Something blooming

NOLAN POV

I didn’t sleep that night either.

Ben had gone quiet after we talked. Not the kind of quiet that begs for space—hers was the silence that came after a war. I’d seen it before, in myself. After the funeral. After the last fight with my father. After I realized I’d never really known the woman I was supposed to marry.

But sitting next to her now, the city below us, her hands wrapped around a chipped mug of rooibos tea—I didn’t feel that same emptiness. I felt…raw. Awake. Like the earth had shifted beneath us and neither of us knew what to call this new terrain.

She hadn’t cried. That scared me more than if she had.

I wanted to say something, anything, but I knew better than to rush her grief. Ben had always carried pain like it was part of her bones—hidden, quiet, indestructible. She made suffering look graceful, which made it easy for people to forget she was still breaking beneath the surface.

I hadn’t forgotten.

Not this time.

She fell asleep on the couch just before dawn,