Chapter 86: Chapter Eighty-Four — Scraped Time
The next two weeks did not move forward in any natural way. They dragged behind him like iron chains. Time did not pass so much as scrape forward, heavy and resistant, grinding against him with a weight he was not built to carry. Zane lived through each day as if the world had turned into coarse sandpaper that stripped him layer by layer until his patience, his pride, and whatever composure he had left were shaved down to bone. He woke each morning with the same splitting headache and the same hollow ache lodged deep in his chest. The bed beside him remained unfamiliar in a way that unsettled him more each morning, because it smelled like nothing. The faint trace of Willow that had once lived in the sheets had vanished with her.
The first three days passed in fragments that refused to arrange themselves into proper memory. He remembered moments without sequence. A bottle leaving his hand and striking the wall with a violent crack that sent glass scattering across the hardwood floor. The raw bite of whiskey burning down his throat while his stomach was empty. The cold shower at four in the morning when he stood beneath the water long enough for his skin to turn numb, hoping the shock might loosen the tight knot in his chest. When he stepped out and passed the mirror, the reflection waiting there looked unfamiliar. His cheeks appeared hollow. Dark shadows circled his eyes. Stubble darkened his jaw where he had forgotten to shave. The tension around his mouth made him look older than he remembered.
Memories of Willow surfaced without warning. Sometimes it was the warmth of her laugh or the way her voice softened when she said his name. Other times he remembered the small sound she made when she fell asleep against his chest, the slow rhythm of her breathing settling against him. Those moments arrived with a gentleness that almost felt cruel. Other memories came sharper. The way she flinched in the restaurant when he caught her wrists beneath candlelight. The faint outline of bruises he had noticed only after it was too late to ask questions. Those images made something inside him rupture again.
Her final words returned often.
"I need space."
The sentence repeated itself through his mind with relentless patience, followed by silence that felt heavier every time he remembered it. He could not decide which memories cut deeper. The soft ones reminded him of everything he had lost. The broken ones reminded him of everything he might have misunderstood.
Work became the only place he could breathe.
His home felt haunted by the absence she left behind. His car felt suffocating. Parks, restaurants, and sidewalks carried memories of conversations and quiet moments that now felt unbearable. Each location reminded him that she had once existed there beside him.
So he went to the office before sunrise and buried himself in work. Meetings filled his mornings. Contracts and negotiations filled his afternoons. Documents covered his desk until the surface disappeared beneath them. The pace was relentless and deliberate. He needed something sharp enough to carve distance between himself and the ache that refused to leave his chest.
His staff noticed the change almost immediately. Conversations grew quieter when he entered a room. Employees lowered their voices and stepped aside in hallways. They avoided unnecessary questions and answered his requests quickly, careful not to linger. The tone of his instructions had become shorter and harder, not cruel but stripped of the warmth people had grown used to.
Rumors spread quietly through the company. Zane Reyes was unraveling.
No one knew why.
No one asked.
He was not angry. He was not cruel. What surrounded him instead was the quiet gravity of a wound that had not begun to close. People felt it instinctively and kept their distance.
Night brought no relief.
Every evening he told himself he would not drink. He promised himself he would sleep sober and wake clear enough to think. The promise rarely lasted more than an hour.
The whiskey dulled the sharpest edges of the panic that crept into his chest at night. It never erased it entirely. He often ended up sitting on the floor beside his bed with his back pressed against the wall, his phone resting in his hand while he stared at Willow’s contact picture.
Minutes passed.
Sometimes hours.
The room remained silent except for the faint hum of the city outside the window.
Eventually his thumb moved.
Sometimes the call happened without intention.
Sometimes he pressed the button deliberately.
There was no difference in the result.
The same recorded voice answered every time.
"This number is no longer in service."
The sentence landed with quiet precision. It slid under his ribs and settled there like something sharp and permanent. It meant she had not simply ignored him. She had erased him completely. She had severed the last fragile connection between their lives.
He called again just to hear the message.
After the fifth attempt in one night he set the phone carefully on the carpet beside him as though it were something fragile that might break if dropped. His hands trembled slightly when they left it. He pressed his palms against his face and drew in a breath that collapsed halfway through his chest.
The sound that escaped him was low and rough.
He refused to name what it was.
For three days he told himself she was still at Victor’s house. He convinced himself she had chosen distance rather than disappearance. That fragile lie lasted until the fourth morning.
Against every instinct warning him that he was humiliating himself, he drove to her apartment building.
The drive took only a few minutes, but every red light stretched longer than it should have. When he reached the lobby he approached the receptionist’s desk with his shoulders tense and his voice rough.
She recognized him immediately. Not because of his name or reputation, but because of the exhaustion written across his face.
"Sir," she said carefully, "her unit was vacated last week."
The words did not register at first.
Vacated.
