Dead Signal
The office was a graveyard of ambition, and Mara was just another zombie shuffling between meetings. Her iPhone buzzed—David again. She'd been dodging his calls for three days, ever since she'd found the surveillance app he'd installed on her phone. David, the man she'd planned to marry, was a corporate spy hired to infiltrate her division. The betrayal tasted like copper in her mouth.
She stood before the bathroom mirror, running her fingers through her hair—now chopped short and dyed coal black, a radical transformation from the blonde waves David had fallen in love with. Her reflection showed eyes that had seen too much: the way her boss smiled while feeding proprietary algorithms to competitors, the hollow laughter at happy hour, the slow erosion of everything she'd believed about integrity and loyalty.
Her phone lit up with a text: *We need to talk. By the water.*
The old boardwalk by the harbor was where they'd first kissed, salt air and possibility. She went anyway, some masochistic impulse drawing her forward. David stood by the railing, his silhouette backlit by the glittering expanse of water beyond. He turned, and for a moment she saw the man she'd loved—the one who made terrible puns over morning coffee, who held her through panic attacks, who'd seemed so genuine.
"I did what I had to do," he said, voice rough. "They have evidence against my sister."
"And what about us?" Mara's voice didn't waver. She was surprised by her own calm. "Was that part of the job too?"
He stepped closer, reaching for her hand. She pulled away. Behind them, the corporate headquarters loomed like a tombstone, its windows alive with theĺŠ çŹ lights of the walking dead—employees like her, drained of passion, selling their lives hour by hour.
"I loved you," he said. "That wasn't fake."
"That's worse," she replied, turning toward the dark water. "If it was just business, I could hate you. But you loved me and you still chose this."
She walked away without looking back, leaving him standing alone in the wash of harbor lights. Her phone showed seventeen missed calls from her boss, demanding she return to the office. She powered it off and kept walking toward the water's edge, finally, terrifyingly, free.