We're Just Classmates, Aren't We?

In a fit of bravado, I save someone's life, only to sustain a head injury. Jenna Newson, my girlfriend of eight years, comes to visit me at the hospital.

In order to pull a prank on her, I pretend to be amnesiac and ask who she is.

While Jenna is momentarily stunned, she soon answers calmly, "I'm a classmate of yours."

Classmates?

I stared at Jenna Newson's face, my girlfriend of eight years, trying to find even a trace of joking in her expression. But there was nothing. She was serious, and... calm.

I forced the corners of my mouth into something resembling a smile. The words "I was just kidding" that I wanted to say stuck in my throat. She called us classmates. Not even close enough to be called ordinary friends.

I figured if the doctor hadn't called her, she probably wouldn't have come at all. But I didn't question her. I just smiled as if everything was normal.

Yet watching her keep her head down and stare at her phone the entire time, my gaze darkened. I started to say, "If you're busy, you don't have to..."

"I am busy, actually. Since you're fine, I'll head out first."

She didn't even let me finish before cutting me off, then grabbed her bag and headed for the door.

Maybe I still held some small place in her heart, because after pulling the door open, she glanced back at me. "Rest well."

I kept that faint smile on my face and nodded politely. But the smile didn't last long. It vanished the second she left.

Jenna and I had been together for eight years. We started dating in college and never stopped. But no one at the company knew about our relationship.

At first, we thought office romances weren't a good idea. Later, we both became directors, each leading our own department teams in competition for performance metrics. At that point, going public became even more complicated.

The company didn't actually forbid dating. Sometimes I asked her about making our relationship official, but she always laughed it off.

Sometimes I wondered if what we had only existed in name. Now I didn't need to wonder anymore. She'd wanted to break up with me for a while now, hadn't she?

The doctor told Jenna that I was perfectly fine. And when my story contradicted what the doctor said, she didn't question it.

She even stated plainly that we were just classmates. Maybe she simply didn't care whether my amnesia was real or fake. Or more accurately, she just wanted to use those words to make her attitude clear.

After all, if we broke up, she could be with Felix Foster.

Her changes hadn't escaped my notice.

We'd been together for eight years. That was nearly three thousand days and nights. We were so familiar with each other that the boundaries between us blurred until we were almost like one person.

I could spot her unusual reactions immediately, and it started when a new employee transferred into her team. A good-looking guy named Felix Foster.

In our entire company, only our chairwoman shared the surname Foster. And coincidentally, when Felix filled out his employee paperwork, under "mother" he wrote the name of our chairwoman, Francine Foster.

At first, Jenna would explain why she was looking after Felix. He was young, fresh out of college, and the chairwoman's son, so she needed to take good care of him.

She told me not to worry, that she wasn't into golden retriever types like Felix anyway. But what Jenna didn't know was that the "young man" she claimed was fresh out of college was actually three years older than me.

Then one day, I needed a video file for work. My laptop wasn't nearby, so I borrowed Jenna's. Her password had been changed.

I called her to get the new one. It was Felix's birthday.

Just when I naively thought it might be a coincidence, I noticed the wallpaper. It showed a photo from a bar with the main subject clearly being a man's hand making a heart gesture.

I remembered how possessive she used to be about wallpapers. She told me I wasn't allowed to change mine, and she promised she wouldn't change hers either.

For years, my computer wallpaper was her photo, and hers was mine. I also remembered how much she hated places like bars.

Jenna must have realized this belatedly, because shortly after I opened the computer, she called me again.