Three Years Forgotten, Why Go Crazy When I Say Goodbye? novel Chapter 405

"I know."

That night, after dropping Leo off at his new place, Willow returned to her apartment, took a hot shower, and collapsed into bed.

She had been running around the city all day. Logically, she should have been dead on her feet, ready to pass out the second her head hit the pillow. Instead, she was wide awake, her mind racing with startling clarity. And the root of her insomnia was one person: Silas Thorne.

Silas had left on a business trip. It had been three full days since he departed, and she hadn't received a single text from him.

The darkness of the night saturated the room, broken only by the warm, amber glow of the bedside lamp.

Willow lay on her side, sinking into the plush mattress, her thumb mindlessly tapping open their chat history.

The conversation had stalled days ago. His final message was a simple, curt okay.

She scrolled up, her eyes tracing their past exchanges. The higher she scrolled, the more an undeniable emptiness clawed at her chest. She hadn't realized it until now, but she and Silas used to talk a lot.

There was always a good morning and a good night. He would casually ask what she had for lunch, or offer sharp, insightful advice when she vented about work problems. She hadn't thought much of it then, but reading them now brought a sudden, suffocating ache to her throat.

Thousands of miles away, Silas stood alone before the floor-to-ceiling windows of his hotel suite.

The city skyline outside was dense and unfamiliar, a sprawling sea of alien lights.

He had just wrapped up a grueling, hours-long networking dinner, and exhaustion clung to his features. His fingers gripped his phone tightly. The screen illuminated, then faded to black, over and over as his thumb hovered over their chat box. He just couldn't bring himself to hit send.

It wasn't that he didn't want to talk to her. It was that the memory of her voice kept echoing relentlessly in his skull. I don't have those kinds of feelings for him.

"Pick someone up?" Silas's brow furrowed sharply. "Who? Who is so important that she had to go personally?"

He had never even let her exert herself picking him up.

"It was Leo Yardley. He flew in to start his onboarding early."

"Oh." Silas went silent. Of course it was Leo. He had already witnessed firsthand how fiercely protective she was of her old team back in Seattle. She cared about them infinitely more than she cared about him.

But he had no right to be petty. She didn't harbor any romantic feelings for him anyway. If he started acting like a possessive tyrant now, it would only breed resentment, and that was a risk he absolutely could not take.

He forced himself to pivot, firing off questions to distract himself. "How has her appetite been? Is she healthy? How is work? Has anyone been giving her a hard time?"