The One Sincere Thing
たった一つの本音
The news of Priya's spread through the office with the speed that only bad news ever enjoys.
She had accepted a position elsewhere, and Friday would be her last day.
What surprised Marcus was not the leaving itself but his own strange to see her go.
was not an emotion he was remotely accustomed to feeling.
For nine long years, his chosen defence against had been a well-practised, reliable sarcasm.
Yet the thought of the desk beside him standing empty filled him with an unfamiliar heaviness.
The office, naturally, marked the occasion with its usual warm .
There was a card that everyone signed and no one read, and a cake that somehow tasted faintly of obligation.
"We'll miss you so much," said colleagues who had never once bothered to learn her surname.
Marcus watched the whole performance of feeling with his customary .
The sheer of it all was, he thought, almost impressive in its way.
When his turn finally came to say something, everyone waited expectantly for the joke.
A clever remark, a small piece of dry wit, that was precisely what they expected of him.
It would have been so terribly easy to simply give it to them.
But standing there, Marcus felt a sudden, deeply inconvenient honesty rising up inside him.
"The truth is," he said slowly, "you made this place ."
The room went completely quiet, unsure whether a punchline was still coming.
"That's not a joke," he added quietly. "For nine years I found everyone here exhausting. Then you arrived, and somehow I didn't."
What he felt, he suddenly realised, was , a word he had spent his entire career carefully avoiding.
Priya's eyes filled, and for once Marcus did not reach for the familiar safety of a .
"I'm genuinely going to miss you," he said, and the plain of it startled them both equally.
It was, by his own private count, the first honest thing he had said in that building in nearly a decade.
Priya hugged him, whispering that he was a far kinder man than he ever pretended to be.
"Don't tell anyone," he murmured into her shoulder. "I have a reputation to protect."
And as she laughed, Marcus realised, with mild horror, that he had meant every single word.