Office, effective transfer to the Singapore hub in forty-eight hours. I had pressed my pen to that line with a steadiness I didn’t feel, handed the folder back to HR, and walked to the elevator without looking at her desk.
That was three weeks ago.
Now I was standing in the lobby of a mountain lodge outside Queenstown, shaking rain off my jacket, staring at the back of her head.
The annual regional offsite. Two days of strategy sessions, shared dinners, and the kind of enforced proximity that HR called “team cohesion” and I called a very specific kind of torture. I had thought — stupidly, it turned out — that Ronja’s transfer meant she wouldn’t be here. That the timing would spare me the particular discomfort of sitting across a conference table from the woman I’d spent six months pretending not to be in love with.
She was here.
She was standing at the check-in desk in a cream-colored sweater, her blonde hair loose around her shoulders, and she was laughing at something the lodge attendant had said. The sound of it hit me like a cold draft.
I almost turned around. I want to be honest about that. I almost walked back out into the Queenstown rain and called in sick from the car park.
Instead I crossed the lobby.
“Jang.”
She turned. The laugh faded — not into coldness, exactly, but into something more careful. Her blue eyes did that thing they always did, the quick assessment, like she was recalibrating.
“Riku.” A beat. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”
“Likewise.”
We stood there for a moment, the lodge humming quietly around us — the low crackle of a fire somewhere, the smell of pine and damp wool, the muffled sound of rain against the high windows. Outside, the Remarkables were invisible in the cloud. Everything felt compressed, like the weather was pressing the lodge inward, making the space between us smaller than it had any right to be.
“They gave me the corner room,” she said finally, holding up her key card. “Apparently it has a view. Of clouds.”
“Lucky you.”
“I know.” She almost smiled. Almost. “Are you going to stand in the doorway the whole offsite, or are you going to check in?”
I checked in.
Here is what I had told myself for six months: that it didn’t matter. That what had happened between Ronja and me — the late nights in the glass-walled conference room on the fourteenth floor, the shared cab rides home that stretched longer than they needed to, the one evening in the Auckland office kitchen when she’d touched my arm to make a point and neither of us had moved for a beat too long — that all of it was a feeling I had managed, contained, and filed away under the heading of “professionally inadvisable.” We were colleagues. She was, for a period, technically my peer on a cross-functional project, which made the line blurry enough to feel dangerous. Then she was seconded to my reporting chain for three months, which made the line clear and bright and unmistakable.
I had not crossed it. I was proud of that, in the way you’re proud of something that cost you more than it should have.
What I had not anticipated was that she would apply for the Singapore transfer, and that I would be the one processing the approval, and that I would sit at my desk for forty-five minutes looking at her name on the form before I signed it. Or that she would stop by my office the afternoon after — not to discuss it, just to leave a coffee on my desk without a word, and walk back out.
I still didn’t know what that coffee meant.
The first session that afternoon was mercifully structured. Presentations, breakout groups, someone from the Singapore team joining by video link. Ronja sat across the room. I was aware of her the way you’re aware of a sound you’re trying not to hear — a constant, low-frequency attention I couldn’t fully suppress.
She presented her transition brief with the same clean efficiency she brought to everything. No hesitation. No glance in my direction. Just Ronja Aune, composed and precise and already, it seemed, halfway gone.
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