Eight Years Later I No Longer Love You Chapter 09
“Adrian, Sophie’s resignation letter is here.”
She had been formally reprimanded internally for altering the assets without authorization, and stripped of her credit.
When Marcus set the file down on the desk, Adrian was looking at the new test report. On the screen, the shooting star meadow had just finished its final round of stress testing. The firefly sprite drifted past the WLH-carved bench beside the treehouse, lantern in hand.
He didn’t look up. Just capped his pen and flipped to the signature page.
“Approved.”
Marcus paused.
“You’re not asking her to stay?”
Adrian signed his name and pushed the file back.
“This studio doesn’t need people who only stay because of special treatment.”
Out in the workstation area, the keyboards clicked in an even rhythm. The project schedule was up on the whiteboard, testing logs marching downward in tidy columns. The chaos of everyone orbiting around one person’s moods was finally gone.
When Sophie came to pick up the offboarding paperwork, the silver fox pendant was no longer around her neck.
She stood at the office door, her voice dropping.
“Adrian, I really just wanted to be near you.”
Adrian slid the paperwork across the desk toward her.
“What you wanted to stay near wasn’t me. It was the doors I opened for you.”
Sophie’s hand rested on the edge of the paper. She didn’t pick it up.
“And what about Willow? Everything you’re doing now, can she even see it?”
Adrian looked at the meadow on the screen. It took him a moment to answer.
“Whether she sees it or not doesn’t change what I should be doing.”
Sophie finally took the paper. As the door closed behind her, someone in the hallway passed a new bug report inside. Adrian took it and bent his head to make notes.
He returned to the work.
Only, from that day on, no one in the studio ever again heard him call anyone’s effort something he was simply owed.
…
At the cottage by Lake Tahoe, I was sorting the dried chamomile out of a bamboo tray. The petals were light and airy, and my fingertips came away smelling like sun.
Mrs. Doyle was leaning against the doorframe, watching me.
“Willow, that dried flower frame of yours, someone asked me three times at the market last week if you had more.”
I pressed the last white rose into the wooden frame and smiled at her.
“There’ll be more. I’ll bring them tomorrow.”
She looked at the few dried flower lamps on the table.
“These for sale too?”
“Not yet. I still have to redo the copper wire.”
Once I’d slowed down, I discovered I had this much patience in me.
Spring daisies. Summer forget-me-nots. Fall lilac. Winter’s dried pampas grass.
I gathered them all, little by little, into glass domes, wooden frames, and the pages of old books.
Customers said my things weren’t loud, but you could look at them a long time.
Some drove all the way out from Tahoe City just to buy one magnolia night light.
I logged the orders in a notebook, and when I had time in the evenings, I wrote a few pages of my own. About the flower market. About the wind. About the slowness of the days by Lake Tahoe.
At first, it was just a hobby.
Then, in the local Etsy sellers’ group, people started calling me Ms. Hayes.
The first time I heard it, the hot glue gun almost slipped in my hand. Mrs. Doyle laughed until she couldn’t stand up.
“See? Flowers grow people, too.”
I bent to straighten a crooked stem.
“Only if the person’s willing to grow themselves first.”
The day the game officially launched, it trended from noon until night.
Steam wishlists, downloads, player screenshots, one after another spilling out onto the internet.
The most viral thing wasn’t the main quest. Wasn’t the combat system.
It was that redone shooting star meadow.
Players were losing it in the comments.
【What do those three letters next to the treehouse mean?】
【Who’s WLH? Some easter egg from the devs?】
【This scene is way too gentle. Why are all the benches carved with the same three letters?】
The official studio account stayed quiet for a long time, and finally just reposted a single screenshot of the meadow.
Adrian replied to it from his own account.
【She’s the one I took eight years to learn how to respect.】
That comment got voted to the top.
Some people called it romantic. Some tried to guess the story. Others said an apology this late might not have a recipient anymore.
I saw the post while scrolling through the Etsy sellers’ group.
When Mrs. Doyle handed me her phone, she watched my face carefully.
“Willow, want me to close it?”
I read the line, handed the phone back, and kept trimming the lilac in my hand.
“No.”
However pretty a meadow on a screen might be, it was still just a screen.
I liked my life the way it was now.
Quiet. My own.
Watching flowers open and close in the sunlight. Watching clouds gather and drift in the evening breeze.
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