My Boss Replaced Me With His First Love

Three days.

That's what I kept telling myself on Thursday afternoon as I sat at my desk sorting through four years of files. Three days, and then I'd never have to sit in this particular chair again, never have to listen to the specific hum of these particular fluorescent lights, never have to feel the strange, tight quiet that settles over this floor whenever Devin is in his office and everyone knows it.

Three days.

My phone buzzed. His name on the screen. Not a call—a text.

*Bring in a cup of hot honey water.*

No please. No question mark. The same way he'd been asking for things for four years, in that flat, efficient shorthand that I used to read as intimacy. *He's comfortable with you. He doesn't need formalities with you.* That's what I used to tell myself. Looking at it now, it just looked like a man who had never once considered that the person reading it might have a spine.

I made the honey water. I didn't know why I made it. Habit, maybe. Or maybe I just wanted to see it through—the whole picture, the full stop at the end of a sentence I'd been writing for too long.

The office door was cracked when I arrived. I pushed it open with my shoulder, both hands around the warm mug, and stopped.

Melissa was stretched out on the leather sofa like she'd been there all her life. Her head was in his lap. Not sitting beside him—in his lap, cheek turned upward, one arm curved over her stomach. And Devin's hand was moving in slow circles over her lower abdomen, slow and deliberate, like it was the most natural thing he had ever done.

I stood in the doorway and thought about a Tuesday morning two winters ago. I'd come in holding my side, hunched so far forward that Sandra had stopped me in the hall to ask if I needed to go home. I'd said no. I'd made it to my desk, taken three ibuprofen on an empty stomach, and when I finally got up to refill my water, I ran into Devin in the break room. He'd glanced at me—that same quick, clinical glance—and said, *You look like hell. You're not getting sick, are you? I need you in the Tanaka call at two.* I'd told him it was just cramps. He'd reached past me to the cabinet, taken out the office's generic painkillers, and set them on the counter beside my hand. *Don't let it affect your work.*

His hand kept making its slow, careful circles.

I walked to the desk. Set the mug down without a word. The ceramic made a soft sound against the glass surface—barely anything. I turned to go.

"You're—"

The voice came from the sofa. Melissa had sat up. She was looking at me with an expression I couldn't immediately read, something between recognition and calculation, her head tilted slightly to one side. Her eyes moved over my face the way you look at a word you think you might have seen before.

"You're... Marvin Huckabee's sister?"

The slap landed before I finished processing the question.

It wasn't hard, exactly. It was fast. Her palm caught me across the left cheek, and for a single suspended second there was nothing—just white—and then the ringing started. My cheek went hot immediately, the kind of heat that builds from the inside out, and I realized I had taken a step back without deciding to.

I didn't raise a hand. I didn't say anything. I just stood there while the ringing faded and the burn set in.

Melissa's eyes were wet. Her finger pointed at me like an accusation, her voice climbing.

"She's from the Huckabee family in Jurnell!" The words came out fast, almost breathless with outrage. "She could've lived like a princess. She had everything—she didn't need any of this. But she came to you as an *assistant*. And you're telling me she doesn't like you? You're telling me that's nothing?"

I watched the tears spill over. I watched Devin's gaze move to my face—a half second, no more—and then slide away.

He stood. He crossed the room to where Melissa stood with her shaking finger still pointed at me, and he folded her into his arms the way you'd fold something fragile, something that needed protecting. His hand moved to her hair. His voice came out soft, quieter than I'd heard it in months.

"Even if she does like me," he said, "it's all one-sided." His chin rested on the top of her head. "Because in my heart, there's only room for you."

I didn't move. My fingers were doing something at my side—curling in, slow, then releasing. Curling in again. I was watching from somewhere slightly above myself, the way you watch a scene you've been rehearsing for so long that the actual performance doesn't touch you anymore.

*He didn't look at my face.* That was the thought that kept arriving, simple and clean. *He looked at her tears. That's how I know it's over. Not because he chose her—I already knew that. But because my pain didn't register on his radar at all. Not the slap. Not the ringing in my ear. Not the heat climbing up my cheekbone. Nothing.*

Last night had been three in the morning. I knew this precisely because I had looked at the clock, the way I always did when I couldn't sleep—3:04 AM, the numbers red in the dark. He had pulled me toward him by the shoulder. His mouth had been warm against my skin. He had said my name the way he used to, the other way, the one that had nothing to do with conference rooms. *Jennifer.* Like it was something he needed.

Seventeen hours ago.

The slap didn't hurt as much as I thought it would. Maybe because something inside me had already been hit harder, earlier, and this was just the echo. The original wound had been made in small, patient increments—a cramp I weathered alone, a box of painkillers set on a counter, a name said in the dark that meant nothing in the daylight. The slap was just the last note of a song that had already ended.

My cheek throbbed. I kept my hands at my sides.

Then Melissa made a sound—sharp, sudden, high enough to cut—and I turned just in time to see her hand close around the mug.

The honey water hit my arm.

It was still hot—properly hot, the way I'd made it—and my skin registered it before my brain did. A bright, terrible bloom of heat from my wrist to my elbow, the fabric of my sleeve going wet and clinging, the skin underneath already tightening, already beginning to rise.

"*Ah*—" Melissa recoiled, cradling her own hand to her chest. "Dev, it's hot!"

I stood with the water dripping from my arm onto the floor. I did not look down at the skin. I did not touch it. I watched Devin's eyes move—past me, over me—to the red flush creeping across Melissa's fingers where the mug's heat had caught her.

Something shifted in his face. Not concern. Not exactly. But something colder than that, something that had always been there and that I had spent four years deciding not to see.

His eyes came to mine at last.

"Jennifer." His voice was ice. Clean, quiet, absolute. "You've been with me for four years. And you can't even handle something this simple?"