The days that followed should have felt like a return to normality, a quiet landing back into the life Lena had known before everything went wrong, yet from the very first morning after her return she understood, with a dull ache in her chest, that something inside her had shifted and refused to settle back into place.
She returned to her job in finance, back to the familiar glass building and the quiet hum of printers, keyboards, and low conversations, back to files, spreadsheets, and numbers that once gave her a strange sense of comfort and control.
Before, she had enjoyed the small, mundane tasks, the predictability of them, the safety of being hidden between rows and columns where nothing unexpected could reach her.
Now, as she stared at her screen, fingers hovering over the keybo
