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.

The physical archive occupied the building’s sub-basement, a concrete cavity reached by a freight lift that shuddered like an old lung. Elara swiped them in with her badge; the lock clacked, and cool, papery air rolled out. Rows of plan chests stood shoulder-to-shoulder, drawers labeled in a handwriting that had retired before either of them qualified. Overhead, a single fluorescent tube buzzed, throwing a sickly light that made everything look jaundiced.

“North-east quadrant, drawer ninety-four,” she said, consulting the spreadsheet on her phone. “Pre-2008 competition entries.”

Liam followed the taper of her shoulders down the aisle, the walls narrowing until his sleeves brushed both sides. Dust puffed up each time his jacket scraped metal. She paused to let him pass; they performed an awkward sideways shuffle, her breast pressing briefly against his arm. Neither commented. He caught the scent she wore—something green and sharp, like snapped twigs after rain—and felt it settle at the base of his throat.

They located the drawer. It stuck. He yanked; the runners squealed, releasing a breath of stale varnish. Inside, hundreds of drawings lay accordion-folded, edges foxed. Elara knelt, hair escaping her clip, and began lifting bundles out. The posture pulled her blouse tight across her back; he saw the ridge of her bra strap and looked away, though not quickly enough.

“Hand me the inventory,” she said without turning.

He crouched beside her, thighs touching. Their combined body heat made the small space feel suddenly starved of oxygen. He read codes aloud; she cross-checked, pen cap between her teeth. When she found a match she exhaled through her nose, a small satisfied sound that made his pulse lurch irrationally.

Forty minutes in, they had eliminated half the drawer but not the prize: a set of hand-rendered elevations for the Riverside Library extension, the firm’s first competition win. Without those originals the retrospective panels would look skeletal. Elara’s foot tapped against the concrete. She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, leaving a graphite smudge on her cheekbone. Liam’s fingers twitched with the urge to wipe it off, to feel whether her skin was as warm as it looked.

“Try the rear compartment,” she said, voice lower, as if the archive demanded whispers. She leaned across him, reaching deep; the drawer’s metal lip cut into his thigh. Her hair brushed his jaw, static lifting it so that single strands clung to his stubble. For a second neither moved. He could feel her breathing through the fabric of her shirt, the faint tremor of effort.

His hand found the folder first: thick card, debossed date 2008. He drew it out slowly to avoid tearing. Elara straightened, eyes shining with something between triumph and relief. In the cramped aisle there was no room to celebrate separately; they stood chest to chest, the folder between them like a shared heartbeat.

“Found you,” she murmured, and for a moment he wasn’t sure which of them she meant.

The folder was heavier than it looked, its edges soft with age. Liam set it on the floor between them, the cardboard creaking as it settled. Elara crouched first, fingers tracing the faded label, and he followed, their knees touching. The fluorescent light flickered once, then steadied, casting long shadows down the aisle.

"I used to watch you in the studio," she said, not looking up. "You always seemed so certain. Like you knew exactly where every line should go."

He laughed, a short sound that echoed off the concrete. "I was faking it. Half the time I was copying the person next to me."

"Still. You had this..." She paused, searching for the word. "Presence. Like the room tilted toward you."

Her admission hung in the dusty air. Liam studied the side of her face, the way her eyelashes cast shadows on her cheekbones. "I noticed you too," he said. "In the lecture hall. You always sat three rows back, left side. Always had that green notebook."

Her head turned sharply. "You remember that?"

"I remember everything." The words came out rougher than intended. "I used to time my arrival so I'd walk past you. Never managed to say anything."

She was quiet for a long moment, fingers still resting on the folder. "I thought you were out of my league. That you probably had a girlfriend at another college. Someone sophisticated."

"I didn't. Not then."

The silence stretched between them, thick with fifteen years of missed chances. Liam could hear his own heartbeat, feel the warmth radiating from her skin. She smelled like paper and something citrusy, sharp enough to cut through the archive's mustiness.

When he leaned in, it was gradual, giving her time to pull away. She didn't. Her lips were softer than he'd imagined, parted slightly in surprise. The kiss started gentle, exploratory—two people learning a language they'd never spoken aloud. Then her hand found his chest, fingers curling into his shirt, and something shifted. She kissed him back harder, urgent, like she was making up for lost time.

His back hit the metal drawer with a clang. Her body followed, pressing him against the cold steel. One of her hands tangled in his hair; the other gripped his shoulder like she was afraid he might disappear. He could taste coffee on her tongue, feel her breathing quicken against his chest.

When they finally broke apart, foreheads touching, they were both breathing hard. Her eyes were wide, pupils dilated in the fluorescent half-light.

"Jesus," she whispered.

"Yeah." His voice came out strangled.

She didn't move away. Instead, she rested her forehead more firmly against his, their noses brushing. "I can't believe we just did that."

"Neither can I."

But her hand was still clutching his shirt, and his was settled at her waist, thumb rubbing small circles through the fabric. They stayed like that, breathing each other's air, while the archive hummed around them and the recovered drawings waited patiently on the floor.

Her fingers loosened from his shirt but didn’t let go entirely; they slid down to rest against his ribs, feeling the way his chest rose and fell. The metal drawer at his back was cold, but everywhere she touched burned.

“I don’t know what we’re doing,” she said, voice barely above the hum of the lights.

“Neither do I.” He swallowed. “I haven’t done this since…”

“Since Sarah.” She finished the sentence for him, no hesitation, no awkward pause.

He nodded, the small movement brushing his skin against hers. “I don’t even know if I’m any good at it anymore—being… close.”

Elara’s hand spread wider, palm flat over his heart. “You feel close enough to me.”

The simplicity of it undid him more than the kiss. He closed his eyes. “She used to meet me in the library at two a.m. when we were students. We’d share a bag of wine gums and fold stupid paper hats out of tracing paper.” The memory arrived whole, bright, painful in its ordinariness. “I haven’t told anyone that in years.”

“Tell me another,”