By noon, the rejection email was a distant echo, buried under layers of routine survival.
Liora sat at her tiny kitchen table, her laptop open again — the cursor blinking on another job portal. The same words stared back at her: "We're hiring!"
Except they weren't. Not really.
Not for people like her.
She typed out another cover letter, fingers stiff, words automatic. The polite professional tone, the list of experiences, the "I look forward to the opportunity"—it all blurred into a soulless script she'd written too many times.
She hit send.
And waited.
She always waited.
But hope didn't knock anymore. It slid past her, silent and indifferent, like the hundreds of unread emails in her inbox.
Her phone buzzed. A message from Nessa.
"OMG, Julian's new teaser just dropped! He looks SO good! I swear I'm in love with that man!"
Liora stared at the screen, her heart lurching into a sour twist.
Julian Hart. Again.
The irony wasn't even funny anymore.
Her best friend — completely enamored with the man who unknowingly held Liora's soul in his sleeping hands. The man who smiled for cameras, oblivious to the girl breaking on the other side of the world.
She wanted to laugh. Or throw the phone out the window.
Instead, she typed back:
"Haha, of course. He's everyone's dream, isn't he?"
A lie.
The dream wasn't him. It was freedom. It was waking up to a life where she wasn't shackled to a sleeping stranger's destiny.
Liora set the phone down and exhaled slowly.
Tomorrow, she'd send another application.
Tomorrow, she'd wear another smile.
Tomorrow, maybe… she'd stop waiting.