SKY’S POV
At the time, I had no idea Amira was thinking about leaving the organization. All I knew was that something had changed. The silences on her end grew longer. The version of her voice I caught in passing hallway moments sounded thinner than it used to. Weeks later she’d tell me she’d already been considering walking away, back around this same stretch. At the time, all I had was the silence itself, and the growing sense that something on her end had changed too.
We weren’t supposed to be texting at all anymore. That made the silence easier to explain, but somehow harder to live with. I kept my phone in my pocket most nights instead of on the nightstand, like distance from the object itself might make the rule easier to keep.
I broke it once, a single line asking how she was h
