Sweet Romance12 min read
I Quit the Three-Person Movie
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I moved out by noon and did not look back.
"Are you really leaving?" Ainsley asked, hovering by my old door like she was waiting to see if I’d change my mind.
"Yes," I said, zipping the single bag I owned. "This time I'm staying gone."
Ainsley wrinkled her nose. "You always say that and then go crawling back."
"Not this time." I smiled at her like I meant it. "Not this time."
When I saw Thomas's photo on social media—him opening the car door for Giselle with a caption that read, "I knew you'd always find me waiting"—I felt more relieved than angry.
"You're smiling at that?" Ainsley said, too loud, and I heard the pity in her voice like penny coins.
"It's over." I shrugged. "Two years of pretending—no more."
The landlord met me at the new place with a wheeled cart and a puzzled look. "You moved in so light. One bag?"
"It's enough," I told Marco Schmid, who lived opposite and had already tried to be helpful in a way that made me suspiciously grateful. "I'll manage."
He clicked his tongue and waved his hands like he was dismissing himself, but he added his contact and said, "If anything goes wrong, knock."
I wandered the empty apartment and found myself thinking in inventory lists: where to put a lamp, which wall would take a mirror, which corner might hold a bookshelf someday.
My phone buzzed—Thomas. "You moved?"
"Yes," I said. It felt odd that his voice pushed through the air like a thin wind. "Giselle's back."
Silence. "We aren't back together," he said at last. "Come home."
"Call me when you're sincere, Thomas," I said. "This three-person movie—I'm leaving the cinema."
"What if you regret it?" he asked.
"I never regret quitting on people who wouldn't even miss me," I said, and hung up.
Ainsley rang, frantic. "Giselle's back? Are they together?"
"Don't assume anything," I told her. "I left because I'm tired."
"I thought you couldn't live without him," she said, and I imagined her counting my days of misery like beads.
I slept well that night. For the first time in years, my dreams did not tremble at the edges.
Morning brought another message—Giselle's carousel of photos with Thomas at a seafood place, Thomas peeling shrimp for her as if an audience needed to witness his adoration. I scrolled and didn't burn.
At the office people noticed fast. "Isn't that Giselle?" Haley whispered the next morning, looking over a file on my desk.
"Yes." I kept my face neutral.
Griffith Moeller, our director, called an early team meeting and introduced her with a smile wide enough to be sunlit. The room clapped like it was a play.
Giselle walked to my side at the coffee table and chirped, "Jada, you're here! We were college roommates."
She spoke as if the easiest thing in the world was to stand at my doorstep and launch herself into the room, like she had a right to orbit there.
"Welcome," I said and left the rest to the meeting.
Afterward she left a cup of bubble tea on my desk—an invitation and a threat wrapped in sugar. "You'd think for someone who's been promoted she could be less petty," Haley muttered and I refused to indulge.
That afternoon Thomas called. "I told you—we're not together. Why are you targeting Giselle?"
"Targeting her?" I laughed. "Thomas, if she had called me, I wouldn't have had to make a scene."
"You're being unfair," he said. He always lowered his voice and wore a face that begged forgiveness. "Come back."
"Go find the woman you want, not the one who cleans up your confusion," I said and blocked his number.
People at work were curious. "Did you two break up months ago?" Kimberly asked between documents. She had the kind of sharp candor that made gossip sound like business.
"He said he was single," I answered. "If that means anything."
Later that day I ran into Marco at the building entrance carrying two steaming breakfast parcels. He held one out, grinning like a conspirator. "Pancake with chili strips. My treat."
"You brought me lunch?" I asked.
"It came with the apartment," he said. "Consider it a welcome."
I learned quickly Marco had a dry kind of humor. When Thomas later stormed up to me in the parking lot and hissed, "Why would you break up with me?" Marco stepped beside me and said, "Sir, this is private property. You are harassing my tenant."
Thomas blinked and shifted his stance like someone unsure if his anger was a real instrument or a toy.
"I am not going anywhere," I said. "This is my life now."
