I fight it. I keep fighting it. I say her name into the dark—Sophia, Sophia, Sophia—trying to hold the gold of her hair in my mind before the murk takes it, before Valeria takes that too?—
The ceiling crack blurs.
Branches once.
Stops short.
I close my eyes, my heartbeat quietening, until there’s only one clear thought left through the haze…
I hope I die.
8
SOPHIA
It’s two in the morning, and I lie on the futon for a moment, staring at the ceiling. The last few days have been wrong.
Not wrong like before—not the wrong of not-knowing, of counting days and watching the gate and waiting for flowers that don't come. This is a different wrong. Smaller and closer and entirely of our own making.
Ian’s one-hour runs have changed to two hours every morning. Making breakfast is no longer a way to carry conversation to take my mind off everything, but rather gives him somewhere to put his eyes that isn't me.
Yesterday, he came home with four bags of groceries from a store forty minutes away when there's one at the end of the road. The day before that he was asleep—or performing sleep—by eight p.m.
I let him do it, construct these small, careful distances, and I don't call him on any of them because I don't knowwhat I would say if I did.I know you're avoiding me. I'm doing it, too, just from a different direction.
The kiss lives in the kitchen. That's where I feel it most—standing at the counter where his hands were, where the muffin tray hit the tile, where I saiddon't apologize, I kissed you backand meant it and have been living with meaning it ever since.
I go in there every morning and make coffee and sit at the table, and the room holds what happened in it the way rooms do, and Ian comes in from his two-hour run and makes eggs and talks about something that requires no emotional navigation, and I let him.
We eat. We talk. We move through the day side by side with the thing between us that neither of us is touching.
I love Reth. That hasn't changed. If anything, it's sharper, the way things get sharp when you've done something that clarifies what matters. But loving him completely hasn't stopped whatever this is with Ian from existing, and I don't know what to do with that, and the not-knowing sits in the house alongside everything else.
I’m still staring up at the ceiling when the silence changes. It’s not a sound, exactly. More like a shift in the air. Something moving through the walls that my body registers before my mind catches up. Something’s wrong, a different kind of wrong it’s been the last few days.
I stand, open my door, and peer down the dark hallway. Ian's door is open. That’s what’s wrong. Ian sleeps with his door closed—always, without exception, a security habit so ingrained it's become architectural. I have never once seen it open at night.
I stand in the hallway and look at the open door and theempty room beyond it and feel the thing in my chest that I've been managing shift into something sharper, colder.
Ian’s in the kitchen standing by the window with his back to me, phone in his hand, still dressed. Not just-got-up dressed. Still-in-yesterday's-clothes dressed. He hasn't slept.
"Ian. What’s going on?"
He turns. The expression on his face—the specific rearrangement that happens when he registers it's me—tells me everything before he says a word. He was expecting someone else, and I walked in before he was ready for me, the performance not assembled yet.
"Hey." Too casual. "What are you doing up?"
"Question is what areyoudoing up."
He glances toward the hallway. A flicker of something, and then it’s gone. "Couldn't sleep. Go back to bed."
"You're still dressed."
"I was—I got up early. Sophia, go back?—"
"What's happening?"
It isn't a question. He hears that. He looks at me, and there’s a long moment where something moves behind his eyes, and then he turns back to the window.
