The apartment was very quiet after he left.
Mia stood in the kitchen for a long time without doing anything in particular — one hand resting on the counter, the other holding her phone loosely at her side. The overhead light was on, casting the room in its familiar yellow wash, and the refrigerator hummed its low indifferent note, and the city went on outside the window the way it always did, without any awareness that something inside this small apartment had shifted in a way that could not be shifted back.
She set the phone face-down on the counter.
Catherine Voss.
She had a name now. A real name, attached to a real person — not the abstract shadow of betrayal she had been living alongside for five years, not the shapeless idea of abandonment she had built her understanding of the p