"You'll change your mind," Thomas said, as if I were a houseplant that had forgotten which pot it needed.
"Then water me more often," I told him. "Let me wither on my own terms."
After that Marco offered me more than help moving boxes. He drove me to work when traffic threatened to eat minutes, and handed me dumb jokes at my desk that made me laugh at my own expense.
"Does he live opposite you or does he live inside your head?" Haley teased one lunch, and I colored.
"He's just... there," I said.
"Is he your boyfriend?" Haley asked like she wasn't really asking.
"Not yet," I admitted. "But he bakes."
Marco had been more than a landlord. He was the technical consultant who arrived from a client side and then stuck around. He was the man who had come into the office the day Giselle brought donuts and pulled me aside with the kind of bluntness I used to expect from Thomas.
"Don't let him back in," he told me quietly one night in the stairwell. "He isn't worth the space you give him."
"How would you know?" I asked.
"Because he leaves dents where he sits," Marco said, almost brutally simple. "You're better at fixing things."
"Maybe I'm better at fixing myself," I said. His face softened in a way that made me look away.
The world tilted again when a rumor hit our department like a hailstorm: the big contract Giselle had boasted about—the one she'd waved like a banner—had holes. "It's a shadow contract," said one of the finance team. "Numbers that don't line up."
My instinct was not vengeance, but curiosity, and the kind of terrible, precise avoidance that high-performing managers cultivate: follow the paper trail, not the chatter.
"I found this," I told Griffith in his office, sliding printed invoices across the desk. "Look at page three."
He read, brows knitting. "If this is true, it's serious."
Giselle's face always had the art of performance. The next morning she swept into the office as if the air had given her a spotlight. "Team lunch on me," she sang, and the office was already primed to stand ovation.
"You're not invited," she said to me, aloud, as she set a cup on my desk. It was a small, precise humiliation.
I went to the boardroom.
"Tell me everything," Marco whispered when I pulled him aside.
We began collecting emails, invoices, and cross-checks. Every tape of words she had sewn into reality began to fray under the tug of numbers.
Then the day came when I walked into the main conference room and asked for a company meeting. I knew the risk. I knew the humility. I knew I could be wrong and look like a woman throwing a fit for not being invited to lunch.
But I had proofs. Real chits with signatures. A paper trail like a braid.
"Giselle," I said once everyone had settled in and Griffith had given me his attention. "We need to talk about your contract."
Her smile thinned. "We can talk later. I'm in the middle of—"
"No," I said, louder than I intended. "Now, in the meeting."
There was a murmur, a rustle. The team sat like a small crowd before a stage.
"Show us," Griffith said.
I brought them the documents. I pointed to the same clause Giselle had used to justify miraculously fast revenue recognition. I produced an email thread with dates. I showed the stamped delivery confirmations that never matched the invoices.
Her face went through human weather: first a schoolyard smirk, then surprise, then a brittle anger.
"You have no right," she hissed. "This is slander."
"These are company records," I said. "Not gossip."
She tried to laugh it off, then called me names under her breath. "You want to take my spotlight?"
"Everyone," Griffith said, standing. "We will have an audit."
The auditors called in. The CEO called in. People gathered around the glass-topped boardroom like starlings. The scandal made a small star out of all the people who had felt ignored—now they had a public show.
What followed was not private.
A formal meeting was called with our company's senior leadership and the CFO. They laid out the forensic report in a clear, condemnatory voice that did not insult math.
"Ms. Bonnet, the records show channel revenue was inflated by forty percent," the CFO said. "Multiple payments show no bank confirmation."
"No—this is a misunderstanding," she said first, then louder, "I only adjusted accruals to reflect upcoming performance."
"You signed the contract," the CFO said, pressing forward. "You submitted invoices for services that were never delivered."
Her composure ruptured. She went from incredulous to indignant to foolishly confident, leaning on the idea she could charm the room.
"Here is your chance," Griffith said. "You can explain, or you can leave."
