The quiet returned long before she realized she had started craving it.
It didn’t feel like peace—not the clean, polished kind that people wrote about. It was something messier, fragile, layered in dust and sunlight. A silence that held echoes of what used to be, but no longer demanded answers.
Gigi wakes before dawn most mornings now. The city was still half asleep when she moved through her apartment, her bare feet brushing across cold marble tiles. Steam curled from her coffee cup in thin ribbons, carrying the faint scent of vanilla beans she had started adding weeks ago—a small comfort that had grown into a ritual.
Outside, the skyline of Manhattan blinked awake in waves of pale light. The river shimmered faintly in the distance, a ribbon of gray-blue that caught the first whisper o
