Chapter 81: A Faint Trail

The silence in my apartment was a physical entity, a thick, suffocating blanket woven from the threads of Marlee’s last look. It wasn’t anger, not the clean, hot fury I might have deserved. It was a shattered, hollowed-out disappointment that had carved a canyon between us, a space too wide to ever cross again. For three days, I had existed in that silence. The ghost of my confession played on a loop in my head: the tremor in my voice, the way the blood drained from her face, the quiet click...