Sweet Romance10 min read
My Boss's Dream-Grandfather Picked Me — and Then He Stole My Heart
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I opened the company chat and typed what everyone was secretly thinking.
"Why is there no holiday for Qingming? Does the boss not have an ancestral grave?" I sent it like a dare, like throwing a stone into still water.
Silence returned, but it wasn't the polite kind. It was the kind of silence where everyone holds their breath, waiting to see whether the water will splash or swallow you.
A minute later, Duncan Denton — our director who loved to forward motivational posts at three in the morning — popped in.
"Duncan: Qingming is a normal working day for the company."
I laughed and changed my nickname to "Hayden SmallHay" and typed, "Great! Boss, you're wonderful!"
I tapped send and felt like a sparrow safe in a tree. Then, the impossible happened.
Fitzgerald Henry replied in the group.
"Fitzgerald: Everyone is off for Qingming. Hayden, you are not."
My coffee sloshed.
I stared at the message. "I'm Hayden," I said out loud, which felt stupid. The company knew me as Hayden. The world knew me as Hayden. Why single me out?
I slid into private chat.
"Hayden: Boss, do I have to come in tomorrow?" I tried to sound casual.
"Fitzgerald: No," he answered.
Relief. Then, another message: "Fitzgerald: Keep your afternoon free."
I frowned. "Why?"
"Fitzgerald: I want to take you to see my family's ancestral tomb."
I blinked. "You should be looking for Gu—" I typed "Cason," but deleted it. "You should be looking for the person named Hayden, not me."
He stopped replying. I was angry enough to throw my phone into my pillow, but sleep came faster than righteousness.
That night I dreamed of the old man again.
He had a long braid, a black ceremonial robe, and a crooked cane. He walked like someone who had all the time in the world and stopped in front of me, eyeing me like a judge who just found a promising defendant.
"You are the one who wanted a holiday?" he asked.
"Who are you?" I said, because it felt better to be brave when dreaming.
He tapped my head with his cane. "Rebellious," he said. "I like rebellious. Are you married?"
"No."
"Good. I'll find you a husband."
I woke up and nearly fell out of bed laughing at myself.
The messages on my phone told me the dream might not be just a dream. Fitzgerald had been sending me messages every two hours since five a.m. He timed them like a clock.
"Are you awake?"
"It's seven, get up."
"You're single, right?"
"Eleven. Come down for lunch."
When he wrote "I'm downstairs," I nearly choked on my tongue. His coffee shop was right under my apartment.
I grabbed my jacket and told myself to go down for five minutes. I swept my hair into a bun, found the one dress that looked like a human, and left.
He sat in the corner, like a statue except it felt wrong to think of him that way. He was too alive to be a statue.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," I lied.
He looked at me like he was measuring a thing he already knew was mine. "I won't make you work tomorrow," he said, flat.
"Then why bring me here?" I pushed.
His mouth twitched like someone trying to decide whether to fold paper cranes. He cleared his throat and said, "My great-grandfather dreamed last night. He wanted you to be the wife of his great-grandson."
My brain made a noise that could have been a choke or a laugh. I tried to be serious. "Does he have a long braid and a formal robe?"
He frowned. "You also dreamed of him?"
I told him about the cane, the robe, and the tap on the head. He blinked like a man who'd seen a ghost at breakfast.
"Then we are both cursed or blessed," he said. "Come by the house tomorrow. We'll pay respects."
I couldn't decide whether to be annoyed or curious.
That night, I found a string of messages from Cason.
"Cason: Are you not coming home for Qingming?"
"Cason: I was wrong. Can you see us?"
"Cason: Please, Hayden."
I didn't hesitate. I deleted the messages. He had hurt me five years ago. I didn't want him back in any context that included "please."
At lunch, Fitzgerald watched me as if he could read the deletion process from my face. He told the waiter to bring warm milk for me — apparently he remembered my stomach would betray me if I drank cold coffee.
"You're making decisions for me now?" I teased.
"You're fragile," he said. "No ice."
A memory crawled into my head. Five years ago on a business trip, I had been punished with cheap alcohol and worse favors. I had been brave then because I thought being brave earned love. It did not. It earned bruises and a single person I could not trust.
Fitzgerald had split a beer cap open with his thumb at the dinner and later, when a pig of a client insisted the women at the table "drink for the sake of business," he pushed my beer away, pried off the cap with his fingers and—deliberately theatrically—pretended to drink the client's cup. He did it to shame him, and then stood up and kicked the man off his chair because the man joked in a way that only meant "make the woman drink."
"Want to kick him?" Fitzgerald had said, half-drunk, to me later in the car. "I can kick him for you."
I giggled. That night he had smiled for the first time in my memory, and I thought maybe he was human after all.
