CLAIRE
I lost him again.
Not in the typical sense of the phrase. He didn’t leave me. He didn’t pack his belongings or vanish or stroll down a corridor without glancing back. Eros Asante was physically there in the penthouse every night, arriving at his usual hour, checking on Chloe at his regular intervals, occupying the same spaces and sharing the same air. But the man who had sat on the hallway floor with me, sharing the story of his worst night, the man whose feet had brushed against mine, whose hand had reached toward my jaw, and whose eyes had held something fragile and genuine, that man was no longer present.
He was replaced overnight by a version I recognized from my first week. The Puck. The fortress. The enforcer of the forty-seven rules, but now those rules felt less like a f
