The thing Lachlan hated the most was the quiet.
Not silence…there was still movement, still noise, still the low churn of a place that never fully slept…but the sound had thinned.
Conversations didn't linger the way they used to. Footsteps passed without the usual rhythm of recognition. Even the air felt less occupied, as if something essential had stepped out and taken the warmth with it.
It had been four days.
Four days since Sera hadn't come back.
At first, it hadn't seemed wrong. She wandered. Everyone knew that.
She slipped through cracks, vanished into corners of the place like she'd always known how to move between moments. She'd done it before—gone quiet for a few hours, half a day at most—and then reappeared with that faint smile and a look in her eyes that said you worried for nothing.
But this wasn't that.
This was absence with weight.
