جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 30

EVANThe archive feels different when you’re no longer expected. That’s the first thing I notice as I step through the glass doors: the way the air resists me, subtle but unmistakable, like the building has already adjusted to my absence. The guard at the entrance barely looks up this time. No nod of recognition. No polite flicker of familiarity. Just a practiced wave-through, like I’m one more interchangeable body moving through a system that doesn’t need to remember names. I tell myself that’s fine. I don’t need the archive to remember me. I only need one person to.The main reading room hums softly with controlled quiet—pages turning, keyboards tapping, the distant whisper of a scanner pulling history into a machine that pretends neutrality. Morning light slants through tall windows, dust motes drifting lazily in the sun. Everything looks the same. That, someh

EVANThe corridor outside the archive smells faintly of disinfectant and old stone. I keep walking anyway. Not because I feel brave—because if I stop moving, I’ll have to admit what I just heard in that glass room with the older archivist’s winter-sky eyes: that following Livia might not be love or loyalty or even obsession. It might be compliance.The municipal building breathes around me the way it always does—pipes clicking somewhere behind plaster, distant voices upstairs, the soft whir of an elevator that never quite sounds modern. My footsteps echo too clearly for a place full of people, and I hate the way my body keeps waiting for a second set of footsteps to match mine.There’s no man in a dark suit near the fire extinguisher today. Or maybe there is, and I’ve simply stopped believing I’m allowed to see him unless he wants to be seen.I reach the stairwell and pause with my hand on the rail, staring down as if the stairs themselves are a decision. The hospital is across town.

EVANThe drawer sticks. Not dramatically. Not enough to announce itself as a secret. Just enough resistance to register as wrong. I notice it because everything else in the apartment opens cleanly. Leah likes clean lines. Clean motion. Cabinets that glide, drawers that don’t catch. She once replaced an entire dresser because one track warped in the humidity and made a sound she didn’t like. I don’t want to fight furniture, she’d said, half joking, half serious.So when the bottom drawer in her study hesitates under my hand, my body reacts before my mind does. I stop. The apartment is quiet in that hollow way that only happens late at night—after the city has decided it’s done performing. The lights are low. Leah is asleep in the bedroom, the hospital bracelet still looped around her wrist because neither of us has had the energy to cut it off yet. I tell mysel

EVANI don’t tell Leah about the photo. That’s the first decision I make that morning, and it tastes like the same old poison—protective, careful, cowardly. She’s still asleep when I slip out of the apartment, hospital bracelet catching the early light when she shifts. Her face is softer in sleep, as if her body is trying to give her one last mercy before the day starts asking things of her again. I leave a note on the table anyway. Not dramatic. Not romantic. Practical.Back soon. Coffee + pastry. Don’t panic if you wake up alone. I’m right nearby. —EI hate the fact that I’ve started writing notes like I’m managing an emergency, because that’s what this has become. A life where leaving a room requires mitigation.The streets smell like espresso and exhaust and something sweet baking in a place I can’t see.

EVANNight in Rome doesn’t arrive like it does at home. It doesn’t dim. It doesn’t soften. It drops. One moment the city is still loud with late dinners and scooters and tourists who don’t know when to stop filming each other. The next, the streets narrow into shadow, and the sound changes pitch—less laughter, more footsteps, more doors closing, more engines idling too long.Hospitals have their own version of night. Not darkness—routine. The lights stay the same. The hallways stay bright. The beeping becomes the soundtrack you stop noticing until it changes and your entire body reacts before your mind catches up.Leah was discharged from the hospital this afternoon with a stack of printed instructions that look harmless until you read them like a sentence. Monitor symptoms. Avoid stressors. Maintain routine. Report changes.Changes. Everything is change. The hospital didn’t call it a cure. They didn’t even call it a plan. They called it management. They called it observation. They ca