Zara and Leo fell into a rhythm that felt like a private language. Work filled the days and bled into the nights, and in that steady grind a kind of trust began to stitch itself back together but not the noisy, dramatic kind, but the quiet, stubborn binding of hard work and shared purpose.
The borrowed office above the old bookstore smelled faintly of paper and lemon oil. Outside, the city went about its usual scraping and humming, but inside the room stacks of printouts and laptop screens made a different kind of noise: timestamps, red flags, lines of code. Leo moved with the efficiency of a man used to command. Zara moved with the focus of someone who’d chosen to build rather than break. Together they read each other’s cues without saying much, a glance answering a question, a hand sli
