Page 70 of Knotting on Heaven's Door

Her breath hitched.

“So let’s not make it worse,” I finished, straightening. “Goodbye, Ada. I’ll see you at work… Mrs.De La Vega.”

I walked out without looking back.

The door clicked shut behind me, but the ache stayed lodged in my chest like a goddamn bullet.

The air outside had cooled, but I barely felt it. The walk backto my apartment was hell. Every step away from her felt like a betrayal of instinct, of the part of me that had already decided she was it.

CHAPTER 16

Ada

Morning brought another regret.

Not the kind that burned like shame in your chest—but the slow, quiet kind. The one that curled into your bones and made everything feel heavier than it was.

There was no event this weekend. No chaos. No twenty-page menus or burnt sauces or missing deliveries to distract me. Just me, this silence, and the ghost of Sebastian’s voice echoing in the back of my mind.

I shuffled to the kitchen, still in my oversized T-shirt, hair tied up in the messiest bun known to mankind. I made toast and eggs because that’s what functioning adults do, right? Toast. Eggs. Basic fuel.

I stared at the plate for ten minutes before pushing it away.

My appetite had evaporated sometime between the moment he walked out my door and the hour I’d spent wide awake replaying everything he’d said.

Don’t ask me to stay if it’s not forever…

The words coiled around my ribs, squeezing until I couldn’t breathe.

I poured myself a cup of coffee instead.

Bitter. Black. Like I deserved it.

I wasn’t the kind of woman who cried over men. I hadn’t cried since Adam died, and even then, it was the kind of grief that hollowed you out from the inside. That left nothing behind but caution tape and warning signs.

But today? Today I felt it.

That sharp sting behind my eyes. The wobble in my throat. That ache that told me I was dangerously close to falling apart over a man I had no business caring about.

Because it wasn’t just sex anymore, and we both knew it.

And worse—he’d known before I had.

I pressed the heel of my hand to my chest like I could hold it all in, force the emotion back where it belonged. I didn’t have time for this. I didn’t have space for it.

But gods, I felt like I was going to cry.

Clearly, sitting around was doing me no favors.

I tried to clean the kitchen. Scrubbed the counters, reorganized the spice rack, even wiped down the fridge door like I was trying to polish my regrets off of stainless steel.

It didn’t work.

I tried responding to emails. My fingers hovered over the keyboard, blinking cursor taunting me. Nothing productive came out of it—just drafts I never sent and a half-written message to Mia asking if she needed help with anything today. I deleted it before hitting send.

By eleven, I was pacing the living room like a caged animal. Too much energy, too many thoughts, not enough distractions.

So I did something completely out of character.

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