I Took a Job to Move On From My Wife's Death, But My New Boss Is My Old College Crush

The cursor blinked in the empty field: Reason for leaving last position. Liam’s fingers hovered, then typed: Personal leave. He deleted it. Typed: Career break. Deleted that too. The truth—My wife died and I stopped functioning—wasn’t listed in the dropdown options.

He left it blank and scrolled down. Upload CV. He clicked the button, watched the progress bar fill, and felt nothing. The job description had promised solitude: maintain digital archives, minimal client contact, flexible hours. A tomb for the living. He was qualified. He was also forty-two and hadn’t opened AutoCAD since Sarah’s diagnosis.

Behind the laptop, the living room held its breath. Her books still crowded the low shelf—oncology journals, dog-eared novels, a field guide to urban lichen she’d bought on their honeymoon. The photograph had been moved three times in two years: bedside table (too sharp), drawer (cowardly), hallway (accusatory). Now it lived beside the router, a domestic afterthought. Sarah grinned at the camera, wind flattening her hair against the Cliffs of Moher, one hand raised against the Atlantic glare. The image was sun-bleached; her teeth looked phosphorescent.

Liam’s thumb found the trackpad. Submit application. A dialogue box: Are you sure? He exhaled through his teeth and clicked yes. The screen refreshed to a thank-you page decorated with a minimalist skyline. He closed the lid.

The apartment answered with silence. He stood, joints stiff from disuse, and walked the four steps to the kitchen. The kettle required descaling; he boiled it anyway. While it rumbled, he opened the fridge, stared at a single jar of marmalade, shut the door. The kettle clicked off. He didn’t move.

Instead he returned to the living room and picked up the photograph. The glass was cool, smudged with the oil of previous fingerprints. He traced the outline of her shoulder, the place where his hand had rested the day it was taken. You’d tell me to take the job, he thought. You’d say, “Stop being a ghost in your own life.” The words formed so clearly he almost heard them, and the familiarity of that imagined voice—practical, amused—sent a spike of pain through his sternum.

He set the frame face-down, then immediately turned it upright again. A compromise: she could see the room, he could avoid her eyes. The gesture felt criminal and necessary in equal measure.

His phone buzzed: Application received. He deleted the notification. Outside, dusk gathered over the canal, turning the water the color of old pewter. Somewhere a bicycle bell rang twice, the sound thin and evaporating. Liam sat back at the table, opened the laptop, and began drafting a cover letter for a different posting—library assistant, night shift—before stopping halfway through. The words kept rearranging themselves into an apology he hadn’t meant to write.

The building was all glass and right angles, a crystalline growth against the Dublin skyline. Liam paused at the revolving door, watching his reflection fragment and reassemble with each rotation. His suit felt borrowed—the sleeves too short, the shoulders too wide. He hadn't worn it since Sarah's funeral.

The reception area breathed money. White leather sofas floated on a polished concrete floor. Behind the desk, a woman with perfect eyebrows directed him to the fourth floor without looking up from her screen. The lift moved in silence, numbers climbing.

Glass walls. Everywhere, glass walls. Through them he saw open-plan desking, standing desks, young architects hunched over glowing monitors. The conference room they showed him into had a view of the canal, the same water he'd watched from his apartment, transformed here into an architectural feature.

He sat. The chair was ergonomic, designed for bodies that hadn't spent two years collapsing into themselves. His hands found the edge of the table—some pale wood, probably Scandinavian, probably cost more than his monthly rent.

The door opened.

She wore navy. A blazer that fit her like it had been sewn on, trousers that ended just above ankle boots. Her hair was shorter now, falling just below her jaw in a clean line that made her look like someone who made decisions quickly. But it was the same face—those cheekbones that had made him stupid in lectures, the mouth that always looked like it knew something he didn't.

"Mr. Murphy."

Not Liam. Not yet. She extended her hand across the table and he took it—her grip firm, professional, but her palm was slightly damp. She was nervous. The realization hit him like vertigo.

"Ms. Delaney."

They released each other's hands too quickly. She sat, opened a leather portfolio. Her pen was matte black, expensive. When she looked down at his CV, he watched her absorb the gap in employment, the dates that didn't align, the references from a life he'd stopped living.

"You studied at UCD," she said, not looking up.

"Same time as you."

Now she met his eyes. For a moment—less than a second—something flickered across her face. Recognition, yes, but something else. Something that made him remember sitting three rows behind her in Architectural History, how she'd once turned around to borrow a pen and he'd been unable to speak for the rest of the lecture.

"I remember," she said. The words came out softer than the others. Then her shoulders squared. "Though your experience seems somewhat... dated."

The interview began.

