THE AFTERMATH
The apartment was empty in a way that suggested absence rather than vacancy. Damien stood in the doorway, his key still in the lock, his breathing audible in the silence that followed the door's swing. He had not been here in five years—not since the night before the gala, when Sophia had sketched on his couch while he reviewed board documents, their bodies separate but their attention companionable, the domestic rhythm they had established without discussing.
Now the couch was gone. The sketchbooks, the pencils, the architectural magazines she had stacked in teetering towers. The coffee cup with her lipstick on the rim, which he had kept for three weeks after she left before throwing it away in a fit of self-disgust. All gone, as if she had never existed, as if the months