"Explain what?" she spat. "That I—this is corporate politics." Her voice hit a hysterical note. "You can't be serious."
A junior staffer, Joyce De Luca, who had been tasked with chasing the invoices, looked up and said quietly, "Our client recordings show only preliminary calls, not delivery confirmations. The project manager didn't sign off."
Giselle's mouth opened, closed. She went pale and then red in the space of a breath. "You're lying," she said to Joyce.
"No, I'm not," Joyce said. She had been so quiet until then that her voice seemed to steal the meeting's oxygen.
The room watched Giselle go through stages: swagger, denial, outrage, then a breaking tremor. Someone recorded the meeting on a phone—because that is what people do when something dramatic happens—and the file ricocheted around the floor like a polished stone.
"Do you have any defense?" the CEO asked.
She tried to produce documents that would support her claim, but the auditors had already traced the money. There were side letters, unsigned change orders, and a trail of approvals that led to a dead end.
"No," she said, short and rattled, the public like a mirror where every untruth lurked.
"Because we take our ethics and client trust seriously," Griffith said. "We have no choice."
He announced her suspension pending termination and a formal report to the board. The words landed like a gavel.
Giselle's reaction was not graceful.
She lost her bravado and started babbling apologies that slipped between fury and fakery. "I can explain—" she sputtered. "This is—this won't ruin me, I have connections."
"Connections?" scoffed Camilo Dickerson from procurement. "This isn't a high school clique. This is our company's balance sheet."
People shifted. Colleagues who had once smiled at her flinched. The room was full of eyes, some sharp with triumph, others stunned at the fall of someone who had always seemed to glide.
Her face changed as she watched members of the team whisper and pull their chairs back. The smugness cracked. She tried bargaining. "Please—I'll make it right. Give me a chance."
"You made a mess, Giselle," Griffith said. "You put the company at risk. We will pursue recovery. You will be terminated."
Giselle's expression moved from anger to panic, then to denial, then to a desperate attempt at theatrics: she slammed her palm on the table and screamed, "I'll sue you! The world will know how you ruined me!"
"Ms. Bonnet," the CEO said, voice cold with policy and consequence, "we will handle this professionally. You will be escorted off the premises."
She made a last attempt at performance—pleading eyes, trembling lip—looking around for someone to rescue her, but the circle had closed.
"Take her out," the CEO told security.
A crowd gathered outside the boardroom doors. There were phones out, and some of the younger members of the team were filming, because when morality dramas happen, people need witnesses.
Giselle's last stage was collapse. She slid down into a chair and began to sob, huge, theatrical, as if the more noise she made the less the numbers mattered. She begged, whispered, spat; she called people names, she called them liars, she called for her mother.
Then she started to plead with me.
"Jada, please," she whispered when a security guard came. "You don't understand. I had to do this."
"You had to lie," I said. "You could have told the truth."
"People would have laughed," she said, as if that justified a crime. "I couldn't lose."
"Doing this doesn't make you look important," Marco said quietly, his eyes cold. "It makes you small."
The crowd outside reacted like an audience at the end of a play. Someone laughed. Someone started a chorus of "shame." A group of fresh hires held up their phones and one even started a live stream. The footage would leak; it would become a stain she couldn't scrub out.
She crawled on her knees across the glossy floor and looked up at Griffith. "Please, I will repay—"
"Not our job," he said.
She begged to explain, to beg forgiveness publicly, to make amends in a way that would look like drama rather than justice. But the law and the company do not bend their knees to performative repentance.
They escorted her out. The hallway filled with whispers. She tried to run, but security had already formed a line. On her way past the office kitchen, she flung herself against the glass wall and screamed my name, "You ruined me!"
The crowd hushed, eyes wide. That moment—her hand pressed to the glass, her face contorted, a lone figure in a very public theater—felt like a coda. People felt vindicated, uneasy, superior.
Later I heard she tried to call Thomas and then sent messages to clients. The dust settled, and the company posted a formal notice. She left the building with a box, and the world did what it does: some retreated into silence, some celebrated, and some felt the small, cold creep of guilt at having watched.
