Regretfully Yours

One year later

The penthouse was quiet..just too quiet. Not the comforting kind that wraps around you like a robe at the close of a long day, but the claustrophobic kind. The kind that's holding you down and informing you something's off. Something's gone.

Leon Knight stood at the door like a statue, his muscles locked into place. His thousand-dollar finery remained undisturbed, but inside everything came apart. He loosened the silk tie at his neck, hoping to loosen some of the congestion squeezing his throat shut. It did not. Nothing did.

She had gone.

Her presence clung everywhere, suggested by gestures and indefinable cues. Her corner desk, once a busy place with scribbled sticky notes on the walls, pastel-colored writing pens, and lukewarm cups of tea, sat vacant. The couch where she would sprawl after long meetings, book clutched in her hands, glasses slipping down her nose-it still lay untouched, the pillows firm and unyielding. Even the tea-stained mug he complained about using, the one she wouldn't let him get rid of no matter how awful it was, was cleared from the kitchen sink.

All traces of her-vanished.

All except one.

On the dining table was an envelope. Cream. Thoughtfully placed. His name, penned in her delicate script on the outside:

Leon.

He didn't need to open it.

He already knew.

Divorce.

He stood there, regarding it. As if the word might turn, might collapse in on itself to be something kinder. A farewell note, a promise of return. But deep within himself, Leon knew she wasn't coming back. The woman who shared his name but never captured his heart-the same woman who endured his silence, his absence, his slashing indifference-she finally had walked away.

And what shocked him most wasn't the letter.

It was the vacant pain happening inside the hollow of his chest.

He did miss her.

Not the manner in which a man misses a tool or a convenience. No, not that way. He missed the roll of her eyes when he was being intolerable. The smile, even when there were unswept tears. The warmth of her presence-how it heated the room up even if she did not say a word.

He had missed her strength. How she stood her ground in board meetings, voicing ideas he once waved aside with a wave of his hand. The unspoken dignity she showed when he shunned her at dinner parties, stood her alone on their anniversary, or played deaf to the misery behind her plastered smiles.

She had tolerated it all.

Until she didn't.

And Leon, who built an empire of reason and control, discovered he had lost the one thing he never accounted for-her love.

Not stolen from him. But because he gave her every reason to let it go.

She entered his life as his secretary, quiet and concise, modest. But somewhere, along the course of time, she became other things. His wife. His rock. The only one to see the cracks beneath the clipped edges of his triumph.

And now she had left.

But it wasn't only her outfits, her books, or her fragrance that went with her.

She took with her something infinitely more precious.

His heart.

And for the first time in his life, Leon Knight had no clue what to do.

Except one thing.

He had to get her back.

Even if it was already too late.