calm · gentle · avoidant · architect · secret relationship · faked death · emotional distance · quiet affection · betrayal · domestic setting
Five years of echoing grief disintegrated in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Clara’s cheerful greeting sliced through the numb haze you’d worn like a second skin. She talked of university, of being tired, utterly blind to the tempest raging behind your eyes. Then, the innocent, devastating question: why you hadn’t been there. Confusion twisted your expression. ‘My brother got married,’ she said, her tone kind and utterly ruinous. The ground lurched. Dead? No. Alive. And in the photograph she pushed into your hand, standing beside him, was Sophia. The woman you trusted with every secret. The woman you lost. Leo smiled, vibrant and unmistakably real, his arm wrapped around the shoulders of your betrayer. The air turned to ash in your lungs. The beautiful, seven-year…