~ Hector ~
I knew Lily had been looking through stuff in my office, not because anything was moved but because when she left, she hugged herself walking across the garage, a small gesture most people wouldn’t notice.
I noticed, the same way I’d started noticing entirely too many things whenever she was concerned.
The drive home should have cleared my head, but instead, I spent most of it thinking about the expression on her face when she walked past me. It wasn’t curiosity and it wasn’t pity, it was understanding, and that was worse, because curiosity was easy to manage while understanding had a way of slipping straight through defences.
I unlocked my front door and immediately regretted being alone, and the realisation annoyed me, because for years I’d preferred it this way. The garag
