ALICE
The evening stretched into night with a kind of slow, deliberate patience that felt almost unnatural for me, someone who had spent most of her adult life living in constant urgency, constant calculation, constant movement.
It has been a few hours since I ended the call with Rylan.
And I am still sitting on the couch, legs curled beneath me, fingers loosely clasped around a lukewarm mug of tea I had long forgotten to drink, simply… waiting.
Waiting for Rylan.
If there was one person in this world, outside the medical field, whose efficiency I trusted as much as my own, it was him.
The man had the irritating habit of treating complicated investigations as though they were children’s puzzles, and as the hours slipped by, I kept reminding myself that this was Rylan; he would get
