But that confidence began to unravel the moment she fell for him.
At first, he was charming—bringing coffee to her desk, sending warm texts between meetings. But affection soon hardened into neediness. He called during client presentations, demanded reassurances between meals, sulked when she stayed late for a pitch.
Boundaries blurred into guilt. She left meetings early to calm his anger, skipped brainstorms to appease him, lied about headaches and missed deadlines. Coffee became her lifeline. Colleagues noticed. So did her boss.
Twice, she was warned: the team needed reliability, not “emergencies.”
The breaking point came during a high-stakes pitch. A major client. A critical account.
Mark barged into the office, red-faced, shouting over an unanswered text. The scene was loud enough for the client to hear. The deal collapsed. Her boss, grim but resigned, handed her a severance envelope and spoke of “future opportunities.”
Mark begged forgiveness. Promised change. Blamed stress.
Noemi saw the truth. She ended it.
The breakup was brutal—loud, public, humiliating. When the door finally slammed behind him, her apartment felt unbearably hollow.
Her savings sat in her account, a fund she had once reserved for a future home. But what was a future now? She needed distance. Air.
So she booked a cheap coastal cottage, packed light, and drove south with one plan: sit by the sea until her thoughts grew quiet again.
The drive was longer than promised, but by late afternoon she reached it—a squat box with peeling blue paint and mismatched shingles. It wasn’t pretty, but the sea lay just beyond the dunes. That was enough.
Inside, the air smelled of salt and old wood. A sagging sofa faced a window framing a sliver of gray ocean. The kitchen was bare—just a chipped kettle and a weary refrigerator.
She dropped her bag by the door, opened the screen to the wind, and let the air sweep through like a reset.
No unpacking. No plans. Just escape.
She slipped on a sweatshirt and followed a sandy trail beyond the dunes. Dune grass brushed her knees before the shoreline spread open. She sank against a granite boulder, watching the tide inhale and exhale.
Her life lay in ruins—relationship ended, career lost, every familiar piece stripped away. Yet here, with the sun warming her skin and the surf scrubbing her mind clean, she felt something like forgiveness.
For the first time in weeks, she breathed fully. No tight chest, no buzzing phone, no demands.
Later, she wandered along the shore, letting foam cool her ankles. She tucked a piece of sea glass into her pocket, laughed at a darting crab, let the cold water soothe hidden aches.