POV: Iris Hartwell
Forty-eight hours of silence.
Iris had counted them in her guest suite,measured time in the absence of conversation, in the careful avoidance of shared spaces, in the precision of their movements around each other like two objects in orbit, maintaining distance through calculated trajectory.
She'd taken meals in her room. Had left the penthouse only to visit the foundation office, returning to the isolation of her suite before Julian could encounter her in any shared space. Had maintained the fiction that they were roommates who despised each other because that fiction was easier than acknowledging what had actually happened: she'd stayed despite believing he'd murdered her husband, and he'd refused to explain, and the refusal had calcified into something that felt like permanence.
On the third night, she woke gasping from a nightmare she couldn't remember.
