Collecting everything he needed for his class, Aiden stood up straight, slinging his bag over his chest. “Anything else you need?” he asked, smoothing down his neck tie. “I’ve got to get to class.”

She quickly stood. “I wanted to say sorry.”

Aiden swallowed and dropped his gaze to the floor. He didn’t have time to deal with this either. “Lisa...”

“I should have apologized for the way I left things last year. I should have done it sooner,” she said in a hurried voice. “All of the things I told you about yourself were true. But I realize that I didn’t speak to you in a tactful way. We were just growing apart and I don’t know if either one of us knew how to address it. So I decided to look for another job without telling you.”

He rolled his eyes to the ceiling of his small office, wanting to be anywhere else but there in front of his ex-girlfriend. A year ago, she’d told him his laziness was holding her back. They may have been hired together, but she wasn’t going to toil her life away with him. “You don’t have to do this,” he said.

“I do,” she said. A pleading expression in her eyes, made Aiden take pause. “When we stopped talking about our future, I needed to leave Galway and see what I could accomplish. Deep down, I wanted you to come with me, wherever we might end up, but I never saw the drive in you or your work. I felt like you were content drifting around here and wasting your potential. I’m sure you’re coming up on tenure review, right?”

“Next year.”

Lisa’s brows raised. “How’s it going?”

“Not well,” he admitted. “I frittered away the last feckin’ year getting over you.”

She winced. “I’m sorry.”

Aiden shook his head. “No, no, don’t apologize for that. You’re not responsible for what I muck up. I’m just trying...” He trailed off and his shoulders slumped. “I’ve got a lot of things to publish. A journal made me change nearly everything in an article I sent them, so I stayed up all last night to make that deadline. I’ve got to get a book proposal ready by the end of the summer and I almost forgot about the conference.”

She nodded. “So you’re doing the work.”

“I am. It’s just hard,” he said. “But look, I appreciate your apology.” He was mature enough to know that adults came together and talked these awkward moments out. Anger slowly flowed from his body as he gazed at her. She was the same Lisa who he thought he loved, but he now felt nothing for her. When he had helped move her things out of his Claddagh house, he’d bitten down his anger while they worked in silence. Later that evening, when all traces of her had been wiped away, he remembered drinking away his pain in a local pub. He barely made it home afterward, but when he woke up the following morning in an empty bed, loneliness plagued him for several months.