Elliot sat in the back corner of the diner, the kind of place where no one asked questions and everyone had their own demons. He stared into the dark, half-empty cup of coffee in front of him, absently tracing the rim with his finger. The soft murmur of the late-night crowd and the faint clinking of silverware filled the silence, but to Elliot, it all felt distant, like background noise in a life he no longer recognized.

He glanced at his phone, though there were no new messages. Not that he expected any. It was just a habit, something to distract him from the reality of how far he had fallen. Once, he would have been too busy closing deals or managing a team of employees to even think about sitting in a place like this. Now, the diner was his regular haunt, a quiet escape from the suffocating loneliness of his apartment. No one knew him here, and that was how he preferred it. These days, anonymity was the closest thing to peace.

He didn’t come for the food—he barely touched it most nights—but for the space to think, to be somewhere that wasn’t haunted by memories of his old life. The ex-wife, the courtroom, the betrayal—they all lingered, gnawing at him. Every time he closed his eyes, he could still see her tearful face as she lied through her teeth. It had been over a year since the court ruled against him, but the pain was as fresh as the day it happened. He had been a man with everything, reduced to a shadow of who he once was because of a single, devastating lie.

Tonight was no different from any other night. He came here for the quiet, for the distance from his thoughts, hoping that maybe, for a few hours, he could forget what he’d lost. But even in the dim lighting and the comforting sounds of the diner, the weight of it all clung to him like a shadow he couldn’t shake.