Mr Efficiency Spent His Life WAITING for My Bestie Chapter 07
Shortly after her termination, Susan posted a viral online exposé painting Zane as a heartless playboy who’d seduced and abandoned her.
The post threatened catastrophic damage for their newly-listed company. Zane refused to issue any public response.
He stood haggard before me, tentatively reaching out to take my wrist. “Nina. Ninety days. I’ve found you.”
A humorless laugh escaped me. Zane’s brand of logic was almost absurd. “Ninety days? Is that your benchmark for ‘long enough’?”
He shook his head. “It’s the longest you’ve ever stayed away. Before, you never spent more than two months gone.”
I folded my arms, watching him sway on his feet, worn out from sleepless nights. “Then you’ve miscalculated. The day I left, that clock started counting for a lifetime.”
“Come back. We finally got the company listed. What if it collapses without you?”
Zane’s smile turned hollow and despairing. “I deserve the blowback for my bad choices. My worst mistake was never letting the world know you were mine. I failed to honor that our love had never changed.”
I stepped past him. “You drove Susan to work every day, waited in elevator lines beside her, prepped her promotion speeches, bought her dresses, took hundreds of her photos, stood at her wedding altar. Zane, those are all proof our love had already shifted.”
—
“You can manufacture endless excuses for every choice you made.
But you cannot explain why you slowly ran out of patience for me,
why you weighed every single one of my troubles against an
efficiency checklist, judging whether they were worth your time.”
Zane froze. His breath hitched, and a broken sound escaped him.
“That isn’t—”
I stripped away his last layer of self-deception. “Zane, we were
together ten years. I’ve seen you gentle and patient. I’ve also seen you
cold and rational. I know exactly what those moments of distraction
with Susan meant. It was never about me. You developed real
feelings for her.”
“You treated love like a spreadsheet. If my feelings didn’t fit your
efficiency metrics, you deleted them. But you are still human. You
hurt, you grieve, you fall for people. Those fleeting moments of
attraction were your raw human instinct.”
Zane stared at me, dazed, as if the truth was finally sinking in. “No,
Nina. Even if my mind wandered for a second, loving you is my true
instinct.”
“At the altar… I only saw you. The next morning, waiting for city hall—I
felt alive for the first time in years. I didn’t understand it then. But
losing you… it clarified everything.”
I watched him struggle desperately to prove he still loved me, and I
could only feel pity.
Could a belated epiphany expunge a criminal record? Could it wipe
away the humiliation of being manhandled, my dress torn, thrown out
onto the apartment complex sidewalk?
—
“You understand far too late.”
Right then Zane dropped onto one knee. Hidden cameras rushed out from where they’d been staked out nearby.