His heart dropped into his shoes with a sickening thud.

He stared at the tiles for so long that the lines separating them blurred away into nothingness, leaving behind a massive neutrality and a cold feeling of infinity.

His brain worked furiously to put distance between the words on the paper and the words he had thought over and over since she’d left…

But they collided anyway, rocking his insides until he had to rush into a stall to wait out the dry heaves.

An eternity later, he staggered back to his desk with the note in his back pocket.