The panic he’d carried for days collapsed into grief so deep he couldn’t breathe. Clara hadn’t vanished, hadn’t been threatened, hadn’t been hiding. She had simply left, and he had refused to accept it for all this time.
Leo arrived and sat beside him without speaking, a steady presence in the midst of Adam’s unraveling. He hadn’t known about the breakup. The weight of truth finally settled into the space Adam had been desperately trying to fill.