The silence in the days after The Confrontation was a new, leaden thing. It wasn't the tense, rule-bound quiet we'd imposed before, but the heavy, hollow silence that settles in the wake of an explosion. The landscape of our lives was permanently altered. The bedrock friendship between Derek and Marcus was now a treacherous fault line, and every interaction between Derek and me felt like we were navigating its tremors.
We didn’t discuss it. Words felt too flimsy to bridge the chasm of what had been lost. Derek vanished into a vortex of blueprints, liquor orders, and contractor meetings for the bar expansion. I buried myself in the dizzying details of a biotech firm’s “Winter Genome Gala,” losing myself in spreadsheets for ice sculptures shaped like DNA helices. Our communication was reduc
