The next morning, Ronda woke with less chaos in her chest.
Not peace.
That would have been too generous.
But less chaos.
The difference mattered.
For days, everything inside her had felt jagged; anger, longing, fear, pride, all colliding in ways that left her exhausted before each morning properly began. But sometime in the night, after writing those lines in her notebook and staring too long at the ceiling fan, something had shifted.
Not because she had found an answer.
Because she had finally stopped asking herself to solve everything at once.
She did not need to decide the rest of her life before breakfast.
She did not need to know exactly where Karl belonged in her future before boarding a bus.
She did not need to turn feeling into a verdict every time it breathed near her.
