By the time Willow reached her apartment, exhaustion had settled into her body with a heaviness that felt deeper than simple fatigue. The long flight, the return across time zones, and the slow reentry into a life she had not truly escaped pressed inward from every direction. Her muscles felt dulled and unresponsive, and her thoughts refused to stay still long enough to form anything clear. Ever since she had seen Zane again her heartbeat had carried that same uneven rhythm beneath her ribs, a restless stutter that made it impossible to feel steady inside her own skin.
The apartment greeted her with silence that felt too sharp to be comforting. It was not the quiet of rest but the charged kind that seemed to hum faintly against the walls, vibrating through the air like stillness before a storm. The familiar outlines of the furniture looked slightly distant, as if she had stepped into a place she remembered rather than one she lived in.