The word echoed in his mind as if it belonged to someone else’s conversation. Vacated meant cleared. Removed. Gone.
He rode the elevator anyway.
The hallway outside her apartment felt longer than he remembered. The carpet muffled his footsteps as he approached the door. Her number still hung beside the frame, but everything else felt empty.
He placed his hand against the door and felt the cold metal beneath his palm, the surface smooth and indifferent as though it had never known the warmth of the life that had once existed behind it. The hallway lights hummed quietly overhead, casting a steady glow across the empty corridor while the elevator somewhere down the hall opened and closed with mechanical patience. Zane stood there without moving, his shoulders rigid and his breath shallow, listening to the ordinary sounds of the building continue without any acknowledgment that something important had vanished.
Time stretched in strange increments while he remained there. The hallway slowly emptied as footsteps faded and apartment doors closed behind the residents returning to their lives. Eventually the silence thickened until it felt almost heavy. His legs began to ache from standing, yet he did not move immediately. His hand remained pressed against the door for several seconds longer, as though he hoped that by holding it there long enough he might feel some trace of her through the metal.
When he finally stepped away, the movement felt unnatural, like abandoning something unfinished.
The drive home passed without much awareness. The streets unfolded in familiar patterns beneath the headlights while traffic lights changed from red to green and back again. Zane moved through the city on instinct alone, his mind drifting somewhere beyond the road while his hands guided the car without conscious thought. By the time he reached his apartment building he barely remembered the turns he had taken to get there.
Inside, the silence greeted him with a kind of sharpness that made his chest tighten. The space had always been quiet, but now the quiet felt hollow rather than calm. Rooms that once held the small movements of another person now stood untouched and still.
The days that followed lost any clear structure. Work consumed the hours until exhaustion finally pushed him home. He drove without destination after leaving the office, sometimes circling the same blocks without realizing it. Alcohol dulled the worst of the tension in his chest but never erased it entirely. Sleep arrived only when his body could no longer remain awake.
Morning came whether he was ready or not.
One morning his assistant opened the door to his office and stopped abruptly when she saw him. Zane sat slumped behind his desk, still wearing the same shirt and jacket from the previous day. The collar had loosened and his tie hung unevenly against his chest. Papers covered the surface of the desk around him, and a half empty bottle sat partially hidden behind a stack of reports. His head rested against the back of the chair while shallow breaths lifted his chest in slow rhythm.
She did not wake him. She stepped backward quietly and closed the door again before anyone else could see him that way. By the time the elevator doors closed behind her she pressed her hand against her mouth because she had never imagined seeing him look so defeated.
By the end of the second week Zane had stopped pretending that he could function normally. He moved through his days on habit alone. Meetings happened because they were scheduled. Emails were answered because they appeared on his screen. Conversations occurred because people stood in front of him waiting for instructions. Beneath those motions the grief had settled into his bones with a steady weight that refused to shift.
One night, long after midnight and after too much whiskey had dulled his thoughts into slow fragments, he found himself sitting in his car outside Willow’s building again.
He had already driven past twice earlier that evening, each time convincing himself to keep going.
Now the engine was off and the car rested in silence beneath the streetlights. Zane leaned forward until his forehead touched the steering wheel. The position made his shoulders curve inward as though he were trying to fold himself into a smaller space. His phone rested loosely in his hand.
For a long time he remained there without moving. The street outside the windshield stayed quiet except for the occasional passing car and the distant murmur of traffic several blocks away.
Eventually his thumb moved.
The screen brightened and her name appeared.
He pressed the call button.
The answer arrived quickly, delivered in the same calm mechanical tone he had heard too many times already.
"This number is no longer in service."
Zane did not curse. He did not throw the phone or slam his hand against the wheel.
Instead he lowered the device slowly and placed it on the table beside him, his gaze fixed on it as though it were the last fragile piece of something that had once meant everything.
His voice broke slightly when he spoke.
"Come back... please."
The words drifted into the empty car and faded against the glass and leather around him, dissolving into the stillness of the interior. Zane remained exactly where he was, shoulders curved forward over the steering wheel, his hand still resting near the phone as if he had not quite finished the motion of setting it down. For several seconds he did not breathe properly because he had not realized he was holding the air in his lungs, as though some quiet, irrational hope believed the world might respond if he stayed perfectly still long enough.
Nothing answered him.
Outside the windshield the street remained unchanged. The glow of the streetlights stretched across the pavement in long pale streaks, and somewhere down the road a traffic signal changed color with patient indifference. The city continued moving through its quiet nighttime rhythm as if nothing in the world had shifted.
Inside the car the silence stayed exactly where it was. He waited longer than he realized.
No sound followed his words. No movement disturbed the quiet.
The silence remained, steady and complete, until it wrapped around him with a weight that left him sitting alone inside it.
