Love doesn't break all at once. It fractures quietly, like ice under a steady, invisible weight.
For Joie and Alliana, the dissolution didn't start with a scream or a slammed door. it started with the clock. Joie began coming home later, the 9:15 PM train replaced by black SUVs that dropped her off in the dead of night. Alliana started waking up alone, the space beside her in bed cold enough to suggest Joie had been gone for hours.
The messages shortened from paragraphs of shared jokes to one-word check-ins. "Late tonight." "Don't wait up.""Okay."
The apartment still smelled like Alliana's coffee and the fresh detergent on the sheets, but a new scent lived there now—something clinical, metallic, and cold.
Joie never talked about the work. She stayed a ghost in her own home. But Alliana was a marketer; her entire career was built on reading what people didn't say. She saw the truth in Joie's hands.
She saw the way Joie's fingers would hover an inch above Alliana's shoulder, hesitating, as if she were afraid her touch might leave a bruise or a stain. She saw Joie spend ten minutes at the sink, scrubbing her cuticles until the skin turned a raw, angry red—washing away ghosts that soap couldn't reach.
One Tuesday, the rain was a dull roar against the window. Joie was leaning against the kitchen sink, her head bowed, her shoulders slumped as if gravity had tripled in the last hour.
"You don't look at me the same," Alliana said. Her voice was barely a whisper, yet it cut through the sound of the rain like a blade.
Joie didn't turn around. She couldn't. If she looked at Alliana, she'd see the "Light" she was actively extinguishing. "It's stress, Alliana. The finals are coming up. The hospital rotations are brutal."
"Stress makes you tired, Joie," Alliana countered, stepping into the kitchen. Her bare feet were silent on the cold tile. "Stress doesn't hollow out a person's eyes. Stress doesn't make you flinch when I try to hug you."
Alliana reached out, her hand gently turning Joie's face toward her. The light from the stove hood was unforgiving. It showed the dark circles under Joie's eyes and the new, hard line of her jaw.
"Where did you go?" Alliana asked, her eyes searching Joie's. "The girl I met on the train—where is she?"
Joie felt a surge of agony in her chest. She wanted to tell her. She wanted to say: I am in a basement. I am mapping nerves so I can cause pain. I am paying for my life with the lives of others. But she remembered Stephen's grip on her chin at the Blue Marlin. She remembered the threat: If she finds out what we are, she becomes a witness.
"She's busy," Joie said, her voice dropping into a flat, professional monotone that made Alliana flinch. "She's trying to build a future for us. Why can't that be enough?"
"Because I don't want a future with a stranger!" Alliana's voice finally broke, a jagged sob escaping her throat.
Joie turned back to the sink, her hands gripping the porcelain until her knuckles turned white. She let the silence stretch, cold and wide, until Alliana finally walked out of the room.
Joie didn't follow her. She couldn't. She just stood in the dark, wondering how much more of herself she would have to cut away before there was nothing left for Alliana to love.