Forty-Eight Hours Before She Boards That Plane

Afterward, the group filtered toward the dining room. I went the other way, out through the side door to the covered terrace that ran along the back of the lodge. The rain had softened to a mist. The lake was out there somewhere beyond the grey, and the mountains, and all that enormous southern silence.
I heard the door open behind me.
“Hiding?” she said.
“Thinking.”
“Same thing, usually.” She came to stand beside me at the railing, not close, but close enough that I could smell her perfume cutting through the cold air. Something warm and faintly woodsy. I had noticed it before, in elevators, in meeting rooms, in ways that I’d told myself were incidental.
We stood in silence for a while. It wasn’t uncomfortable, which was its own kind of problem.
“You signed the transfer,” she said. Not an accusation. Just a fact.
“It was my job to sign it.”
“I know.” She turned slightly, looking at the side of my face. “I’m not angry about it, Riku.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“You’ve been acting like you think I am.”
I turned to look at her then, because she deserved a direct answer and because I was tired of giving her the profile of my face as a substitute for honesty. She was watching me steadily. There was something in her expression I hadn’t seen in the office — something unguarded, the way people get when they’re far from their desks and the weather is pressing in and there’s nowhere comfortable to retreat to.
“I’m not acting like anything,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow.
“Fine.” I looked back at the mist. “Maybe I’m acting like someone who spent forty-five minutes staring at a form before he signed it.”
The silence that followed was different from the one before. Denser.
“Forty-five minutes,” she repeated.
“Give or take.”
“And then you signed it.”
“And then I signed it.”
She exhaled — not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. “I left you a coffee.”
“I know. I didn’t know what it meant.”
“It meant I noticed.” She said it quietly. “That you’d taken a long time. That it mattered to you. The coffee was — I don’t know. I didn’t know what else to do with that information.”
I let that sit for a moment. The mist was thickening, and somewhere below the terrace, water was running off the roof in a thin, steady stream.
“Why Singapore?” I asked. It wasn’t the question I’d meant to ask, but it was the one that came out.
She was quiet long enough that I thought she might not answer. Then: “Because it was the one that made sense on paper. And because I’d been waiting for something that wasn’t going to happen, and I needed to stop waiting.”
There it was.
I felt the weight of it land — the particular, specific weight of a thing you already knew but hadn’t been willing to name. She had applied for a transfer to the other side of the world because she had been waiting for me to do something I hadn’t done. Because I had been very careful, and very professional, and very good at not crossing lines — and none of that had cost me anything, I’d told myself, because the line was the right place to stand.
Except it had cost her something. And she had taken herself out of the equation rather than keep paying for it.
“Ronja.”
“Don’t,” she said. Not harshly. “Don’t apologize. I don’t want an apology.”
“I wasn’t going to apologize.”
She looked at me.
“I was going to say that I wasn’t waiting for the right moment,” I said. “I was waiting for the risk to disappear. And it wasn’t going to disappear. I just kept hoping it would, because that was easier than admitting that I wanted something I wasn’t sure I was allowed to want.”
She didn’t say anything. The mist moved between us and the mountains.

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About the Author

Clara Vance — a former corporate strategist, expert in the tension that builds between two desks. Her hobby? Morning coffee chats in the office where she collects ideas for her stories.

— Clara Vance

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Categories: Forbidden, Romances

Tags: 10min stories, Clara Vance, emotional fiction, forbidden romance, New Zealand, Queenstown, second chance, short story, slow burn, workplace romance

September 1, 2026

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