DON’T STOP (Lila and Darrell) novel Chapter 115

Chapte

Chapter 115

Norman

A month later…

I had woken up next to Daisy Wright every morning for a month, and it still caught me slightly off guard each time – the way she looked before she was fully awake, hair everywhere, face soft and unguarded, nothing like the woman the rest of the world got to see. I had missed this version of her more than I had allowed myself to admit for three years.

I watched her for exactly three seconds before she opened one eye and looked at re

“Stop staring,” she muttered.

‘I’m not staring.”

‘You’re always staring.” She pushed herself up and reached for her phone on the nightstand. “Come ɔn. We’ll be late.”

We brushed our teeth side by side at the double sink, which had been my favorite thing about mornings for four weeks running. She had a system – ‘face wash first, then brushing, then moisturizer in a specific order that she followed with the same precision she brought to quarterly reviews. I had learned not to disrupt the system.

This morning I disrupted the system.

I reached over and squeezed her toothpaste while she was mid-brush, making the paste shoot dramatically off the brush and onto the mirror, and she turned to look at me with an expression of complete betrayal, mouth full of foam.

I laughed.

She pointed at me with the toothbrush. A clear warning.

I held both hands up in surrender, still laughing.

She rinsed, wiped her mouth with considerably more dignity than the situation required, and walked out of the bathroom. I was still smiling when I finished brushing.

Next, she was in the toilet when I came to lean against the doorframe with my coffee.

“Norman.” She was flat and final.

“What?”

“Get out.”

10 pst starting here

“Get Out

“We were dating. Daisy This lent

“I will end you” She pointed at the doce without looking up titan her phone Clone behind you

I closed it behind me, still smiling, and went back to the cen

Breakfast was simple she made eggs because she was particular above rygs and didn’t trust me with them after one incident I was not going to bring up, and made coffee because she needed at east two cups before she became fully functional, and I had learned that early in our marriage and apparently hadn’t forgotten.

We ate at the kitchen island, shoulders close, talking about the day ahead. She had a board meeting it ten. I had back-to-back calls until noon. She stole a piece of toast from my plate without asking, and I let her because I always let her, and she knew it.

When she kissed me before we left, it tasted like coffee and her and the particular warreth of a morning that had nowhere urgent to be.

We drove separately. Always separately – Daisy Wright did not share commutes; it was simply not now she operated, and I had accepted this about her the same way I accepted all her edges. What I had not expected was that we would end up side by side at the first traffic light, her sleek white car beside my black one, and that she would glance over and find me already looking.

She rolled her window down.

I rolled mine down.

‘Stop following me,” she said.

“Same road, Daisy”

She looked forward. I looked forward. The light stayed red.

I looked back at her.

She was already looking.

The light turned green.

“Have a good day,” I said.

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M

She smiled small and real and just for ine. Then she blew a kiss across the space between the ca casual as anything, like she hadn’t just rearranged sometfring quietly in my chest, and pulled away.

I watched her car move ahead of mine and then turn right at the next junction.

I turned left.

The office was already running at full pace when I arrived.

‘Good morning, sir.” Daniel was at his desk outside my office, my schedule already pulled up on his screen, coffee waiting on the corner. Twenty-four years old, efficient, completely unflappable, and entirely unbothered by the fact that his predecessor had resigned by phone while his boss was at his ex-wife’s house.

I had made good choices with Daniel.

‘Morning,” I said, picking up the coffee. “What’s first?”

‘Call with the Singapore team at nine. Legal review at ten thirty. The infrastructure board wants a response on the amended proposal before the end of day.” He paused. “Also, you have three interview requests from the press following the initiative coverage.”

‘Decline all three.”

‘Already drafted the responses, sir. Just need your approval.”

I looked at him.

‘Daniel.”

“Sir?”

“Good man.”

He nodded efficiently and turned back to his screen.

The morning moved the way busy mornings moved — one thing becoming the next becoming the next, the hours folding into each other without ceremony. The Singapore call ran long. The legal review threw up two issues that needed immediate attention. By early afternoon I had answered more emails than any hurnan being should be required to answer in a single sitting.

I checked my watch.

Three forty-seven.

I looked at it again like that would change something.

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fidunt

I leaned back in my chair and pressed two fingers to my temple. A dull, persistent ache had been building there since around midday, the kind that started quietly and got louder the longer you ignored it.

“Daniel.”

He appeared in the doorway in seconds. “Sir?

“Do we have anything for headaches?”

He crossed to the small cabinet by the window without hesitation, opened it, and produced a small box of painkillers which he set on my desk with a glass of water.

“Already in there,” he said simply.

“Thank you.”

He nodded and disappeared.

I swallowed the tablets, took a long sip of water, and looked back at my screen.

Four hours until I could reasonably leave.

I checked my watch again.

Three forty-eight.

I exhaled and opened the next document.

HOURS LATER**

The elevator doors opened at the ground floor, and the evening air of the lobby hit me immediately – cool and quiet after the hours of recycled office air upstairs. I rolled my shoulder slightly, loosened my collar, and started toward the exit.

Then I saw Daisy.

She was standing just beyond the glass doors, facing the entrance, and she was smiling. Not the professional smile, not the one she arranged for boardrooms and galas and people she needed something from. The real one. She was waving slightly, just her fingers, like she was trying not to make too much of it but couldn’t quite help herself.

She had come to pick me up.

She never did this. I had told her not to – she was always exhausted by the end of the day, and her apartment was closer, and there was absolutely no reason for her to drive across the city just to- and yet here she was. Standing in front of my building in the evening light, looking happier than

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yone had a right to look after a full working day,

Something in my chest did what it always did when she looked at me like that,

I smiled back and started walking toward her

One step.

The pain hit me like something physical – a white-hot spike driving straight through the centre of my head, so sudden and so violent that it stopped me completely. A sound left my throat before I could stop it, low and involuntary, my hand flying up to grip the side of my head.

Are you alright?”

Her voice, coming closer. Heels on marble.

I felt it then. It was warm and moving. Something running from my nose downward before I fully understood what it was.

I turned away from her immediately.

One fluid movement — turn, hand up, covering my nose and mouth, angling my face away before she could reach me and see. I felt the drop hit the marble floor, and my stomach dropped with it.

I reached into my jacket pocket with my free hand. Napkin. I always carried one. I pressed it to my nose quickly and firmly and shifted my weight, stepping forward, my shoe covering the small dark spot on the floor before she could look down and see it.

“I’m fine,” I said. My voice came out slightly muffled behind my hand. “Something went down the

wrong way.

I kept my back half turned, napkin pressed to my face, willing it to stop, willing her to stay exactly where she was for just another thirty seconds.

Chapt