Michael stopped marking the days.

  Time blurred into a series of identical mornings and controlled evenings, measured not by clocks but by Samantha's presence. When she was near, the world was orderly, quiet, contained. When she wasn't, the silence grew teeth.

  He sat through meetings without retaining a word. Nodded at plans that felt like they belonged to someone else's life. Signed papers that carried his name but not his intention.

  The restaurants ran smoothly. Too smoothly.

  Everyone told him he should be proud.

  "You're back," one investor said, smiling. "Stronger."

  Michael smiled back, because that was what people expected from someone who had survived something they couldn't see.

  At night, he lay awake and pressed his palm flat against his chest, as if trying to locate something physical—an ache, a bruise, proof that the heaviness had a source. But there was nothing.

  Just emptiness.

  He stopped caring whether he slept or not. Stopped caring whether he ate. Food tasted correct, technically perfect, and utterly meaningless. It filled his stomach without touching him.

  Samantha noticed the withdrawal and adjusted her tactics.

  She became softer.

  "You've been through so much," she said, fingers brushing his arm in public, possessive and tender all at once. "You don't need to push yourself. Let me handle things."

  He let her.

  Because effort required desire, and desire required a reason.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Sometimes, when he stood alone in the kitchen late at night, he would rest his hands on the counter and feel a ghost of familiarity—a sense that this was once a place of heat and noise and life. He couldn't picture it. Couldn't remember the shape of it.

  But his body reacted anyway.

  His shoulders loosened. His breathing deepened.

  Then Samantha would enter, heels clicking softly, and the feeling would vanish like smoke.

  "You don't need to be here," she said once, guiding him away from the stove. "You don't need to remember how to be that man."

  "What man?" he asked.

  She kissed his cheek. "Exactly."

  The words settled somewhere deep and dark.

  And for the first time since the crash, Michael realised something that scared him more than the emptiness itself.

  He didn't care if he lived like this forever.

  He didn't care if he didn't.

  Willow's Diary

  There is a kind of pain that doesn't scream.

  It just… erodes.

  I feel him slipping, not violently, not suddenly—

  but the way cliffs fall into the sea

  grain by grain.

  I wish he knew that wanting nothing

  is not peace.

  It is grief that has forgotten its name.

  Poem — Erosion

  Stone doesn't break when the wave arrives.

  It breaks when the wave leaves.

  I am watching the tide pull you apart,

  quietly, carefully.

  If you forget why you stand,

  I will remember for you.

  Even if I have to stand alone.