He lowered his head and murmured something against her hair. She nodded, soft as a prayer. That focus. That patience. That version of him—
I had never truly possessed it. Perhaps I had never even glimpsed it.
They disappeared into the waiting car. The engine purred to life. Headlights flared like the eyes of some predatory beast, then vanished into the curtain of rain.
He did not look back. Not once.
I stood there until the cold had burrowed so deep into my marrow that I could no longer feel my fingers. Only then did I realize the truth that had been waiting for me all along:
I had nowhere to go.
In the end, I still entered that house.
Inside, warmth pressed against my skin—suffocating, almost obscene in its comfort. I followed the sound of voices down the corridor, arriving just in time to hear him speaking through a door left carelessly ajar.
"You shouldn't have let yourself get soaked like that."
"I knew you would come," Silvia replied, her voice a silk thread in the darkness. "You always come."
I pushed the door open.
The air crystallized in that single second.