The Weight of Empty Rooms
The alarm hadn't gone off yet. It never needed to—Aleah's body had learned, in the eight months since Malachi left, to wake precisely four minutes before six, as if some internal clock refused to let her sleep through the worst part of the day. She lay still, staring at the ceiling fan that wasn't spinning, and listened.
Nothing.
That was the thing about silence. Most people thought of it as an absence, a simple lack of sound. But Aleah had come to know it as a presence all its own, a weight that settled into the room like fog, pressing against her ribs until breathing became a conscious act instead of an automatic one. The apartment held its breath around her, and she held hers back at it, a standoff neither of them ever won.
*One.*
She counted the inhale, the way Dr. Whitfield had taught her—not because counting fixed anything, but because it gave her mind somewhere to go besides the spiral. *Two.* The ceiling fan had a hairline crack in one blade, something she'd noticed the week after Malachi's side of the closet went empty, and now she couldn't stop finding it, that small imperfection becoming a fixture of her mornings, more reliable than he had ever been. *Three.*…
