Everything was quiet.
Not the held-breath quiet that came before something broke. Not the loaded silence of two people choosing which grenade to throw next. Just quiet. The ordinary, unremarkable quiet of a life that had decided, for once, to stop testing the people living it.
Rhys and I were solid. Not the fragile kind that shattered if someone looked at it wrong – we'd been that. Lived inside it for months, walking on glass, waiting for the next crisis to prove what we'd always feared. This was different. This was the kind of solid that comes from having been broken and choosing to rebuild anyway. Welded together by everything that should have torn us apart – his father, my mother, the campus, the cemetery, the word on the whiteboard, the letter on cream paper, the thirteen-year-old bo
