While he stares at the elevator buttons like it’s his first time seeing them, I scrutinize his face, searching for red eyes, new wrinkle lines, or any other telltale sign that he’s as fucked up about our breakup as I am. Or some clue as to why he decided to call off our engagement in the first place.

But every brown curl on his head is perfectly tousled, and his blue eyes look sharper than ever. If anything, he looks more well rested than usual. Son of a bitch.

By the time the elevator doors open again and we walk to our respective desks, I’m channeling my inner Lady Gaga. Your career will never wake up and tell you it doesn’t love you anymore. Your career will never wake up… I repeat the mantra over and over in my head. Forget James. Forget everyone. I don’t need to be in a relationship to win at life. In fact, historically, romantic relationships have only brought me down.

Single, powerful, beautiful. I repeat another mantra I once came up with for a newly divorced woman who asked for advice on the column. I’m single, powerful, and beautiful.

Pushing away all thoughts of James from my head, I focus on work until my lunch break.

My favorite time of the workday is lunch, since it was the only time my friends and I could regularly see each other during the week before I started living with them. With only twenty employees, Horizon is a pretty small magazine owned by Citrine, a larger, out-of-state parent company. But Val works in IT and Kiara in design, and our jobs keep us all busy. If it weren’t for the icebreakers at a company-wide mixer seven years ago where we discovered we were obsessed with the same music artists, we might never have become friends in the first place.

“How are you holding up?” Kiara asks when we meet in front of the café on the first floor. Since Kiara and Val had to run some errands on their way to work this morning, we barely had time to say “hi” before they left.

“Well, I had an awkward run-in with James at the elevator,” I reply. “He pretended I was invisible.”

Kiara and Val groan.

“Maybe we could get him fired,” Val jokes. “Want me to log in to his computer and see if he’s been watching porn during work hours?”

Kiara giggles. “Oh God, I hope he hasn’t.”

“Same,” I say. I don’t think James would watch porn at work. But this past weekend taught me I don’t know anything about him.

How can someone randomly decide they don’t love you after seven years? Just like that?