Big Girl

After that day, Aurora learned how to disappear without leaving. She stopped wandering into Ethan’s meetings. Stopped perching beside him during briefings, and stopped offering those quiet, unsettling observations that once made grown men pause and rethink. When Ethan was present, she spoke only when spoken to, and even then, carefully, as if every word cost something.

He told himself it was for the best. Silence was safer than the look in her eyes, the one that felt too old, too wounded for a