The elevator descended too smoothly for what had just happened inside it.
No jolt. No shudder. No cinematic mercy in the machinery.
Just the quiet drop of polished weight through a building that had already resumed pretending nothing inside it had changed.
I stood alone in the mirrored box with my breathing held in the wrong places.
My pulse was steady.
That was the strange part.
My hand hurt. My shoulder still remembered the shape of his grip. My throat felt scraped clean by the sentence I had finally forced through it.
But my pulse was steady.
As if some part of my body had been waiting so long for that moment that, now it had come and gone, there was nothing left to panic about.
Only aftermath.
When the doors opened to the lobby, the light felt too bright.
The receptionist di
