THE SILENCE AFTER THE SCREAM

CHAPTER THREE — Delivery at the Loft

I should have left after five minutes. That was my intention. I had errands to run, emails to answer, a life outside their orbit that I occasionally attempted to maintain. But something in Marcus’s expression kept me rooted—some combination of exhaustion and fear, softened by a denial he didn’t dare admit.

He wandered to the window, where Victoria Park stretched out in muted greens beneath the overcast sky. The trees were beginning to turn, edges crisping into amber and rust. He watched the scene like a man waiting for a sign.

“She’s been… different,” he said without turning around. “Not in a dramatic way, nothing you’d call alarming. It’s more…” He searched for the right words, shoulders rising and falling. “Like she’s drifting. Like she’s halfway in a dream she doesn’t want to wake from.”

I leaned against the counter. “Is it the deadline?”

“Maybe.” He sounded unconvinced. “Or maybe it’s the book she’s writing. She won’t let me read a word of it. Not even her notes.” A pause. “Especially not her notes.”

He shifted, finally facing me. His eyes were tired—good eyes usually, warm and bright, but that day they were shadowed. “Last night I woke up and she was just standing in the hallway. Completely still. No lights on. She didn’t even look at me when I called her name.”

A pulse of cold slid down my spine, though I tried to dismiss it.

“Stress does strange things to people,” I offered.

Marcus gave a humorless laugh. “I know. But this feels… different. She’s been writing lines on scraps of paper. Single sentences. Then she tears them up like she’s scared of them.”

“What kind of sentences?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know. I never get to them before she destroys them.”

The radiator sighed in the corner. The loft felt suspended in a kind of pre-storm stillness, the air thick and unmoving. If I had been braver—or wiser—I might have pressed him. Asked the questions that now keep me awake at night. But I didn’t. I told myself it wasn’t my place, and Marcus didn’t argue.

Eventually I left, stepping out into a wind that was growing sharper by the hour. I remember looking back at the loft windows, wondering if Sophia was behind one of them, watching.

It was the last time I saw the three of us—Sophia, Marcus, and myself—standing on the same side of the line.

Everything after that began to split.