She began with the obvious. “Two years is a long time to be away from practice. How do you explain it?”

Liam felt the photograph’s weight in his pocket—he’d slid it in at the last minute, a talisman he now regretted. “Personal circumstances,” he said. “They’re resolved.”

Elara’s pen hovered. “Resolved in what sense?”

“In the sense that I’m here.” The words came out flatter than he intended, like a slab laid without mortar. He watched her note something in the margin of his CV, a single vertical line that might have been either approval or condemnation.

She moved to software. “Which version of Revit did you last use?”

“Twenty-twenty.”

“We’re on twenty-four. You realize the gap?”

“I can close it.”

“How quickly?”

“However quickly you need.”

She looked up then, eyes the same storm-grey he remembered, but harder, as if the years had added a laminate. “That’s not an answer, Liam. That’s deflection.”

He felt heat rise in his throat. “I’m not deflecting. I’m stating that learning curves don’t frighten me.”

A pause. She clicked the pen closed, opened it again. “The archive is chaotic. We’re preparing for a retrospective exhibition in eight weeks. I need someone who can locate every drawing we’ve produced since 2015, tag it, and build a searchable database. Alone. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Without supervision.”

“Yes.”

“Without emotional collapse if you discover a deadline you forgot.”

The sentence landed like a slap. He swallowed once. “I’m not fragile.”

“I never said you were.” She slid a single sheet across the table—probation terms, bullet points, end date. “Three-month trial. Half salary until review. If the archive isn’t immaculate by week eight, we part ways. No notice.”

He read the page twice, though the words barely registered. “You’re offering this now?”

“The firm is hemorrhaging billable hours on document hunts. You’re available. It’s arithmetic.” Her voice stayed level, but her left hand had curled into a fist on her knee, knuckles pale. “Take it or leave it.”

He thought of the empty fridge, the kettle’s scale, the photograph staring at the router. “I’ll take it.”

“Monday. Eight-thirty. Bring your own laptop; IT won’t issue one until month two.” She stood, extending the same hand as before. This time her grip was colder. “Welcome back to the living.”

He wasn’t sure whether she meant the profession or something larger. Before he could decide, she had turned to the glass wall, already dialing someone on her phone, her back a closed door more final than any wooden one.

The first week passed in pixels.
Subject: Folder taxonomy v2.
Subject: Naming convention – STRICT adherence.
Subject: Re: Re: Missing 2017 zoning drawings – locate today.

Each message arrived between 07:42 and 07:47, as if she scheduled them while the kettle boiled. No hello, no sign-off, just bullet points. Liam pictured her thumbs on the phone, the same economical movement she once used to flip a drafting board. He answered with equal dryness—Yes, found, moved—then returned to the nested labyrinth of badly dated folders, the cursor his only company.

They occupied the same open-plan aquarium, but Elara’s desk sat two glass partitions away, angled so he caught her profile only when she turned to speak to someone else. She never turned toward him. If she needed to relay something “urgent,” she sent another email even though he could see her mouth form the words across the room. The distance felt intentional, surgical, and it scraped at him like a burr under wool.

By Thursday he had restored 1,300 drawings, renamed 4,800, and begun to dream in file paths. At 18:10 the rest of the floor emptied. He stayed, claiming overtime he didn’t want, because the alternative was the apartment and the photograph that watched the router. The cleaning staff vacuumed around his chair; the lights dropped to motion-sensor gloom. He worked until the ache in his left eye became a pulse he could count.

Friday brought a last-minute directive: cross-reference every Revit file against its PDF export. The task was pointless make-work—he had already verified the set—but the message ended: Deadline COB. He stared at the clock: 14:27. Something tight gathered beneath his ribs. He typed, Will require late evening. Elara replied within a minute: Noted. No offer of help, no suggestion that the deadline might flex.

He did it anyway, clicking through folders while the office dimmed again. At 21:48 the final comparison ran green. He exhaled, leaned back, and became aware of thirst, hunger, the faint chemical smell of toner. The glass walls reflected only him, a thin man in an oversized suit jacket slung over a chair. He looked like someone borrowed from the lost-property box.

As he shut the laptop, he allowed himself one glance toward her desk. The monitor was dark, the chair pushed in, jacket gone. She had left without sound, without acknowledging he was still there. The tight thing in his chest loosened, turned cold. He told himself it was relief—no awkward elevator ride, no forced small talk—but it tasted like rejection all the same.

Outside, the city smelled of rain that hadn’t fallen. He walked to the canal, stood under a streetlamp, and watched the black water hold fragments of neon. Somewhere behind him a bus hissed to a stop; passengers spilled out, laughing. He took out his phone, thumb hovering over the email icon. He wanted to write: You could have said goodnight. He wrote nothing, pocketed the device, and started home, the unread sentence burning a small, private hole in his pocket.

