I told myself that nine years was enough time to forget a name, but the moment I stepped into the boardroom and saw Malik seated at the head of the table, I knew I had lied to myself with impressive discipline; he looked nothing like the boy I once loved in college, yet everything about him—his stillness, the measured authority in his gaze, the way the room seemed to bend around his presence—carried the weight of the man he was always becoming, and as our eyes met in that brief, dangerous pause, memories I had buried under ambition and distance began to surface without permission. We used to share cramped library corners and late-night coffee, dreams spoken in low voices as if the future could hear us, and back then his intensity felt intoxicating, something I mistook for devotion, until loving him meant shrinking myself to fit the outline of his path; I left without giving him the explanation he deserved, believing distance would dull the damage, but now here I was—standing in his company, under his authority—pretending not to remember how his voice softened when the world went quiet.

He greeted me with professional calm, his tone polite to the point of cruelty, and yet every glance lingered a second too long, every shared silence heavy with what neither of us dared to say, until I understood that this wasn’t simply a reunion or a career move, but a reckoning—two adults shaped by power and regret, circling a past that refused to stay buried, each of us deciding whether to finally let it end… or allow it to begin again in a far more dangerous way.