Chapter 114: The Price of Lies

The silence in the apartment was a living entity. It breathed in the spaces between them, thick and suffocating. Since Nancy’s departure, Mario had moved through their shared home like a phantom, his body present but his soul elsewhere, lost in a desolate landscape of regret. Miley felt it in the way he avoided her gaze, in the monosyllabic answers that were walls against her concern, in the hollow echo of his footsteps on the hardwood floors. She had tried. She had offered him food he barely...