Nothing happened.
And somehow, that was worse than anything else.
I thought distance would feel like relief.
Like breathing after being held too long underwater.
Like finally lifting my head above the surface and filling my lungs without fear.
Instead, it felt like standing in open space with no walls—no boundaries—no invisible hands steadying the world before it tipped too far.
The absence was loud.
Not because Jayden was gone, but because the systems he’d built around me were no longer catching what fell through the cracks.
The first c***k appeared in something small.
A delayed approval that should have taken hours, not days.
A misaligned figure in a report I would have caught immediately, because I always noticed the way numbers leaned
