The apartment was no longer quiet.
For weeks, silence had been their companion—comfortable, familiar. But now, Jalen filled it with questions. He asked them casually at first, dropping them into conversations like pebbles in a pond:
"Where do you go at night, Mira?""Why don't you smile anymore?""Why do you look so tired when I feel so alive?"
She dodged them with practiced ease, turning her words into veils. But veils wore thin. And behind Jalen's softened demeanor was a sharpness returning—a restless curiosity.
Mira knew the day would come when he wouldn't accept her evasions.
One afternoon, she returned home to find the apartment ransacked—not by thieves, but by Jalen.
He sat cross-legged on the floor, papers scattered around him: her receipts, her scribbled notes, even an empty vial she'd forgotten to discard.
"Mira," he said quietly, "what is this?"
Her heart stuttered. She forced her face into neutrality. "It's nothing. Trash."
But his hand trembled as he held up the vial. The faint shimmer of its residue caught the light.
"This isn't trash," he whispered. "It's… it's from the Exchange, isn't it?"
Mira's blood turned cold.
The Exchange. He had named it.
Mira's throat tightened. "You don't know what you're talking about."
But Jalen's eyes brimmed with something between fear and anger. "I'm not stupid. I've heard stories—about how they bottle emotions, about what it costs. And I've felt it, Mira. This happiness… it's not mine. It doesn't fit. It's like borrowed clothes, too big for me. And every time I look at you, I see the seams unraveling."
Mira couldn't breathe. He had pieced together too much.
She dropped to her knees beside him, clutching his hands. "Jalen, please. Don't—"
But he pulled away, his voice breaking. "Tell me the truth. What did you give up?"
The truth pressed against her ribs, desperate to break free. She wanted to scream it: that she had bartered away her laughter, her joy, her poetry, her wonder. That she had carved herself hollow just to see his eyes shine again.
But fear silenced her. If he knew the cost, would he resent her for it? Would he crumble beneath the weight of what she had sacrificed?
She shook her head, forcing a lie through trembling lips. "It doesn't matter. You're better now. That's all that matters."
Jalen stared at her, his face pale, his eyes shadowed with something close to grief.
"Maybe it doesn't matter to you anymore," he whispered. "But it matters to me."
That night, Mira couldn't sleep. She paced the apartment in silence, her hands trembling as though the walls themselves were closing in.
The Exchange had warned her: The more you give, the more they will notice.
And now, Jalen had noticed.
The thought of losing him—whether to his depression or to the truth—twisted inside her like a blade. She couldn't bear either.
But the path forward narrowed. She needed more happiness for him, before suspicion became certainty. If she could keep him buoyed, keep him bright, maybe he would stop searching.
Her own unraveling didn't matter.
Only his survival did.
Two days later, when Jalen returned from a walk, Mira was gone.
He found only a note on the table, written in her careful hand:
Don't follow me. Trust me.
But Jalen's heart sank as he read it. Because trust was the very thing slipping through his fingers.
And for the first time since his darkness had lifted, he felt the old shadows stirring.