The apartment was quiet in a way that felt exposed rather than empty, a silence that carried weight instead of fragility and settled into corners, lingered in doorways, and reshaped the air around the absence of voices that had filled the space only hours earlier.
This was not the brittle stillness that followed fear, nor the tense quiet that arrived after conflict and waited to see what would fracture next, but something heavier and more enduring, a quiet that stayed because it had nowhere else to go.
Willow stood at the bathroom sink with her hands resting lightly on the counter as the water ran, watching it longer than necessary as though attention itself mattered, as though letting it go unobserved might invite a mistake she would not have the energy to correct.
Zane had left for the airport less than an hour ago, and the knowledge of that fact sat in her body with an insistence that had not yet softened into something manageable.