The server had been grinding for twenty minutes, progress bar frozen at sixty-three percent. Liam's coffee had gone cold an hour ago, skin forming a thin membrane across the surface. The corrupted file contained the firm's earliest digital blueprints—projects from 2015 that existed nowhere else, their physical counterparts lost to a flood in the basement storage three years prior.

He tried the recovery tool again, watching code scroll past like a foreign language. The cursor blinked mockingly. Behind him, the motion sensors clicked off another bank of lights, plunging half the office into darkness.

"You're using the wrong parameters."

He startled, spinning in his chair. Elara stood at the entrance to his cubicle, her silhouette framed by the emergency lighting. She wore a grey t-shirt instead of her usual blazer, the fabric soft and worn, and her hair was pulled back messily, strands escaping at her temples. Without makeup, she looked younger, the sharp angles of her professional mask softened into something almost vulnerable.

"Sorry," she said, though her tone held no apology. "I saw the lights on."

Liam gestured helplessly at the screen. "The recovery software keeps timing out. I've tried three different approaches."

She moved closer, close enough that he caught the faint scent of soap and something else—tea, maybe. Her fingers found the keyboard, brushing his as she took control. "The file structure's fragmented. You need to rebuild the index first, then extract."

Her hands moved with practiced efficiency, opening terminal windows he hadn't known existed. She typed commands from memory, her breathing steady and focused. Liam found himself watching the reflection of code in her eyes rather than the screen itself.

"How do you know all this?" he asked.

She kept working, but her shoulders lifted slightly. "Started in IT support to pay for college. Architecture was the dream job, but computers pay the rent." A few more keystrokes. "There."

The progress bar jumped, climbing steadily now. Seventy percent. Eighty-five. They watched in silence as it completed its journey, the corrupted file surrendering its contents to a new folder on the desktop.

"Thank you," he said, meaning it more than the words could carry.

She rolled her shoulders, the movement pulling her t-shirt tighter across her back. "Couldn't sleep. Figured I might as well be useful somewhere." Her voice dropped, became something almost confessional. "I hate leaving things broken."

The lights flickered back to full brightness as the motion sensor detected their stillness. In the sudden glare, they both blinked, the moment's intimacy dissolving into fluorescent reality. But she didn't move away immediately, and when she finally stepped back, her hand brushed his arm—a brief, accidental contact that lingered longer than necessary.

She stayed close enough that he could see the faint scar above her left eyebrow, something he didn't remember from university. The silence stretched between them, no longer comfortable but not quite uncomfortable either—just full, weighted with everything they hadn't said since he'd walked into her office.

"Where did you go, Liam?" The question came out barely above a whisper, as if she was afraid of disturbing the stillness of the empty office. "After graduation. After... everything."

He stared at the recovered files on the screen, the architectural drawings glowing faintly. "Sarah got sick. Cancer." The words felt clinical, distant, like reading someone else's medical chart. "Three years of treatment. Then two years of... not." His throat constricted around the last word, making it come out smaller than intended.

Elara's hand found his forearm, her fingers warm through the thin fabric of his shirt. The touch was grounding, present in a way that made his chest ache. "I'm sorry, Liam." No platitudes, no questions about what kind or how long. Just the simple fact of it, acknowledged and held between them.

He realized he was holding his breath. When he exhaled, it came out shakier than he expected. Her thumb moved across his skin in a small, unconscious circle, and he felt the tension he'd been carrying for months—maybe years—shift slightly in his chest.

"She was an architect too," he heard himself say. "That's how we met. She would have known how to fix that file in half the time."

Elara's grip tightened briefly, then relaxed. "I didn't know." Her voice carried something he couldn't quite identify—regret, maybe, or the weight of understanding how much she'd missed. "I looked for you once. On social media. But you'd disappeared."

The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Somewhere in the building, a ventilation system kicked on with a low mechanical sigh. He became acutely aware of her hand still on his arm, the way her palm curved to fit the muscle there, the faint pressure of each fingertip.

"I couldn't..." he started, then stopped. How to explain the way grief had made him want to erase himself from the world, to become a ghost in his own life. "It was easier to be nowhere."

She nodded, a small movement that shifted the air between them. Her hand lifted from his arm, leaving behind a patch of skin that felt suddenly cold, exposed. She stepped back, the professional mask sliding back into place even as her eyes remained soft.

"The files are safe now," she said, gesturing toward the screen. "You should go home. Get some sleep."

But she didn't move toward the exit, and neither did he. They stood there in the artificial brightness, two people who had once known each other in a different life, now connected by a corrupted file and the simple fact of survival.