THE SILENCE AFTER THE SCREAM

CHAPTER SIX — A Tense Dinner

I didn’t plan on seeing them again so soon. After the strange, fragmented encounter with Sophia the night before, I’d told myself I needed distance — a little time to stop feeling like I was standing in the middle of their unraveling. But the next evening, Marcus invited me to dinner in that casual, insistent way he used whenever he wanted to pretend everything was fine.

“Just something simple,” he said over the phone. “Sophia’s feeling better today. Join us.”

The phrasing caught me. Feeling better today, as if wellness had become an intermittent visitor rather than a constant state. Still, I said yes.

When I arrived, the loft was brighter than it had been the day before. Marcus had lit candles around the kitchen, their flames trembling in the breeze that slipped through the cracked window. The storm hadn’t broken yet, but its breath was everywhere — pushing against the glass, whispering through the vents, unsettling loose papers on the counter.

Sophia stood at the stove, stirring something in a pot. She looked composed on the surface, but too still beneath it. Like someone concentrating very hard on passing for normal.

Marcus greeted me with forced cheer, the kind that tightens around the edges. “Wine’s on the table. Help yourself.”

I did, though the glass felt heavy in my hand. Sophia glanced over her shoulder and offered me a faint smile — polite, but distant, like she was trying to remember who I was and where I fit into the arrangement of her life. I asked if she needed help. She shook her head.

Marcus lowered his voice once Sophia turned away.

“She’s better today,” he repeated, as if saying it enough times might make it true.

I nodded, not trusting myself to comment.

We sat down shortly after. The meal smelled good, but none of us seemed ready to take the first bite. Marcus filled the silence with small talk — work updates, a story about a neighbour’s new dog, some joke about the wind sounding like a haunted kettle. His words layered the table like a chessboard of distractions.

Sophia barely touched her food. She kept her hands in her lap, fingers curled into one another, knuckles white. Her eyes drifted to the far corner of the room again and again, as if pulled by a suggestion of movement none of us could see.

Just when I thought Marcus might give up and let the evening collapse into whatever silence Sophia was holding onto, she spoke.

It startled both of us.

“I had another dream,” she murmured.

Her voice sounded thin, stretched, like something brittle being unrolled.

Marcus set down his fork. “A dream?”

She nodded, eyes fixed somewhere just past his shoulder.

“I was standing in the study,” she said. “Only it wasn’t mine. Or maybe it was. The walls kept shifting.” Her breath shuddered, but she kept going. “There was someone in the room with me. I couldn’t see them. The lights weren’t working. Everything felt… wrong.”

Marcus’s hand closed around his wine glass. “Sophia, we talked about—”

“No,” she cut in — soft, but firm enough to stop him. “I know it sounds strange. I know I haven’t been myself. But it didn’t feel like a dream. It felt like remembering something I shouldn’t remember.”

I felt a chill crawl up my spine.

Marcus looked at me — a quick flicker of worry, the kind that lasts only a heartbeat but says everything.

“What do you think it means?” he asked her gently.

Sophia picked up her fork, then set it back down again. “I think something happened,” she whispered. “Something important. And I can’t… reach it.”

She rubbed her temples with trembling fingers, as if trying to massage clarity into place.

“It’s like pieces of me are missing,” she said. “Like someone else is carrying them.”

The room fell silent. The storm wind pressed harder against the windows, making the glass buzz faintly in its frame. The candles flickered, shadows swaying across the table like uneasy witnesses.

Marcus reached across and took her hand. She let him, but she didn’t look at him.

“We’ll figure this out,” he said. “I promise.”

Promises are strange things. They sound like anchors, but often they’re just thin lines tossed into dark water.

Sophia withdrew her hand gently. “We can’t figure out something if I can’t remember what it is,” she said. “Or what I’m afraid of.”

Marcus flinched — tiny, but visible.

I wanted to speak, to break the tension, to say anything that might help, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching something collapse in slow motion. Something internal and silent and irreversible.

The three of us sat there in the candlelight, pretending to eat, pretending to be the versions of ourselves that had existed only weeks earlier.

And all the while, the storm outside grew stronger.

If I had known then how little time we had left —

how close we were to the night that would end everything —

I think I would have stayed at that table longer.

Maybe I would have listened harder.

Asked different questions.

Paid attention to the things Sophia wasn’t saying.

But hindsight is always fluent in clarity.

Living, unfortunately, never is.