Eighty-One

Olivia Westview

I left the HR office feeling like I was walking through molasses, my steps slow, heavy. How was I supposed to face him? The same man I hurt, the man I spent nights with in Chicago, only to be left with nothing but ambiguity when we returned. We never defined what we were, and now I was supposed to walk into a hospital room and have yet another uncomfortable conversation.

As I reached my office, I sat down at my desk, staring blankly at my computer screen. I couldn’t focus. My thoughts kept circling back to James, to our tangled mess of history. The nights in Chicago had been so intense, so raw—so confusing. He’d made me take Plan B after, pushed birth control on me, as if keeping everything clinical would make it easier to deal with. But nothing had been easy. N……