The vodka pizza was still warm through the paper bag, grease already spotting the bottom in dark circles that would have annoyed Thea any other day, but today she barely noticed because her heart was doing that stupid flutter thing it always did when she was about to surprise Callum, the same flutter she'd felt three years ago when he'd first asked her to coffee after that disastrous client meeting where she'd saved his presentation.
She shouldn't have left work early, not with the Henderson account review tomorrow and Margot still waiting on those revised proposals, but it was December eighteenth and Callum had been so distant lately, canceling their last three dinner plans with increasingly vague excuses about deadlines and his uncle needing him for emergency meetings, and Thea had decided that maybe she was the problem, maybe she'd been too focused on work, too tired for sex like he'd mentioned last month in that tone that wasn't quite joking, so here she was with forty-three dollars worth of his favorite pizza and the navy dress he'd once said made her look like she belonged in a cologne commercial.
The key turned smoothly in his apartment door because he'd given it to her six months ago with that careless confidence of someone who'd never had to worry about being betrayed, and she was already planning how she'd set everything up on his coffee table, maybe light that expensive candle she'd bought him, the one that smelled like leather and bergamot and still sat unused on his bookshelf, when she heard it.
Laughter, feminine and breathy and intimate in a way that made Thea's stomach clench before her brain could catch up, and she stood frozen in his narrow hallway with the pizza growing heavier in her hands as Callum's voice drifted from the bedroom, low and amused in that particular way he used when he was trying to be seductive, saying "come here" like he'd said it to her a thousand times except he hadn't said it to her in weeks.
The lunch bag hit the floor before Thea registered she'd dropped it.
Her feet carried her forward without permission, and maybe some part of her already knew what she'd find because her hands had gone cold and her chest had gone tight in that animal way bodies understand danger before minds do, but nothing prepared her for the sight of Sienna Castellano straddling her boyfriend, wearing Callum's old Columbia shirt that Thea had slept in just last weekend, her dark hair spilling over shoulders that were bare and smooth and twenty-three years old.
Time stretched like pulled taffy, every detail burning itself into Thea's retinas with cruel precision: the wine bottle on the nightstand, the expensive Barolo she'd given Callum for his birthday, the condom wrapper on the floor catching the afternoon light, the way Sienna's spine went rigid when she saw Thea standing there, the way Callum's face cycled through shock and panic and something that looked almost like irritation, as if Thea was the one who'd done something wrong by walking into his apartment with his key and his favorite pizza and three years of her life in her hands.
"This isn't what it looks like," Callum said, and Thea almost laughed because of course that's what he'd say, as if there were any other way to interpret his intern riding him in his bed wearing Thea's shirt, except it wasn't her shirt, was it, nothing in this apartment was hers, not really, she'd just been borrowing space in his life while he figured out if she was worth keeping.
"How long?" Thea heard herself ask, and her voice sounded strange, distant and calm like it belonged to someone else, someone who hadn't just watched her future collapse into rubble.
Sienna scrambled away from Callum, tugging the shirt down over thighs that Thea had once complimented during their Tuesday morning coffee meetings where Thea had mentored her, actually mentored her, written recommendation letters and given career advice and introduced her to clients, and the girl couldn't even meet her eyes now, just stared at the floor like she could disappear into the hardwood if she wished hard enough.
"It doesn't matter," Callum said, reaching for his jeans with hands that shook slightly, and that tremor gave Thea a sick satisfaction because at least he had the decency to be nervous, at least some part of him recognized the magnitude of what he'd destroyed.
"Tell me how long or I call your uncle right now," Thea said, surprised by the steadiness in her voice, by her ability to form words when her lungs felt like they'd forgotten how to process air.
Something flickered across Callum's face then, something that looked like fear mixed with calculation, and he glanced at his phone on the nightstand with an expression Thea had never seen before, guilty and cornered and almost relieved, like he'd been waiting for this moment, like her discovering them wasn't the disaster but the solution.
"Three months," he finally said. "Maybe four."
The number hit Thea like a physical blow, stealing what was left of her breath, because four months ago they'd gone to his company retreat in the Catskills, four months ago he'd told her he loved her while they watched the sunrise over the lake, four months ago she'd started seriously looking at engagement rings during her lunch breaks, imagining the weight of a diamond on her finger and the look on her mother's face when Thea finally brought Callum home for Christmas.
Callum's phone lit up on the nightstand, vibrating with an incoming text, and Thea moved without thinking, snatching it before he could stop her, and there on the screen in cold digital certainty was a conversation that made the infidelity look almost forgivable by comparison.
Uncle Dorian: Did you tell her yet? We need her gone before Christmas.
Callum: Not yet. Waiting for the right moment.
Uncle Dorian: *There is no right moment. End it. I'll handle the rest. Monday morning, my office, make sure she shows up.*
Thea's hands went numb, the phone nearly slipping from her grasp as her brain struggled to process what she was reading, struggled to understand that this wasn't just about Callum's weakness or Sienna's ambition but about something bigger, something that had been planned and orchestrated and decided in corporate offices while Thea had been working sixty-hour weeks to exceed her targets.
"You're firing me," she said, and it wasn't a question because the texts made it abundantly clear, made it obvious that Callum's betrayal and Dorian's manipulation were two parts of the same coordinated destruction, that she'd been so focused on being perfect at her job that she'd missed the knife sliding between her ribs.
Callum had the audacity to look uncomfortable, running his hand through his hair in that gesture he always used when he was about to lie, about to minimize, about to make himself the victim in a story where he'd orchestrated everything.
"Uncle Dorian thinks you're a liability," he said, as if that explained anything, as if that justified sleeping with her mentee while planning her professional execution. "You make waves, you challenge his decisions, the clients like you better than they like management, and that's a problem for the company structure."
Thea stared at him, at this man she'd spent three years loving, and realized she'd never actually known him at all, had only known the performance he'd given, the role he'd played while waiting for the right moment to discard her like something broken and useless.
She turned and walked out without another word, left the key on his hallway table next to the pizza that was probably cold by now, left Sienna crying in his bed and Callum scrambling for excuses that didn't matter anymore, and she made it all the way to the sidewalk before her phone buzzed with a message from Dorian Sterling that confirmed what she already knew.
*Monday. My office. Nine AM sharp.*
Thea stood on Twenty-Third Street while Christmas shoppers flowed around her like she was invisible, like she was already gone, and she understood with brutal clarity that Monday wasn't about firing her, it was about humiliation, about making an example, about ensuring that Thea Langford would never work in New York real estate again, and there was absolutely nothing she could do to stop it.