Amara left the office with a lightness she refused to question, her steps quicker than usual as she moved through the evening crowd. The city outside the building was still alive with its usual chaos, horns sounding somewhere in the distance, voices overlapping along the sidewalks, and people weaving around one another without paying much attention to who passed beside them. She allowed herself to disappear into the movement for a while, letting the weight of work slip to the back of her mind as she turned the corner toward the quieter stretch of street where she had parked her car.
That was when she noticed something moving near the edge of the walkway.
At first, she barely registered it. It was tucked near a trash can, just beyond the reach of the nearest streetlamp, and from a distanc