I did not celebrate. I felt sick with a kind of hollow triumph: someone had finally answered for what they'd done. It did not make my chest lighter; it made it quieter.
After the public spectacle, the rumor mill cooled. The board recovered. Our team got busier than before, focusing on clients and repairing the fissures left behind.
Marco and I settled into an awkward new normal. He would stand by the elevator while I left late nights, bring hot milk that was never mine to drink, and ask for nothing in return. "This company is loud," he said once, handing me a small tin of milk like an apology. "Take this. It's easier."
"You always bring me errands," I teased.
"You always forget to make tough choices until it's too late," he said, and that was true.
One rainy evening in the stairwell, he caught me with an armful of files. "You looked like you needed help," he said.
"I did," I admitted. "But not the kind Thomas offers. Not the loud ones."
He snorted. "Loud ones are for people who need an audience."
"Quiet ones are for me," I said.
He hesitated, then leaned in and kissed me. It was careful, clean, full of the small steady thing that builds out of many patient days. It was not dramatic; it was a comfort.
"Will you stay?" he asked later, fingers tracing the rim of my coffee cup.
"I will," I said. "I stayed gone when I needed to, and I will stay for the right reasons."
We moved slowly, like good architects. We built evenings around shared breakfasts and ridiculous playlists, and he brought me small things: a grilled sandwich, a repaired bicycle, stories from a project that had nothing to do with the two of us.
One morning I found a dented can of warm milk on my desk—the brand I had once brewed for Thomas in a younger life. "He left this," Marco said sheepishly. "He said you'd like to keep something memorable."
I stared at the tin. It was ridiculous and tender. I put it by my computer and, without thinking much, wrote back to everyone who mattered that day: "I'm here. This is my home."
Office life moved on; Thomas's messages dwindled; Giselle's name faded into the soap scum of headlines and market disclosures.
Months later, on a neighbor's whim, Marco and I took the shared electric scooter out at midnight. "You lead," he said, thumb on the throttle. "I'll follow."
The city was asleep and bright in small pockets. We laughed at how small and loud the scooter was. We stopped under a streetlight and he held my hand like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"You're stubborn," he said, gaze soft and bright.
"I am," I answered. "But I'm stubborn about the right thing now."
He kissed me then—not the small comfort kiss but one that promised something splendid. "Don't run back," he murmured.
"I won't," I said, and meant it.
Weeks later in the office, a new hire asked me about doing what I did: confronting a colleague and cleaning a mess. I told her, "Follow the facts. Tell the truth. Don't let guilt be your decision maker."
"And love?" she whispered.
"Don't let it be a theater," I said. "Let it be a home."
That night, I looked at the dented tin of milk on my desk and smiled. It would always remind me of cheap apologies and warmer mornings and the man who chose to stand by me in a stairwell, and later, in an office full of people who had seen the worst and the best of us.
We did not need to be dramatic to be right. We simply needed to be present.
Last winter, at the small office party after a long quarter, Marco nudged me toward the cake table, eyes asking a question. I leaned in and said one word: "Stay."
He laughed then, the sound that had first made me trust him. "I already did," he murmured.
When he pressed a tiny ring of a key into my palm later—the extra to his apartment across the hall, and a promise that the door would always be unlocked for me—I put it into the drawer with the dented milk, because memory is a small, private gallery and I want to hang every careful thing I owe him on its walls.
I left a note on my desk by the milk: "If anyone thinks drama is a currency, they will be bankrupt soon." Then I went downstairs and rode the scooter home with him, the city lights like tiny, winking witnesses.
I had once lived inside someone else’s story and given up the right to be an author of my own ending. Now I wrote slowly, with care, one small chapter at a time. The tin of milk and the scooter rides were small anchors, and when the world wanted to make spectacles of things, I chose steady.
This is my ending for that fresh page: not fireworks, not a "forever" shouted into a crowd, but warm milk on a desk and a quiet key in a palm—things that are mine because we earned them.
The End
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