I wake to the quiet first. Not the good kind—not the peaceful, morning-light-through-the-windows kind of quiet. It’s the kind that presses against my ears like a weight, the heavy, airless silence of a room that has suddenly lost its pulse.
She is gone.
The space beside me is cold. I reach out a hand, my fingers brushing the linen, finding it smoothed with a care that feels deliberate, almost clinical. Serenity never leaves things messy when she’s decided something. She doesn’t leave behind tangled sheets or the lingering scent of her skin if she can help it. She erases herself. That should have been my warning last night, even when her breath was ragged against my neck and her hands were shaking too badly to hide the distance she was already building. I should have felt the departure in
