The Desk Next Door

That was the third sharp moment, the one that clarified everything: the obstacle was not Elspeth, was not the competing companies, was not even the professional ethics of it, not exactly. The obstacle was that we were both people who had chosen, a long time ago, to put the work first. To be reliable above all else. To not be the kind of person who complicated things. And standing at that window, I understood with a sudden, uncomfortable clarity that the version of myself I had built — careful, focused, disciplined — was also the version of myself that was going to let this slip away without saying anything, because saying something would be a risk, and I had spent years being very good at managing risk.
She left the window first. I stayed, watching the last of the light go.
The next two days were the quietest we had been since the first week. We worked. We were professional. Elspeth, reading the room with more sensitivity than I had given her credit for, stopped engineering exits and started simply being present, easy company, filling the silence with cheerful irrelevance. I was grateful for it in the way you are grateful for noise when the quiet has become too loud.
On the last morning of her planned stay — Nabila’s contract review was complete, her report submitted, her flight booked for the following day — I arrived to find the desk beside mine already cleared. The little framed photo was gone. The sea glass linen shirt was gone. There was only the note, folded twice, pressed flat, tucked under the corner of my laptop.
I read it standing up, still holding my coffee.
She had written that the overlap in our contracts had been resolved in the final report, that our companies would not be working in the same space for the foreseeable future. She had written that she was glad to have shared a window with me, which was such a precise and Nabila way of saying something that I had to put the note down for a moment. She had written a phone number, and beneath it, in smaller letters: in case the foreseeable future turns out to be shorter than expected.
I stood at the window for a long time after that, the ocean doing what it always does, indifferent and enormous and endlessly itself. Elspeth appeared in the doorway behind me at some point, took in the scene, and said nothing, which was the kindest thing she could have done.
I picked up my phone. I looked at the number. Then I looked at the water one more time, at the surfers threading through the break, at the light already starting its slow turn toward gold.
I typed the first three words.
And then I sat down at my desk — my desk, the good one, the one with the window — and I waited.

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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, contemporary romance, Costa Rica, forbidden romance, professional tension, short story, slow burn, travel romance, workplace romance

August 28, 2026

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