The next morning, Ronda woke with the memory of his voice still resting somewhere soft inside her.
Not loud enough to be called joy.
Not steady enough to be called peace.
Just there.
A quiet warmth under the ribs.
A dangerous kind of steadiness.
She lay still for a few seconds, staring at the ceiling fan above her bed as it dragged itself through another tired rotation. Outside, the neighborhood was already awake; buckets scraping concrete, a radio preaching too loudly, someone calling a child back from the road.
Ordinary sounds.
Safe sounds.
She clung to them.
Because the truth was, the night before had changed something.
Not in the dramatic way books liked to pretend change happened.
No kiss.
No promise.
No sudden miracle where all the wrongness around them disappeared beca
