He was gone before she came downstairs the next morning.
Not physically gone. His car was still in the driveway. His coat was still by the front door. The faint smell of his coffee lingered in the kitchen the way it always did when he had been up since before sunrise. But Damian was nowhere in the house, and the silence he left behind was a different kind of silence than usual. Heavier. Deliberate.
Aurora stood in the kitchen in her robe and poured herself coffee and told herself it meant nothing.
By the second morning she had stopped telling herself that.
He was avoiding her. She knew it the way you know things you wish you did not know, quietly and completely, without needing anyone to say it out loud. He left early and came home late. When they did cross paths, briefly, in the hallw
