Callie’s POV
The drive back felt shorter than it should have—but not because the distance had changed. It was because I wasn’t the same person who had traveled it just a few hours earlier.
I sat in silence, staring out the window, my forehead lightly resting against the cold glass, letting the streetlights blur into streaks of color before my eyes.
But it wasn’t the view that kept me still.
It was the noise.
Not entirely external.
It was as if the world had become too… present.
I could hear the murmur of a television several houses away, a muffled argument filtering through walls that no longer felt like real barriers, the creak of a door opening somewhere nearby. Even the car engine had layers I had never noticed before—vibrations, tiny misalignments, a mechanical breathing that fe
