Part 34
She felt it before she saw it.
A small break in the pattern — one unscheduled pulse in the network of pings and logins she watched each night.
Adrian had gone quiet online for exactly forty-three minutes.
Then, one message sent from an old address she thought she'd erased.
Aura's fingers hovered above the keyboard, breath held.
He was reaching out.
Not to her.
She traced the digital thread until it vanished into a journalist's archive domain.
Leah Ford.
The name stirred faint recognition — someone from before, back when Adrian's smiles were still unguarded.
The ache that followed wasn't anger.
It was the kind of grief that made her chest feel hollow.
He was still looking for safety in strangers, when she had built it right here for him.
She closed the monitoring window and tried to steady her hands.
He's scared, she told herself. That's all this is. Fear makes people run.
Her gaze drifted to the wall where she'd pinned clippings from his career — photographs, reviews, a concert wristband she'd found months ago.
Each one reminded her of why she started this: to protect the parts of him that fame would eventually destroy.
Still, something inside her trembled — the space between her control and his choices.
If he kept reaching outward, she feared the world around him was growing beyond her control, and the thought that he might no longer be safe tightened around her heart and she couldn't let that happen.
Aura stood, crossed the room, and wrote a single note in her ledger under Adrian — Security:
Re-establish connection. Restore trust.
She looked at the words for a long moment, then added a second line:
No confrontation. Gentle approach.
It wasn't about punishment.
It was about correction.
About bringing him back, softly, before he disappeared entirely.
As she closed the notebook, the city outside her window glowed with a thousand distant lights — each one a reminder of how easily he could be lost among them.
You don't need to run, she thought. You just need to remember who stayed.