Distance became the new protocol. The apartment, once a shared command center, now felt partitioned. Kaelan worked from the den, door often closed, on calls with lawyers in Singapore and anxious board members in New York. Elara took over the sunlit dining room, spreading out the radical new “tree” spine schematics for The Aperture. The brace project with Liam in the living room was the DMZ the only place their orbits intentionally crossed.
It was during one of these structured sessions, with Liam painstakingly sanding a curved piece of the prototype, that the first crack in their careful separation appeared.
Liam looked up, his focus shifting from the carbon fiber to Elara’s face. “You’re quieter,” he observed, his voice still slow but piercingly perceptive. “Since Iceland.”
Her hand, h
