ALONE
The bus deposited Sophia in a city whose name she forgot immediately, a mid-sized urban center distinguished only by the anonymity it offered. She walked from the station with her two suitcases, her sketchbook, and the envelope Damien had pressed into her hand at the bus station—the one containing her mother's treatment continuation, the one she had not yet opened, the one that represented either genuine care or final manipulation, and she no longer possessed the energy to determine which.
She found a motel near the bus station, paid cash for three nights, locked the door behind her, and slept for fourteen hours. The sleep was not restorative. It was escape, unconsciousness, the temporary death of a mind that could not process what it had lost and what it carried and what it must b
