DAMIEN
.
.
Years.
It had been years since I last saw Leila. Years measured in the silence of the penthouse, in the dull ache in my chest, in the ghosts that haunted the corners of my life.
Years since I’d felt anything other than the controlled detachment that was my default state, and since Mabel last had a life.
I sat in my art room, the city lights spread out below me like a cold, distant constellation, the silence of the space pressing in, a constant reminder of the emptiness she left behind.
But then.
The Veridian show.
Elena had been invited.
She was a model there, one of the faces everyone did see on billboards, in magazines, her beauty a public commodity.
A world away from the shadows I inhabited.
I went with her, an obligation, a public appearance, the place ha
