I didn't see it coming. Not in the way that mattered. Not until the day it ended.
It started like any other morning: the city alive with muted sounds of traffic and distant sirens, sunlight struggling through the gray clouds. I had brewed coffee, carefully poured it into two mugs, and carried them to the balcony where Ethan waited, hands folded, staring at the horizon like the world itself had betrayed him.
"Morning," I said softly, placing the mug in front of him.
He didn't look at me. Didn't smile. That small hesitation, that quiet withdrawal, had been creeping in for weeks, but I had ignored it. I always ignored it.
"Morning," he said finally, flat, his fingers brushing mine without meeting my eyes.
Something inside me clenched. There it was—the distance, the silence, the invisible wall between us. I took a shaky breath. "Ethan… what's wrong?"
He looked at me then, eyes tired, almost haunted. I could feel the weight of his gaze settling into me, making me smaller, like I was already guilty of something I hadn't done. "Aria… I can't do this anymore."
The words were calm, measured, but they struck like a thunderclap. My heart stuttered. My stomach fell through my feet. "Do… do what?" I asked, even though the answer was already clear.
"This," he said, gesturing vaguely between us, between our life together, between all the promises we had made. "Us. I… I don't love you the way I used to. I can't keep pretending."
I wanted to laugh, or scream, or throw the mug across the balcony. But nothing came out. My chest tightened, lungs refusing to work, and all I could do was stare at him, trying to memorize every detail of the man I had loved with reckless abandon.
"Ethan… please," I whispered, the tremor in my voice betraying the panic I was trying so hard to mask. "We can fix this. We can—"
"No," he interrupted, sharper than I expected. "We can't. It's over, Aria. It's been over for a while. I just… I didn't know how to tell you. I didn't want to hurt you."
The last words were meant to soothe, but they felt like acid burning my chest. I nodded slowly, unable to speak. I wanted to beg him to stay. I wanted to scream at him for leaving me so casually, like all the years, all the nights we had spent wrapped up in each other, meant nothing.
I didn't cry. Not yet. I swallowed hard and forced my voice out. "I… I understand," I said, though I didn't. I understood nothing. Not heartbreak, not abandonment, not the crushing loneliness that was already stretching its fingers around my heart.
He stood and moved to me, hesitated, and then kissed my forehead softly. It should have been comforting. It wasn't. Instead, it felt like the final nail in a coffin I hadn't even realized I was in. He walked away, leaving me alone on the balcony, coffee gone cold, the city buzzing indifferently beneath me.
I remember that night, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling the absence of him as though the room itself had hollowed out. Sleep wouldn't come, though exhaustion weighed on me. I kept replaying every moment—every word, every touch, every laugh we had shared—and realizing how fragile it all had been.
And then came the first unmistakable whisper of unease. I was curled up in bed, trying to convince myself I was imagining it, when I felt it—the faintest prickle at the back of my neck. A shadow in the corner of my room. A presence that wasn't there before.
I froze. My eyes darted around the room, heart hammering against my ribs. Nothing. Just the furniture, the moonlight casting pale rectangles across the floor. I told myself it was nothing. Just the aftermath of heartbreak. My imagination playing tricks.
But the feeling didn't go away. It lingered, like a low hum beneath my skin, a quiet warning I couldn't ignore. And though I didn't know it then, it was the first thread in a web that would soon wrap around my life, tight and unyielding.
The days after the breakup were a blur of errands, half-eaten meals, and endless scrolling through my phone, pretending to be okay while my chest ached with emptiness. Friends called, asked me to go out, to drink, to forget. I laughed with them, but the hollow feeling in my stomach refused to be ignored.
And always, in the periphery of my thoughts, there was that sense of being watched. Sometimes at the grocery store, I thought I glimpsed a shadow moving just beyond my vision. In the coffee shop, a man would be there, but when I looked, he was gone. And at night, as I walked home, I couldn't shake the sensation that someone was following me, footsteps always just behind mine, fading when I turned.
I didn't tell anyone. Who would believe me? Who would listen to a girl so freshly heartbroken, so desperate, so… distracted? Not Ethan, gone like he never existed. Not Maya, too busy with her own life to notice the changes curling into me like smoke.
And so I carried it alone—the pain, the fear, the quiet suspicion. A darkness that wasn't mine but had found its way into my life. I didn't know it then, but this darkness would become my constant companion, shaping the next chapters of my existence, turning desire into danger, longing into obsession, and leaving me with a question I wasn't yet ready to answer: who was watching me, and why?
Sleep finally came in shallow fits, haunted by shadows I couldn't name. And even in the day, even when the sun dared to rise, I couldn't escape it—the lingering thought that my life had changed forever, that something, someone, was now waiting in the spaces I couldn't see, ready to step out of the shadows when I least expected it.