Eugene's POV
By five o'clock in the afternoon, the suffocating silence of the house had transformed into a completely different kind of pressure. The clean, logical boundary of my study no longer felt like a sanctuary. It felt like a trap. The memory of our conversation over lunch—the raw, unexpected vulnerability in Flora’s voice when she spoke about her father, the quiet intensity in her eyes when she asked why I had chosen to stay single—had completely bypassed my defenses. I hadn't just let her into my office; I had let her glimpse the hollow spaces inside me that I had spent years pretending didn't exist.
Knowing Emily would be walking through the front door in exactly two hours, I couldn't sit still any longer. The numbers on my spreadsheet were just meaningless shapes blurry with
