Things went back to normal after that night.
Or at least, the kind of normal that feels a little hollow at the edges... when you still wake up beside someone you love but the ghosts of everything else hang around the corners of your mind.
Kael was still Kael... steady, deliberate, always half somewhere else. He'd been buried in work, in meetings, in that cold empire he was trying to control before it devoured him. I understood, or at least I told myself I did. We saw each other when we could, and when he was around, it was as if the world smoothed itself out just enough for me to breathe again.
But the quiet hours between those visits… those belonged to the ache.
To the absence.
To Sarah.
