Page 2 of Love in Focus

Kiara grabs the other side, while I hold the middle.

I shrug. “Just pure stubbornness I guess.”

“Well, you don’t have to go through everything alone anymore,” Kiara says. “You’re stuck with us now. For better or worse.”

Quietly laughing, we carry the box up the stairs.

The first Monday after the breakup is even more excruciating than I thought it would be. For the most part, I love working forHorizon Magazine, one of the only surviving regional magazines in the San Francisco Bay Area, but even that feels like a big middle finger from life when I run into James on the elevator.

Yes, my ex is also my coworker. And yes, I’ve read the million think pieces about how you should never date someone from work. I’vewrittensome of them.

But in my defense, I met James in college during my senior year, so it’s not like we started out as an office romance. Since we were two job-searching seniors, we dated casually at first. After what happened with Celeste, I was in no rush to get into another relationship. But when we were both hired by the same magazine fresh out of college, it seemed like destiny. And things got serious fast, especially after James’s very well-off parents bought us a condo in San Francisco and we moved in together, four months after we met.

In retrospect, what James and I did was ill-advised. But back then, everything was sofunand exciting. We spent most of our twenties exploring every inch of the Bay Area together when we weren’t at work, sometimes evenforwork, since I had to constantly visit new places for my articles. A good chunk of the memories I made since moving to the area, like eating clam chowder for the first time at Fisherman’s Wharf or renting a convertible to drive down to Santa Cruz, were with James.

But today, James gets on the elevator, not even saying hi or otherwise acknowledging that I exist. It’s so obvious from his unnaturally stiff posture that he’s actively trying to avoid eye contact with me as we make our way up to where our office is on the fifth floor.

While he stares at the elevator buttons like it’s his first time seeing them, I scrutinize his face, searching for red eyes, new wrinkle lines, or any other telltale sign that he’s as fucked up about our breakup as I am. Or some clue as to why he decided to call off our engagement in the first place.

But every brown curl on his head is perfectly tousled, and his blue eyes look sharper than ever. If anything, he looks more well rested than usual.Son of a bitch.

By the time the elevator doors open again and we walk to our respective desks, I’m channeling my inner Lady Gaga.Your career will never wake up and tell you it doesn’t love you anymore. Your career will never wake up…I repeat the mantra over and over in my head. Forget James. Forgeteveryone. I don’t need to be in a relationship to win at life. In fact, historically, romantic relationships have only brought me down.

Single, powerful, beautiful.I repeat another mantra I once came up with for a newly divorced woman who asked for advice on the column.I’m single, powerful, and beautiful.

Pushing away all thoughts of James from my head, I focus on work until my lunch break.

My favorite time of the workday is lunch, since it was the only time my friends and I could regularly see each other during the week before I started living with them. With only twenty employees,Horizonis a pretty small magazine owned by Citrine, a larger, out-of-state parent company. But Val works in IT and Kiara in design, and our jobs keep us all busy. If it weren’t for the icebreakers at a company-wide mixer seven years ago where we discovered we were obsessed with the same music artists, we might never have become friends in the first place.

“How are you holding up?” Kiara asks when we meet in front of the café on the first floor. Since Kiara and Val had to run some errands on their way to work this morning, we barely had time to say “hi” before they left.

“Well, I had an awkward run-in with James at the elevator,” I reply. “He pretended I was invisible.”

Kiara and Val groan.

“Maybe we could get him fired,” Val jokes. “Want me to log in to his computer and see if he’s been watching porn during work hours?”

Kiara giggles. “Oh God, I hope he hasn’t.”

“Same,” I say. I don’tthinkJames would watch porn at work. But this past weekend taught me I don’t know anything about him.

How can someone randomly decide they don’t love you after seven years? Just like that?

A fresh burst of pain hits my chest, and for a split second, it’s hard for me to breathe. If James and I fought a lot or if there was any noticeable tension between us, I might have been less blindsided. But besides a couple of minor disagreements here and there, which we quickly resolved with a joke or a laugh, I can’t remember if we ever actually fought. Maybe that had been our problem, in the end. After all,someconflict is healthy. But I never thought that deeply about James’s and mylackof conflict until the sudden death of our relationship.

I need a distraction. Fast. Hoping they won’t notice the tears forming in the corners of my eyes, I steer my friends toward the line for food.

“I’m starving,” I say. “Let’s go eat. Can we talk about something other than James?”

Kiara’s face pinches, like she can tell I’m not okay but she’s trying her best not to say anything.

“Yup, sure thing,” she says as we get in line. “Have you heard from Evelyn about the new project we’re doing for Valentine’s Day yet? The ‘Modern Love in Focus’ one? The freelance photographer they hired issohot! I heard you’re attached to conduct the interviews and write the text.”

I’m always so deeply buried in emails on Mondays that I’m not surprised I haven’t even heard of this project yet. But it sounds like the kind of ambitious work that Evelyn, our executive editor, would sign me up for. She’s always been pushing me to do bigger and better things every year, even though I’m mostly content just writing local lifestyle stories and contributing to Dear Karl,Horizon’s romantic advice column that’s named after the San Francisco fog.

Information about the project is probably in my inbox somewhere. I’ll have to get to it after lunch.

“That sounds cool!” I say. “I haven’t read that email yet. Do you remember the name of the photographer?”

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