I couldn’t do it, so I went with the simplest explanation.
“My heart’s not in it anymore.”
There it was, simple and unavoidable. I couldn’t pretend otherwise anymore. My life at the college could be reduced to a single idea—playing something I’d performed too many times. The notes were still correct, the technique still there, but the meaning had dulled. I could go through the motions without effort, shape a phrase, correct a mistake, guide a student toward something better…
And none of it felt the way it used to. No matter how much I tried to push through it, to concentrate, to reconnect with what I knew, part of me remained elsewhere. I wasn’t drifting or unfocused, I was …fixed. Wanting.
That was the part I couldn’t reconcile. Because it wasn’t simply that something had changed. I didn’t want it to go back to how it had been before.
Karl didn’t look away. “Then you need to find your heart again. Your passion. Because it’s still there.”
I lowered my gaze again. “I know.”
That was the problem. I had a very clear idea of where I’d left it. Karl knew too. I saw it in the way he watched me, in the things he didn’t say. Thankfully, he didn’t say them out loud. I wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.
We moved on to other things after that—practicalities, the college, things that required less from me—but his words stayed where they were, lodged somewhere just beneath the surface, waiting. It wasn’t until later, when the flat had gone quiet and the day had finally caught up with me, that I let myself think about it properly. About where my heart was. About who it had stayed with.
I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, the darkness pressing in around me. And without meaning to, I said his name.
“Stefan.”
I could feel him. The weight of his hand at the back of my neck. The way his voice dropped when he was focused on me.The way he looked at me as though he saw more than I was ready to show.
I closed my eyes, but if anything, that made it worse. Because now it was no longer memory, but presence, detailed and impossible to ignore. I could feel his hands on me, playing me like an instrument. I could smell him, that familiar scent that would fill my nostrils each morning when I awoke in his arms.
The feel of him inside me.
I turned onto my side, dragging the pillow closer, as if that might ground me in something real.
What I wanted wasn’t here. And no matter how much I told myself I understood that, accepted it, had made peace with it, my body didn’t seem to agree.
I pressed my face into the pillow, trying to shut it down, to push it back into something manageable. But even as I forced myself toward sleep, part of me was still there. With him.
And I had no idea how to bring it back.
Diana set her glass down and aimed the remote at the TV, extinguishing it.
I blinked. “You don’t want to watch the film?”
She’d invited me for dinner, which had somehow turned into wine and vague plans for a film neither of us had seemed interested in watching. And I couldn’t escape the feeling she had something on her mind.
I think I’m about to be interrogated.
Not that I’d hid anything from her or Karl. They were my two lifelines, my sounding boards, the only people who truly understood me.
Well, maybe there was one more.
“There’s something I should probably tell you,” she said.
I blinked again as her words sank in.Ah. So this isn’t about me.
A small wave of relief followed, immediate and undeniable. I wasn’t in the mood to dissect my job, my life—or the Stefan-shaped absence sitting quietly behind both.
“That sounds ominous.”
She chuckled. “I suppose it did, but that’s not how I intended it to sound.” She picked up her glass, then hesitated. “The fact is…”
She drank half of it in one go.