"Don't tell anyone I made milk for you," he said now in the coffee shop.
I rolled my eyes. "You pretended to be tender five years ago when you were mostly un-bothered. So what's changed?"
"I thought about you since," he said simply.
I almost dropped my cup.
"Since when?" I asked.
He looked outside the cafe at nothing. "Since the night you fainted on the street. I carried you to the hospital. I didn't tell you because you were asleep and I didn't want to be strange."
A sliver of a memory clicked. The blurred face the night I collapsed, the palms that held me. I had never known. It meant something, or it meant nothing, depending on whether you asked the right question.
"You carried me?" I echoed.
"Yes," he said. "I liked you then. And I still do."
My stomach, traitorously, felt like a child's stomach on a carousel.
We went to his family home the next day for Qingming. His kin all stared at me like I was a newly hatched animal. I tried to smile through a crowd of hands that clapped me like a welcomed bride.
"He's been talking about this dream," a plump aunt said, squeezing my hand. "Your skin is so pretty."
"Thank you," I managed.
Fitzgerald pulled me into corners and said things like, "Don't eat much," and "Hold my hand if the ground is slippery," and the small manners of a man who watches for danger like a person who'd put himself between a blade and someone he thinks of as needing the shield.
"You're just being sweet so they'll stop selling you," I grumbled.
He smiled once, and it was honest. "Maybe I'm selfish."
Back home that night, the past landed in the doorway. Cason stood there, pasty and apologetic, like a man who'd been left to grow mold.
"Hayden," he began, like an incantation.
I froze. My mind peeled back five years like the layers of an old painting. He had been smooth, a practiced grin, a manipulator who learned how to say exactly what makes women softer. I felt it all flare.
Fitzgerald's hand on my waist tightened.
"Hayden," Cason said again. "Come home with me. Marry me. We can—"
"Stop," Fitzgerald said.
His voice was small at first, then the room filled with it. He moved like someone tuning a piano: precise, inevitable. He stepped between me and the man who had bruised me with words hidden in smiles.
"Leave her alone," he said, and in the blink between those words and the next, Cason lunged forward like a man who thought apologies could be physical.
Fitzgerald's reaction was a clean gesture. He struck once — not with the ugly violence of an animal but with the sharp justice of a man who had kept his temper for five years and it had finally reached the surface. Cason crumpled like wet paper.
"How dare you," Fitzgerald said, and there were people around now, cousins and a neighbor and a delivery boy, eyes wide with the delicious scandal of it.
Cason tried to laugh it off. "He hit me," he said, like a child with a scraped knee who expected sympathy.
"Yes," Fitzgerald said, "I hit you because you hurt her."
The crowd tasted the moment. Someone took out a phone. A woman clucked and said, "This will make gossip at the market tomorrow." Another cousin muttered, "About time."
Cason's face moved through three acts: firstly entitlement, then confusion, finally panic. "I—it's complicated—she loves me—"
"She told you to leave," Fitzgerald said. "She deleted your messages. She wanted nothing from you."
"That’s not true!" Cason's voice rose. He gestured wildly. "I came back. I changed."
A neighbor, old and blunt, spat out what everyone thought, loud enough to be filmed. "Changed into what? Bark cleaner? Who are you fooling?"
Phones clicked as people pressed record. I watched Cason's hands shake as Fitzgerald unfolded a packet he'd pulled from his jacket — a printed bundle of screenshots: the messages where Cason had apologized, the ones that then turned to demands, the voice note where he'd said he hoped she'd get sick if she left, the payment request disguised as "helping with rent." The crowd read it like court evidence. The man's façade peeled.
Cason's story grew smaller with each whisper. "You lie!" He tried another tactic: charm. "I loved her."
Instantly two cousins burst out laughing and pointed. "Love? Look at your clothes! Love doesn't come with cheap cologne and a lie."
People snapped photos. Someone shouted, "Post it!" Another, "We’ll make a trend out of this idiot."
Cason's face went red, then white, then wet. "Please—" he tried to kneel, as if the soap opera of repentance had a kneeling scene. "Hayden, I'm sorry. I will be better. I will—"
"No," I heard myself say. My voice was calm in a way I hadn't been in five years. "Don't. You taught me to be scared of soft words. I'm not your pattern anymore."
Cason's eyes found Fitzgerald — maybe looking for the easy villain. Fitzgerald looked back with a patience that made Cason tremble. The man who'd been arrogant a second before now looked like he had been stripped by truth.
"How could you?" someone shouted from the crowd. "You used her like a stepping stool."
There were no more doubts. The neighbor's phone camera had already gone live; comments flooded in, furious and gleeful. The slap of social humiliation hit Cason like cold water. He tried to salvage air with more lies, but the family had turned. A cousin unveiled a long chain of his debts he'd bragged about only to people who believed him. An aunt produced screenshots he thought were private. The room smelled like lemons and gossip.
