The house was too quiet.
Not the kind of quiet that soothed you, but the heavy, suffocating kind that pressed against my ribs and reminded me of everything I had lost.
I stood by the balcony doors of my dorm room, staring at the dull lights of campus flickering in the distance. Summer had ended, classes had begun, and life had demanded I get up every morning, brush my teeth, sit through lectures, and pretend like my heart wasn’t bleeding out in the silence between one breath and the next.
Weeks. That’s how long it had been since the betrayal. Since that night I woke up in a stranger’s bed with the world tilted against me. Since the moment Adrian’s eyes—once a storm I wanted to drown in—looked at me like I was poison.
Even now, the memory made my stomach clench.
And yet, in the quiet o
