All Chapters of When Best Friends Kiss: Chapter 201

The morning after the door clicked shut, the silence in the house didn’t feel like a vacuum; it felt like a workspace.I spent the first hour doing things that had no digital footprint. I watered the few surviving herbs on the windowsill and moved a stack of mail—unopened demands for comments, mostly—straight into the recycling bin without looking at the return addresses.By 10:00 AM, the "fortress" felt a little too quiet. I grabbed my keys and drove to a local nursery three towns over, a place where no one knew my face or cared about the metadata of my life.The nursery smelled of damp earth and crushed cedar. I found the succulents in a greenhouse at the back. I chose one that looked particularly defiant—a Haworthia with white-striped leaves like tiny, pointed teeth. It looked like it could survive a nuclear winter, or at least a news cycle.As I waited at the register, my phone buzzed in my pocket. A rhythmic, persistent vibration.Todd.I didn’t answer it in the store. I waited u