Anastasia’s POV:
I slept for fourteen hours the first day.
Simone let herself in at some point and left food on my counter and took the sketch notebook off my couch and put it on my desk without waking me and when I finally got up, the apartment smelled like the soup she made when she thought someone needed looking after whether they asked for it or not.
I ate the soup standing at the counter and felt human for the first time in what seemed like a very long time.
The next few days were quieter than I expected. The news was full of the Meridian Group story, names dropping into public record one by one, companies unraveling, the kind of systemic collapse that looked inevitable in hindsight and impossible in the moment before it happened. I watched it from my couch with my sketch notebook
