Chapter 5

Amelia Avila POV:

The HR manager, Ms. Evans, a prim woman in a severe suit, bustled into Gabe's office the next morning, flanked by a stern-faced lawyer. She held a thick folder in her hand, my resignation agreement. She placed it on the polished mahogany desk with a crisp thud, the sound echoing the finality of my decision.

Gabe watched her, then me, a smirk playing on his lips. He was leaning back, arms crossed, his eyes full of condescending amusement. He thought this was a bluff. He truly believed I was playing a game, that I would eventually come crawling back. His arrogance was a venomous thing.

"Amelia," he drawled, his tone dripping with false concern, "are you seriously doing this? Don't tell me you're actually leaving. You wouldn't last a week without me. You'll regret this, you know. Begging to come back will be useless." He laughed, a short, bitter sound. His eyes, cold and challenging, dared me to prove him wrong.

I picked up the pen. My hand was steady. I didn't hesitate. With a flourish, I scrawled my signature across the bottom of the page, my name a defiant declaration. Each stroke felt like severing a cord, a painful but necessary act of liberation.

Gabe's eyes, which had been fixed on me with such smug certainty, widened. His pupils visibly dilated. His smirk vanished, replaced by an expression of pure shock, then disbelief. He stared at my signature, then at me, as if seeing me for the first time.

"You... you actually signed it?" he whispered, his voice raspy.

His lips twisted into a snarl. "Fine!" he spat, his composure cracking. "Go! See how far you get without AG Designs. Without me. Don't come crying back when you realize what you've given up. Because I won't take you back. Not ever." Every word was a lash, a futile attempt to wound me, to maintain control.

For the next few days, Cortney' s social media feed became a shrine to their "love." Post after post of her and Gabe, vacationing in exotic locales, smiling, laughing, holding hands. She was deliberately rubbing it in, I knew. A calculated move to twist the knife, to make me squirm. And Gabe? He allowed it. He even enabled it. He wanted me to see it, to feel the sting of my supposed replacement. He thought this public display would break me, would force me to humble myself, to return to him. He wanted me to crawl back, to admit I couldn't survive without him.

His secretary even called my personal assistant, relaying his message: "Mr. Carrillo says if Ms. Avila wants her job back, she needs to publicly apologize for her behavior, admit her mistakes, and then maybe he'll consider her return."

But his words, his actions, Cortney' s childish provocations-they were all hollow. My heart, which had once been so passionately devoted to him, was now a barren wasteland. I felt nothing but a cold, quiet indifference. He had killed it. All of it.

I decided it was time to collect my few belongings from the penthouse, the place we had called home for so long. The place where so many of our memories, good and bad, were enshrined. I walked through the familiar rooms, a stranger in my own life.

In the study, I found stacks of photos: us, younger, happier, building our first model together, laughing over a blueprint, celebrating a small victory. In the bedroom, hidden away in a drawer, were sentimental gifts, small tokens of affection from a different time. And in the storage room, the old hard drives, filled with our initial sketches, the raw, unrefined ideas that had blossomed into AG Designs. Videos of our early pitches, our dreams, our naive enthusiasm.

A wave of melancholy washed over me. Seven years. A lifetime of memories. But then, the cold reality set in. Most of these "things" were ours, not mine. They were remnants of a shared life that no longer existed. He had given me a house, a company, a diamond ring, but never truly my own space within his world. I realized, with a jolt, how little of lasting value I actually possessed that wasn't tied to him. He had never truly bought me anything significant, nor celebrated me, not once in seven years.

A sudden, sharp clarity pierced through the haze of nostalgia. I took the photos, the sentimental trinkets, the old hard drives. I walked out to the sprawling patio, lit the small portable fire pit we had used for summer evenings. One by one, I fed the memories into the flames. The photos curled, blackened, and turned to ash. The small gifts, made of plastic and paper, melted, distorted, then crumbled. The hard drives sizzled, releasing a acrid smoke as their digital ghosts vanished. The fire devoured everything, leaving behind only embers.

I watched the flames dance, a strange sense of liberation washing over me. The pain was still there, but it was distant, a dull ache rather than a searing wound. It was the pain of cauterization, of a wound being sealed.

I looked around the penthouse, the opulent rooms now devoid of anything that defined me. It was just a space. A very expensive, very empty space. I walked to the door, my small, pre-packed suitcase in hand. It contained only the essentials, a testament to how little I truly owned beyond my work.

Gabe wasn't there. He was probably still enjoying his vacation with Cortney. I paused at the threshold, taking one last look at the life I was leaving behind. The silence of the apartment was profound, absolute.

"Goodbye, Gabe," I whispered into the empty air. My voice was calm, steady. "And good riddance." I closed the door softly behind me, never looking back.