Chapter 103: Walking Wounded
It was just after two o’clock in the morning, most people had long gone home, and were now far away in dream land. But that was not the case for one Derek Haven.
He was wide awake in his top floor office. The view from the window was spectacular, but he did not see it, and even if had, he would not have had it in him to enjoy it. Derek did not enjoy anything any more, the lack of sleep had slowly, but surely robbed him of that ability.
Which was why so early in the morning, or late at night, depending on who you asked, Derek was still awake, stuck at his desk at work, and staring at a his computer screen without really seeing it. On the few occasions when something did make it through to him, he could not even understand it. All that he saw was letters jumbled up, and graphs, and pie charts that did not make any sense.
He wanted so very badly to just shut down the machine and go home, to be able to sleep. But there was none of that for him. Emily’s first designated time off coming to an end( the time off that he had lied about in the first place) had really brought it home for him.
She was gone and she was never coming back. And that hurt to acknowledge, more than something that was strictly business had any right to. And along with that pain had come something else that Derek had not expected at all.
The stress of losing Emily had made his sleeping problems worse. He had gone from around an hour or so of sleep if he was lucky, to just around twenty minutes on good days, and there were so few of those. In fact he’d had only one good day ever since he had told the lie about Emily extending her time off.
When he had initially told the lie, it had been because he could not bear the thought of admitting, even to himself that Emily was never coming back. But in lying again, he had accidentally shot himself in the foot.
This time, he knew for a fact that Emily truly was not coming back. Wherever she was, as far as she knew, her window period to come back had ended the week before. She did not know she still had a chance to come back, and that meant that she would not.
It was an awful feeling, he wanted to go looking for her and tell her that the door was still open for her. But that would have been selfish of him. Besides, she was probably well on her way to forgetting all about him now. There was no need to go looking for her only to have her frown and look at him as though she were trying to place him.
So Derek was carrying on, wounded, but still dragging himself along.
Her work had been divided up amongst some PAs from other departments. The day to day of his office life being left up to them. It was a solution proposed by Padma, no doubt she was tired of all the hiring and firing. She had devided that the PAs could handle a bit of extra work for two weeks. And Derek, who was tired of the emotional whiplash that came with dealing with so many personalities had readily agreed.