The first thing I noticed when I woke up was the silence.
Not the peaceful kind. The heavy kind. The kind that sat between two people who had too much left unsaid.
I blinked against the morning light filtering through the blinds, my head still foggy from the whiskey and the weight of last night’s decisions. I had left Sarah’s card where I knew Grachelle would see it. I had given her just enough rope, just enough doubt, to see what she would do with it.
And she had seen it.
I had felt her stillness in bed beside me when I slid under the covers late last night. The tension in her body. The way her breathing had changed. She had been awake. Processing. Turning it over in her mind.
Now, as I sat up, she was nowhere to be seen.
A flicker of guilt tugged at me, but I pushed it aside. I had
