We avoid the conversation for three days.
Not because we don’t know it’s coming. Because we do.
It sits between us in small, ordinary moments. In the way Adam watches me hold an absence zone steady while stirring a pot with my free hand. In how I hesitate before stepping into another hollow place, measuring not just distance, but cost. In the silence that stretches a fraction too long after the work is done and there’s nothing immediate left to fix.
Survival has rhythm. You learn it quickly or you die.
This doesn’t have rhythm yet.
This is endurance pretending to be a plan.
The truth finally surfaces one night when the fire has burned down to embers and the world feels temporarily stable in the way it does right before something fundamental shifts. Adam is sitting with his back again
