I didn’t float up to my apartment so much as drift, like a leaf that had finally stopped fighting the river. The hallway smelled like laundry and last night’s takeout, mundanity wrapping around the edges of me while the center still burned with him. I locked the door, leaned my back against it, and let the silence arrive. Not the empty kind. The full kind. The kind that makes your pulse sound like a clock.
My coat still held the shadow of his hands. My hair still remembered his fingers. The curve of my wrists wore faint silk kisses that weren’t marks but felt like signatures. I stood there breathing, counting, feeling the slow tilt of the room back toward gravity. Then I laughed—soft, stunned, a private sound that belonged to the woman who had said yes and not once thought of running.
“H
