Page 41 of The Authenticity Clause
She walked over to the windows and, with a decisive tug, yanked the curtains open. Bright, unforgiving sunlight flooded the room, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air. Leo flinched, raising a hand to shield his eyes.
“There,” she said. “Vitamin D. Step one.” She started gathering the takeout containers, her movements efficient and purposeful. “I’m not going to clean for you. But I am going to throw this stuff out before it achieves sentience.”
He just stood there, watching her, a strange, overwhelming wave of gratitude washing over him. She wasn’t trying to fix him. She wasn't offering empty platitudes. She was just… here. A solid, real presence in his house of ghosts. A lifeline.
When she had cleared the worst of the trash, she came back and stood in front of him.
“I miss you,” she said, her voice quiet and achingly sincere. “Your actual, stupid, funny self. He’s in there somewhere, right?”
Leo couldn’t speak. He just nodded, a lump forming in his throat.
“Good,” she said. She gave him a quick, hard hug, a hug that was less about comfort and more about reminding his atoms that they were still held together. “Eat the oranges. I’ll text you tomorrow. You have to answer.”
And then she was gone.
The apartment was quiet again, but the quality of the silence had changed. It was no longer a suffocating blanket; it was just an empty space. A space filled with bright, intrusive sunlight. Maya’s visit had cracked the window of his self-imposed tomb, letting in a sliver of the outside world.
The numbness had receded, leaving behind the raw, throbbing pain of his heartbreak. He looked around the room, and the ghosts were still there. Julian’s laugh echoed in the sunbeams. The memory of his hand on Leo’s was a phantom weight. The pain was so intense it was a physical thing, a crushing pressure in his chest.
He had to do something with it. He couldn’t just sit here and let it consume him. The thought was a new one, a tiny spark of defiance in the darkness.
His gaze fell on his tablet, lying on the coffee table where it had been since the day he was fired. It was covered in a thick layer of dust, its screen dark and lifeless. He walked over to it, his movements slow, and picked it up. He wiped the screen clean with the hem of his shirt.
He turned it on. The screen flickered to life, showing his last project: a mood board for the Northwind campaign. A monument to his own spectacular lie. He quickly closed the file, his stomach churning.
He stared at the blank home screen, his finger hovering. He didn’t know what he was doing. He just knew he couldn’t stay still. He couldn't keep drowning.
He opened his drawing app. He created a new canvas, a perfect, blank, intimidating white square. He stared at it, the emptiness of it reflecting the emptiness inside him. What was there to create? He wasn’t a designer. He wasn’t a strategist. He was a fraud.
But he was an artist. That was the one thing, the only thing, that had ever been real.
He felt an overwhelming, visceral urge. It wasn’t a gentle wave of inspiration; it was a desperate, clawing need. A need to take the howling, formless grief inside him and give it a shape. To take the pain and make it into something he could see, something he could understand.
He selected a color—a deep, bruised, midnight blue. His stylus touched the screen.
The first line he drew was jagged, angry, a tear in the fabric of the white canvas. He didn't think. He just felt. He let the heartbreak guide his hand. He channeled all of it—the shame, the regret, the gut-wrenching memory of the cold, empty look in Julian’s eyes—into the digital page.
He drew a figure made of brilliant, fractured light, a being of pure, chaotic color. And he drew a world of perfect, gray, geometric shapes, a fortress of clean lines and cold logic. And he drew the figure of light standing outside the fortress, his hand outstretched, a single, vibrant tear tracing a path down his cheek, turned away, shut out in the darkness.
He wasn’t creating for a client. He wasn’t creating for a portfolio or for a job application. He wasn't creating for validation.
He was creating for himself. It was the first honest thing he had done in months.
And in the silent, sunlit cage of his apartment, surrounded by the ghosts of what he had lost, Leo Hayes finally, painfully, began to paint his way back to life.
Chapter 29: The Black Hole of Despair
Julian was in the middle of optimizing the agency’s fourth-quarter workflow—a task of such beautiful, sterile complexity that it almost managed to drown out the low, persistent hum of misery in his own head—when the door to his office slid open without a preceding knock.
He didn't need to look up to know who it was. Only Sarah ever entered his office like she owned the place. Because, of course, she did.
“We need to talk,” she said. Her voice was flat, stripped of its usual warmth. It was the voice she used for firing underperforming vendors and negotiating with difficult lawyers.
“I’m in the middle of something,” Julian replied, his eyes still fixed on the intricate flowchart on his monitor.Control the interaction. Maintain the professional frame.
“What you’re in the middle of,” she said, walking over to his desk and placing her hands flat on its surface, forcing him to finally look up, “is turning my favorite employee into a quivering wreck and sucking all the joy out of this building. So whatever that is on your screen can wait.”
Julian leaned back in his chair, his posture a careful study in detached authority. “Anya is one of our most resilient designers. I’m sure she’s not a ‘quivering wreck’.”
