ALEXANDER
It’s been weeks.
I stopped counting the days somewhere around the second one, when I realized that keeping track only made it worse — gave the absence a number, a weight, a specificity that made it harder to breathe through. So I stopped. The sun rises and sets and I move through the hours between them and that is all I allow it to be.
It isn’t working.
I wake up thinking about her. I fall into whatever passes for sleep thinking about her. In between, I bury myself in everything the pack requires of me — meetings, border reports, training rotations, the endless administrative machinery of leading something this large — and I do it all with the performance of a man who is fully present, fully functional, fully in control.
No one says anything. Which means either I’m convincin
