ログインNadia's POV"Can you start tomorrow?"I stared at the woman behind the counter. "Tomorrow?""Our girl left yesterday without a word, and I've got a breakfast crowd coming in at seven." She wiped her hands on her apron and looked me over. "Have you worked in a café before?""I worked at a bookshop for a year. And I can carry things."She laughed. "That's all I need. Carrying things and not crying when someone shouts at you. Can you do that?"I thought about the last few months. "I think I can manage it.""Good. I'm Lauren. Seven o'clock. Wear black trousers."I walked out of the café ten minutes later with a job I hadn't planned on. I'd only stopped because of the hiring sign in the window and because my feet were tired. I stood on the pavement outside and almost smiled. It was small and ordinary and mine.---The next morning was chaos, and I loved it.Orders came faster than I could write them down. A man complained that his latte was too hot, and another complained that his was too
Nadia's POVI got there early.Not because I thought arriving early would help my case — I wasn't sure anything would help my case — but because arriving early felt like the kind of thing a person did when they were trying to demonstrate that they took something seriously, and I needed someone in that building to see that I took this seriously.The campus looked exactly the same.That was the first thing that hit me when I came through the main gate — the same paths, the same buildings, the same clusters of students moving between them with the unhurried energy of people who had nowhere urgent to be and knew it. I'd been part of that once. Three months ago, maybe less, I'd walked through this gate with a bag on my shoulder and a lecture to get to and the specific mild stress of someone whose life was full of things that mattered in the small manageable way of normal life.I walked through it now and felt like someone wearing a costume of their old self.The administrative office was o
Kane's POVThe house was quiet.Not the way it was quiet at two in the morning when everyone had gone to sleep, not the way it was quiet when Kane was working and the staff had learned not to interrupt. A different kind of quiet. The kind that came from a specific absence rather than a general stillness.He went back to the study.Sat down.Didn't pick up his phone. Didn't open the files on the desk. Didn't do any of the things that were waiting to be done, that had been waiting for days while everything else had demanded priority. He just sat and looked at the desk and let the quiet be what it was.Lev appeared in the doorway eventually. Kane didn't look up.They stayed like that for a moment — Kane at the desk, Lev in the doorway, the house around them doing its quiet thing."Make sure she got home," Kane said.A pause. "She did," Lev said.Kane nodded once. Looked at the desk.Lev stayed in the doorway for another moment, and Kane could feel him deciding whether to say something, r
Nadia's POVThe cab dropped me at the end of the street.I'd called it from the corner two blocks from Kane's house, standing under a streetlight with my bag at my feet and my face still damp from everything I hadn't been able to stop in the corridor, and the driver had looked at me once in the mirror when I got in and then looked at the road and didn't say anything, which was exactly what I needed from another human being at that moment.The street looked the same.I don't know why that surprised me — streets didn't change because the person who lived on them had been gone for weeks, the world didn't reorganize itself around individual absences — but it surprised me anyway, the specific unchanged-ness of it, the lamppost in the same place and the corner shop with the same sign and the building with the green door that I'd photographed from a car window what felt like a different lifetime ago.I stood outside my building for a moment.Then I went in.The lift was broken, which it had
Kane's POVLev came into the study and stood in the doorway and said, "She's packing."Kane looked up from the desk.Lev said nothing else. Just stood there, delivering information and waiting to see what it produced.Kane held his gaze for a moment. Then removed his gaze. He sat with it for a moment and then he stood and went upstairs.He knocked once.She opened the door with the bag already in her hand and they looked at each other and she looked exactly like someone who had made a decision and was past the point where the decision was still available for discussion — her eyes dry now, her jaw set, the bag held at her side with the specific grip of someone who intended to leave with it."Where are you going," he said."Home," she said.He looked at the bag. Then at her face. "Your apartment isn't safe.""I know," she said.He looked at her. "Then—""I don't care," she said. "I want to go home.""Nadia—""I want to go home, Kane." Her voice had something in it now, something that ha
Nadia's POV"Are you okay?"Kane asked it the moment we were inside, before Lev had even closed the door behind us, and I looked at him and nodded because nodding was something I could manage right now without anything coming apart.He looked at me for a moment. Not the quick assessing look — the longer one, the one that went past the surface and looked at what was underneath, and I held it for exactly as long as I could before looking at the floor."Are you hungry?" he said."No," I said. "I'm going to freshen up."He held my gaze for another second. I could feel him wanting to say something else, wanting to ask something else, and I appreciated that he didn't because I didn't have the answers yet and giving him half answers felt worse than giving him none."Okay," he said quietly.I went upstairs.---The room was exactly as I'd left it.That was the first thing that hit me — it was exactly as I'd left it, nothing moved, nothing changed, my things where I'd put them, the book on the
Nadia's POV---Nobody spoke in the car.Lev drove. Kane sat beside me in the backseat, jaw set, one hand pressed against his side in a way that told me the wound was screaming even if his face wasn't. I watched him do it and said nothing because I had already said everything there was to say and n
Nadia's POV I don't know how long we sat like that. Him in the chair, me on the couch with my face in my hands, the apartment sitting in a silence that had too many things moving underneath it. I was running calculations I didn't want to be running — exits, options, how fast I could get to my pho
Final Nadia's POV I didn't hear everything. But I heard enough. I set the last of my supplies down slowly and watched him end the call and turn toward me with that look — the one that had shifted somewhere between the beginning of the call and the end of it. Like I had changed categories withou
Nadia's POV --- He was not a good patient. Not in the dramatic, thrashing way — Kane didn't move an inch he hadn't calculated first. But there was a stillness to him that wasn't cooperation. It was tolerance. Like he was enduring me rather than accepting help, which was a distinction I felt ever







