**SASHA**
I didn’t expect loneliness to be the thing that hit hardest.
Pain made sense. Politics made sense. Even the bond, strange and insistent as it is, fits into some internal logic I can wrap my head around. But the quiet space that opens up around me when I walk through the packhouse, that careful absence where people stop talking just a second too late or pretend they were never looking, that’s harder to brace against.
I notice it first in the corridors.
Voices drift easily until I round a corner, and then they taper off, not abruptly enough to be rude, not smoothly enough to feel natural, and I walk through the aftermath of conversations that weren’t meant for me. I catch fragments anyway, low and careless, never cruel but never kind either.
“That’s her.”
“The one he marked.”
