Takotsubo

Screeee.

The brass letter opener bit into the Brazilian cherry wood.

Hiroshi didn’t stop. He dragged the blade deeper, carving a jagged white trench into the polished surface of the fourth desk. A splinter caught his cuticle. A bead of blood welled up, bright and perfect against the dark grain. He didn’t wipe it away. He just kept carving.

Screeee.

It was 3:00 AM. The fortieth floor of Tanaka Corp was a sterile, HEPA-filtered vacuum. The Tokyo skyline slept beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass, a grid of dimming lights, but in here, the air was awake and screaming.

He dropped the opener. It clattered against the scarred wood.

He stared at the grooves. HR had sanitized her out of existence with the cold enthusiasm of morticians. They took her emergency kit. They took the spare tights. They took the half-eaten bag of lemon candies that made her suck her cheeks in when she ate them. They wiped the surface with chemical lemon-scented bleach.

But they missed the negative space. The dent in the air where she used to sit. The phantom frequency of her breathing.

Hiroshi pressed his bleeding palm flat against the ruined wood. It was cold. It sucked the heat right out of his skin.

“Your gait is offensive.”

The woman stopped. The clicking of her black pumps ceased.

Hiroshi didn’t look up from the contract on his desk. He kept his eyes on the black ink, but his ears were bleeding.

Click. Clack. Click.

Too sharp. Too aggressive. A hammer striking a nail. It wasn’t hers. Her shoes had been a whisper. A soft, percussive tap that kept time with his thoughts. This woman’s shoes were an assault on his nervous system.

“Sir?” The candidate’s voice was stiff. Yale. Top of her class. Fluent in three languages. Completely, utterly useless.

“The shoes,” Hiroshi said, his voice a flat, dead calm. “They disrupt the workflow.”

“I… I don’t understand.”

“You’re fired. HR will double your severance. Security is waiting outside.”

He signed the check with a flourish of his obsidian pen. He didn’t wait for her to process the shock. He didn’t wait for the door to sigh shut. He just sat in the silence that followed.

It wasn’t peaceful. It was heavy. Thick. It pressed against his eardrums like deep water. Before, this silence had been a canvas, painted with the low, absent-minded hum she made when cross-referencing spreadsheets. Now, it was just air. Suffocating, thin air.

The cafe across the street was a punishment.

Hiroshi sat on the third tile from the left. He knew she came here on Tuesdays. He ordered black coffee and watched the door. He watched it for an hour. His spine was rigid. His jaw was locked.

She didn’t come.

A barista with purple hair laughed at a customer. The sound was sharp. Bright. A violation. Hiroshi left the cup full. The coffee went cold, a dark, bitter stain on the reclaimed wood. He watched the stain spread, absorbing into the grain, disappearing. He envied the wood. It knew how to absorb things.

The penthouse was a gilded tomb.

Every element was controlled. The temperature was a constant twenty degrees. The triple-paned glass kept the city’s roar at bay. It was a perfect, engineered vacuum. And it was hollowing him out.

Hiroshi stood before the Sub-Zero fridge. The cold breath washed over his face. He saw his reflection in the stainless steel. A gaunt man in a ten-thousand-dollar suit. Hollowed out. Scraped clean.

Behind a bottle of vintage wine sat a single, neon-orange packet of instant ramen. A monument to his decay.

He boiled water. The act was fumbling. The steam rose, and he didn’t pull his hand back in time. The heat blistered his thumb. A sharp, bright pain.

Good.

He welcomed it. It was the only real thing he had felt in forty days.

He dumped the brick of noodles into the pot. The powder smelled of artificial salvation. He stood at the kitchen island, under a pendant light so bright it felt surgical, and ate it straight from the pot.

The broth scalded his tongue. The noodles were glue. It tasted of salt and chemicals.

Flash.

Two years ago. A crisis in the Suez Canal. Forty-eight hours in the office. She had walked in, placing this exact same convenience store ramen on his desk.

“You can’t think on an empty stomach, sir,” she had said.

They had eaten in silence, the blue glow of monitors reflecting in their eyes. It had been the best thing he had ever tasted.

Hiroshi gagged. He spat the mouthful into the stainless steel sink. The sound was wet. Obscene.

He gripped the edges of the sink. His knuckles were white. He could buy the building she lived in. He could buy the cafe. He could buy the ramen company. But he could not purchase a single sustained note of her quiet song. He could not acquire the way she used to look at him—not as a CEO, but as a man she was choosing, patiently, to tolerate.

He turned off the light. The ramen pot sat in the sink. The desk upstairs was still scarred. Nothing had changed.

He walked to the floor-to-ceiling window. He pressed his forehead against the cold glass. He looked down at the city lights. They blurred. He wasn’t looking at them anymore. He was listening for a hum that wasn’t there.

He whispered to the empty room. “Where did you go?”

The room did not answer.

Then.

Bzz.

His phone vibrated against the mahogany console table. A single, violent convulsion.

Hiroshi froze. The screen lit up, casting a pale, sickly glow in the dark penthouse.

He didn’t want to look. His chest tightened, a physical vice crushing his ribs. He reached out, his hand shaking so badly he knocked a crystal tumbler to the floor. It shattered. He didn’t care.

He picked up the phone.

It wasn’t Kenji. It wasn’t the board.

It was a text from a number he had deleted six months ago. A dead number. A ghost number.

The message was three words.

I’m so cold.

Hiroshi’s lungs stopped working. The blood roared in his ears, a deafening, oceanic static. He stared at the screen.

At the bottom of the message, three grey dots bubbled.

She was typing.

He held his breath. His thumb hovered over the glass.

The dots vanished.

The screen went black.