Cason went through the motions of denial, anger, bargaining, shame, and collapse. People who had once smiled at his jokes now kept their distance. Someone filmed him sitting out on the stoop, shoulders shaking, while a dozen phones recorded the crumbling of his image.
He begged for forgiveness. He was laughed at. Some women clucked and spat and then opened their phones to post a picture of his plea with the caption "Do better, men." A teenage boy copied the video and posted with a meme. Within hours the clip would have thousands of views.
When Cason finally left, he was alone. He stumbled past Fitzgerald, lips quivering, eyes dark with failure. He mouthed "I'm sorry," but it had become theatre. Fitzgerald looked at him once and then closed the door.
"That was public," Marta whispered later, both satisfied and shaken. She wiped her hands on her jeans like a person who'd taken part in a cleansing.
"It had to be," I said. "He needed to see the world not side with him. He needed the shame he never felt when he used people."
Marta hugged me tight. "You did the brave thing."
I shook my head. "You and Duncan and Harrison did most of it."
"You kept him alive until the end," Fitzgerald said later, hands tucked into the pockets of his suit as if nothing had happened. He looked like someone who'd argued with the weather and won.
"You're not supposed to act like a guardian for me, boss."
"I'm not supposed to," he said. "But I am."
"What are you supposed to do about the dream-grandfather then?" I snorted. "Did he pick me or mess with your family calendar?"
"Both," Fitzgerald said, and then he surprised me by laughing. "My family has a sense of humor."
Days passed, and the short scandal settled into background noise. Cason's calls were blocked. His social feeds were quiet like a knocked-over glass. My phone buzzed with messages of solidarity from work and friends and a lot of women I never met.
The best part — and don't ask me why it felt like winning a small war — was the way Fitzgerald changed tiny things. He started not to be all cool and distant but to do small, specific kindnesses that felt like stitched sacredness.
"Don't eat the cold coffee," he'd say and slide a thermos across a meeting table.
"Take this home," he said once, handing me a paper bag of mango sticky rice after a long day. "For the ride."
"You're smothering me," I told him once, trying to act annoyed.
He smiled and said, "Baby steps. I like to protect what I love."
There — he had said it in a voice soft as bread.
One night after a long week, I found a small peach candy in my coat pocket. He was always prying into pockets like a detective of affection.
"Who put that here?" I asked, though I knew.
"You ate it," he said.
"No, you did."
"Then I did it to make you smile."
I let myself be held in the doorway, and it felt less like surrender and more like landing.
We married months later, in a small ceremony where the great-grandfather's portrait — a brass-framed, crooked-eared portrait that everyone claimed to have dreamed of — presided over the front row like a little general who approved all the plans.
At the rehearsal, family members joked and cried. I watched Fitzgerald in his suit, the man who used to be a myth in columns for coldness, now smiling in a way that made the skin near his eyes soft. Harrison teased him about being a "grandson selected by fate." Fitzgerald only replied, "She chose better than fate."
On the day of the wedding, after the vows, after the rice and the laughing cousins and the aunt who wouldn't stop clapping, I found myself tracing the crease of the peach candy wrapper in my purse.
I looked at Fitzgerald and heard the shared joke of an old dreamman tapping my head in a far-off night.
"Do you ever regret the dream?" I asked as we cleared plates.
He looked at me, then over my shoulder toward the brass portrait that everyone swore had winked at least once. "I regret only that it took a ghost and a lot of noise to bring me into the room."
"I like noisy ways," I said.
He picked up my hand, thumb smoothing the skin there. The gesture felt new and ancient at once.
"Good," he said. "Because I'm loud and I plan to claim everything you like."
"And what if your great-grandfather sends another match?" I teased.
"Then we'll thank him again. But next time I'll pre-order the peach candy."
We laughed. The house hummed with family stories, with the kind of silly cruelty that only kin can pronounce as love. Outside, someone posted the video of Cason's public fall like a cautionary tale — a few months later he was more or less anonymous, a lesson.
That night, I crawled into bed and pulled the peach candy out of its wrapper, held it like a small planet.
"Good night," Fitzgerald murmured, bending to kiss my temple.
"Good night," I answered, thinking of the old man with the braid and the cane who had insisted on arranging things without ceremony.
Some dreams are strange. Some are kind. Some meddle in the most inconvenient, most human of ways.
I rolled over and there, in the soft dark, I whispered, "Thank you for finding me."
"Thank you for letting me find you," he answered, like a mirror that had finally learned how to speak.
The last thing I remembered before sleep washed me was the peach candy on my tongue — sweet and a little sharp, like the first honest kiss.
The End
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