For three nights the apartment kept its new geography—his side of the bed cool as porcelain, his dresser quiet as a closed museum. Walter had moved himself and his explanations to his parents' house “for space," and space obeyed. Emma woke to her own alarms, took her medications on the whiteboard's clock, walked her five-minute loops like a citizen of a careful country. On the board below TAKE MEDS and DRINK WATER, she had written CHOOSE QUIET and underlined it once. The ink held.
In the mornings she answered work emails in soft clothes, answering only the emergencies that belonged to her. In the afternoons she kept her follow-ups with Clarence, because bodies like schedules and because he was the surgeon of record—the one who hadn't left the room when the room mattered. When she asked fo
