Page 29 of The Yoga Teacher

THE BLINKING CURSOR taunted him.

It all felt so meaningless today.

Every idea felt stale, lifeless. Nothing popped. Nothing landed. Just a series of uninspired taglines and concepts that even he knew were forgettable. Garbage.

He couldn’t stop thinking of Hannah.

He exhaled sharply, rubbing his hands over his face. He could hear the faint murmur of conversations outside his office. The team was in a brainstorm session, throwing around words like "disrupt," "viral," "trend-forward."

Every word sounded like it had been ripped from some social media thread on how to stay relevant in an industry that didn’t have room for aging creatives.

He used to be the one leading those meetings. He used to be the one with the best idea in the room. Now, all he felt was... stuck.

His phone buzzed. A Slack message from Tristan. "Client wants more Gen Z engagement. Think interactive. Maybe AI-driven personalization?"

He flexed his fingers against his keyboard, willing something—anything—to come to him. But all he could think about wasHannah.

She used to listen to his campaign ideas late at night, curled up on the couch, wine glass in hand.

Daniel stared blankly at his screen, the words in front of him blurring into nonsense. The weekend was coming.

She’d come home. They always spent weekends together. That was their rhythm. Their life. It couldn’t just... stop.

He glanced at the clock—three hours until the client meeting.

He needed something. Something that would prove he still had it.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard.

Nothing.

His mind felt as empty as the screen in front of him.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Hannah

HANNAH WOKE UP alone. Again.

The second morning of her new reality.

For a moment, she just lay there, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling. The events of last two days felt like something from another world—distant, unreal. But her body remembered. The ache in her chest, the rawness behind her eyes, the heaviness that sat in her limbs like lead.

Hannah exhaled slowly, forcing herself to sit up.

She expected to feel the same sharp grief of yesterday, the soul-crushing agony that had wracked through her body, keeping her curled under the covers, unable to move, unable to do anything but breathe through the wreckage.

Today, she felt… nothing.

No tears. No sharp inhale of pain. No nausea clawing at her stomach. Just emptiness.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed, her bare feet pressing into the cool floor.

Hannah looked at her hands in her lap, flexing her fingers slowly. They didn’t feel like her own.

She thought about Daniel. Not the stranger she’d seen buried inside another woman, but the man who kissed her every morning. The man who pulled her into slow dances in the kitchen when their favorite songs came on. The man who had promised her forever.

Had she imagined all of it?

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