I never planned to fall for my boss. I walked into that Denver marketing agency knowing he was married, knowing he had two kids and sixteen years of marriage behind him, and I told myself I was there to do a job. Three months in, I caught myself memorizing the sound of his footsteps in the hallway. By month four, I was making excuses to walk past his office just to hear him talk through an open door.
His name was Derek. Derek Callahan, VP of Client Strategy. Forty-one years old, graying at the temples, with a dry sense of humor and a habit of running his thumb along the edge of his coffee mug when he was thinking. I noticed everything. That was the problem.
We got assigned to the same account in March. Late nights, working sessions, takeout containers spread across a conference table. He had a photo on his desk—his wife Rebecca at a lake house, both kids in swimsuits, everyone tan and laughing. I'd catch myself staring at it and feel something twist in my chest. Not jealousy, exactly. More like grief for something that was never mine to begin with.
He was careful. Always. Professional in a way that should have felt cold but didn't. He remembered that I took my coffee with oat milk and no sugar. He asked about my dog by name. Small things that added up to something neither of us was supposed to acknowledge.
I tried to shut it down. I really did. I volunteered for projects that kept me on other floors. I stopped lingering after meetings. I dated a perfectly nice guy for six weeks and broke it off because every time he touched my hand, I compared it to a hand that had never touched me at all.
One night in September, the office emptied out and we were the last two people on the fifth floor. The cleaning crew had already gone through. The only light came from our monitors and the emergency exit sign. We were sitting too close at a shared desk, pretending to review quarterly numbers, and I could feel the heat coming off his arm from three inches away.
"Derek."
He didn't look up from the spreadsheet. "Hmm?"
"We shouldn't be here this late."
"I know."
Neither of us moved.
He reached for his coffee mug and his hand brushed mine for half a second. I felt it in my teeth. He felt it too—his jaw went tight. He set the mug down without drinking from it.
"I need to say something," he said, and his voice had dropped into a register I'd never heard from him.
"Don't."
"I have to."
I turned my chair toward him without meaning to. "Then say it and let me go home."
He didn't say it. He put both hands flat on the desk and looked at the wall behind me like it held some kind of answer. The clock ticked. I could smell his cologne, something cedar-based, and the faint coffee on his breath.
"You have a family," I said.
"I have a family."
"And I have a dog and a lease and a therapist who's going to hear about this tomorrow."
That got a half-laugh out of him, then nothing. We sat in silence while the building creaked around us. Somewhere on another floor, an elevator dinged.
"I should go," he said, standing. "Before I do something we'd both regret."
"You mean before I do something I'd regret and you'd feel guilty about."
He looked at me then, really looked at me, and for a second I thought he was going to cross the room and end this whole miserable standoff. But he didn't. He grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair, said "Lock up when you leave," and walked out without turning around.
I sat in that empty office for forty minutes. I didn't cry. I just sat there with my hands in my lap, counting the exit signs, telling myself that two adults had done the right thing and it felt like garbage.
The next six weeks were a slow-motion funeral. We stopped being alone together. He reassigned me to another project lead with some excuse about bandwidth. Our hallway conversations became scripts: "Morning." "Morning." "Did you see the Henderson revisions?" "Sent them last night." Professional. Surgical. I started dreading the sound of his voice because it reminded me of a door I couldn't open.
Then I heard something that broke me. Not about him and me—about him and Rebecca. I was in the break room, refilling my water bottle, when two women from HR started talking. They didn't know I was there, or they didn't care.
"Sixteen years. Can you imagine staying with anyone that long?"
"I can't. My longest relationship was eight months and we fought about how to load a dishwasher."
"He's still crazy about her. You see them at the holiday party—they dance so close. It's cute, honestly."
Cute. His life was cute. His marriage was cute. I was a footnote in someone else's love story, a chapter that would never be written.
I went back to my desk and typed up my resignation letter. I didn't rewrite it. I didn't draft it in my head. I just opened a blank document, typed four paragraphs, printed it, and walked it to HR before I could change my mind.
Derek found me two days later, standing in the parking garage next to my Honda, trying to jam a cardboard box into the backseat.
"You quit?"
I didn't turn around. "Stellar detective work, Callahan."
"Can you look at me?"
I wedged the box in and slammed the door. Then I turned. He was standing under the flickering fluorescent light, tie loosened, holding a travel mug. The same one he'd been holding that night. I wondered if he knew.
"I can't do my job anymore," I said. "So I'm leaving."
"Because of me."
It wasn't a question. I didn't answer.
"Sarah, you're one of the best account managers we have. Don't throw away a career because of—" He stopped himself.
"Because of what? A feeling? An inconvenience? You, standing in a parking garage, asking me to stay and pretend everything's fine?"
He set his mug on the roof of my car. It made a hollow sound. "I'm not asking you to pretend anything."
"Then what are you asking?"
He didn't have an answer for that. We stood there while a light rain started, thin streaks against the concrete pillars. His shirt was getting wet. Neither of us moved.
"I'm not going to leave my family," he said.
"I know."
"I'm not going to chase you."
"I know that too."
"Then what do you want from me?"
I could have lied. I could have given him some graceful exit line, something about being happy for him and respecting his choice. But I was past that. I was down to the bone.
"I wanted to be chosen," I said. "For once. By someone. And I know that's not your fault and it's not your job, but it's the truth."
He picked up his mug. His hand was shaking just enough to see.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"Don't be. You did exactly what you were supposed to do."
I got in the car and drove away. I didn't check the rearview mirror. I didn't let myself. I just merged onto I-25 and let the Denver skyline shrink behind me, along with the only person I'd ever loved without permission.
The next year was ugly in a quiet way. I found a new job—smaller agency, less money, zero chance of running into Derek Callahan in the hallway. I went to therapy twice a month. I ran a lot, mostly along the Cherry Creek Trail, because it was the only thing that made my brain shut up. I didn't date. I didn't want to. I wanted to sit in my apartment with my dog and watch bad reality TV and wait for the ache to become something I could carry without noticing it.
It took longer than I expected. But it happened.
Two years later, I met a man named Tom. He was a structural engineer, divorced, no kids. He had calloused hands from rock climbing and a laugh that made strangers turn around in restaurants. On our third date, he asked me about my last serious relationship, and I told him the truth. Not all of it—not the part about the love that felt like a locked room—but enough. He listened and asked if I'd found what I was looking for.
"I'm still looking," I said.
He nodded, like that was a perfectly reasonable answer. We kept looking together.
Last spring, I ran into Derek at a farmers market on South Pearl Street. I was buying peaches. He was pushing a stroller with a toddler I'd never seen—a new baby, born after I left. Rebecca was a few steps behind him, holding the hand of their older daughter.
He saw me first. For a second, neither of us moved. Then he tipped his head, just slightly, like a nod but smaller. An acknowledgment. I lifted my hand, then turned back to the peaches.
Tom came up behind me with a bouquet of sunflowers. "Who was that?"
"Old colleague," I said. "From the agency."
"Friend?"
I thought about it for a moment, something I'd never done before. Not a friend. Not an enemy. Not a what-if. A person I used to know, whose life had continued without me the way it was always going to.
"Just a colleague," I said.
We walked the rest of the market hand in hand. I didn't look back.
I went to a job I loved, met a man I could have wanted, and let both of them go before I let myself find out. Then I started over, one ordinary day at a time.
That night, I was cleaning peaches over the kitchen sink when something occurred to me: I hadn't thought about Derek in weeks. Maybe months.
Three dollars a pound. I bought four.
