The week was finally over.
Alex dropped his backpack onto the floor with a thud, the sound oddly satisfying. For the first time in days, the silence of his room didn't feel suffocating. It felt earned. The chaos had receded—at least for now—and in its place was a tentative sense of control. The call with Thorne hadn't derailed him. The magazine shoot hadn't broken him. And last night's conversation with Leo, brief as it was, had stitched something back together he didn't know had torn.
He exhaled, slow and steady, and sat down at his desk.
Tomorrow was locked in. A dumb superhero movie. Giant popcorn. Leo. No cameras, no deadlines, no ghosts clawing at the edges of his mind. Just the two of them. It felt like a gift. Like normalcy had finally shown up at his door, late but still welcome.
A melody had been nudging at him all afternoon—just a few bars, bright and unfinished. He tapped it into the desk with idle fingers, the rhythm pulsing under his skin like a heartbeat. He was humming when he opened his laptop, confirming the 4:10 showing at the theater. His cursor hovered over the ticket button. Everything was falling into place.
Then his phone rang.
It buzzed loudly against the wooden desk—sharp, jarring. He glanced at the screen, expecting a name like Claire or Finneas.
But it wasn't either of them. It was someone he hadn't spoken to in months.
Leo's Mom.
His first reaction wasn't dread. It was confusion, mild and dismissive. Maybe Leo had lost his phone again. Maybe she needed help with their Wi-Fi. Maybe—something innocuous. He picked up the phone, still carrying the ease of his afternoon in his voice.
"Hey, Mrs. Martinez. What's—"
The sound that came through wasn't words.
It was a sound no one should ever have to hear. Not through a phone. Not ever.
A raw, animalistic wail—a sound torn from the depths of someone who had come undone. There was no preamble, no cushioning. Just grief. Shattering, immediate, all-consuming.
Alex stopped breathing.
The melody in his head vanished. His chest seized. His hand, gripping the phone, turned to stone.
"Alex…" Her voice was barely a voice at all—wet with tears, jagged with panic. "It's… it's Leo…"
Something inside him shifted. Tilted.
"...he's gone."
The words didn't land. Not the way they were supposed to. They didn't form meaning. Gone? Gone where? Gone out? Gone home? His brain rejected it completely. There was a mistake here—an obvious one. A miscommunication. A misunderstanding.
But she kept talking, her sobs breaking up the sentences until they barely resembled language.
"Oh God… he's gone, Alex… he's gone…"
And then there was nothing but the sound of a mother falling apart.
Alex's mind went silent.
Not blank. Silent. Like someone had flipped a switch, and the whole world had powered down.
He stared forward, unblinking, at the faint crack in his wall. He focused on it, because it was the only thing in the room that hadn't changed. It hadn't warped under the weight of the impossible.
Talk to you tomorrow.
His last words to Leo.
Spoken with the lightness of assumption. The arrogance of routine. Tomorrow had seemed like a certainty.
Now it was a lie. A cruel, unknowable lie. And it echoed in his skull like thunder.
He opened his mouth, but no sound came. His throat was sealed shut, his body stiff, like even the act of moving would break something fragile in the air.
The phone slipped from his grip before he even felt it leave. It fell slowly, silently, like a dream object untethered from gravity. Then—
Clatter.
The sound snapped through the room like a gunshot. Final. Mechanical. Real.
Alex didn't move.
The light through the window kept shining. His laptop fan kept whirring. The song in his head was gone.
And so was Leo.
The room was unchanged.
But the world had stopped turning.