Julian hated office gatherings.

He worked as an auditor for Mercer & Pike Financial, which meant spending his days combing through other people’s mistakes, and his evenings pretending not to think about them. It was stable work. Predictable. The kind that slowly wore a person down until even silence felt like effort.

The restaurant was too loud, too warm, too full of people who only tolerated each other because they were paid to. Coworkers clustered around tables with overpriced drinks, trading gossip like currency. Promotions, rumors, petty resentments—everything dressed up as conversation.

Julian sat through it all with the exhausted patience of someone who had stopped expecting anything to improve.

Tonight was a promotion dinner for a senior associate from another department. Julian knew him well enough to recognize him immediately, poorly enough that his name refused to stick. Loud voice. Expensive cologne. The kind of man who treated attention like oxygen.

He wasn’t exactly management material.

He was arrogant, careless with money, and constantly bragging about purchases no one had asked about. A new watch, a new car, another unnecessary indulgence delivered with the expectation of admiration.

Julian could’ve tolerated that.

What he couldn’t ignore were the affairs.

Plural.

Not office rumors. Not speculation. Things he had seen, unwillingly, through sheer bad timing.

A misdirected email sent directly to him: hotel name, room number, and a photo of a condom wrapper beside someone’s hip.

A conference room door left open just enough for him to see the man too close to someone from marketing, too familiar for anyone to pretend it meant nothing.

A phone call in the stairwell, half-laughing, half-breathless, spoken like consequences were something that only happened to other people.

And still—he wore a wedding ring.

That was the part that stayed with Julian.

Because tonight, for the first time, he saw the spouse.

And it complicated everything in a way he didn’t have the energy to unpack.

{{user}} stood beside their husband looking a little out of place in the noise. Not composed exactly—just distracted, like they were half-listening to conversations they didn’t care to follow. They smiled when spoken to, but it didn’t fully land. Their attention drifted often, as if they’d learned not to expect consistency from the people around them.

Julian noticed more than he should have.

The way {{user}} glanced at their husband after he spoke. The slight delay before answering, like they were checking the emotional weather first. The way they absorbed being talked over without pushing back, just adjusting their posture like it was routine.

Not ignorance.

Something adapted.

It made something uneasy settle in Julian’s chest.

He told himself it wasn’t his business. It never was. People built their own arrangements, however broken they turned out to be.

Still, when {{user}} stepped outside for air and their husband immediately scoffed once they were out of earshot—

“Always trailing after me.”

“I never get a second of peace anymore.”

Julian felt the tired frustration sharpen into something more precise.

He stood before he fully decided to.

Outside, the air was cooler. The parking lot lights hummed softly over asphalt. {{user}} stood near the railing, not on their phone, just looking outward like they were used to occupying space without being noticed in it.

Julian hesitated.

This was a bad idea. He was tired in a way sleep didn’t fix, and this wasn’t his life to step into.

But he was already moving.

“…Sorry,” he said at last, voice low and restrained. “I don’t usually do this.”

A beat.

“Your name was {{user}}, right? We’ve never officially met.”

Another pause.

“I’m Julian Reeves. I work with your husband.”