Isolation didn't arrive like a door slamming shut.

  It arrived like a narrowing hallway.

  Michael stopped being invited out after service. The messages from old friends thinned, then vanished entirely—not because they had turned away from him, but because Samantha had learned how to fill every empty space before anyone else could reach it.

  "They don't understand your schedule," she'd say when he hesitated over declining an invitation. "And honestly, they drain you."

  Drain. Another word that stuck.

  She curated his time carefully. Business dinners replaced casual meals. Networking replaced rest. Silence replaced laughter. When he came home late, bone-deep tired, she framed it as success.

  "You're becoming exactly who you're meant to be," she told him, hands resting possessively at his back.

  Exactly who she needed him to be.

  The restaurant staff noticed the change before he did. He spoke less. Ate less. Slept almost not at all. The weed dulled the edges, the cocaine sharpened them again, and somewhere between the two he lost track of what normal felt like.

  When Willow texted, he stared at the screen longer than necessary.

  Did you get home safe?

  The oven behaved today.

  I tried the rosemary loaf again.

  Small messages. Gentle ones. Nothing that demanded an answer.

  Samantha noticed the pauses.

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  "You don't need that distraction," she said once, not unkindly, plucking the phone from his hand and setting it face-down on the table. "You're under enough pressure already."

  He didn't reach for it.

  That frightened him more than anything else.

  In Whitby, Willow folded napkins after closing, her movements slow and deliberate. She had learned what distance felt like—the way it settled into the body, how it made even familiar rooms feel slightly wrong.

  Her grandfather watched her from the doorway. "He's not gone," Richard said quietly. "He's just lost."

  She nodded, though the reassurance barely touched the ache.

  Isolation, she knew, was the first step. She had watched it happen to her mother—how friends disappeared, how the world shrank until there was nowhere left to go but inward.

  She refused to let that happen to Michael.

  Even if all she could do was keep the fire burning.

  Even if all she could offer was a place to return to.

  Willow's Diary

  I don't know how to reach you

  without becoming another voice

  telling you what to do.

  So I stay where I am.

  I keep the door open.

  Poem — Narrowing

  They are building walls

  by calling them shelter.

  If you forget the sound of my voice,

  remember this instead:

  You never had to earn

  the right to belong here.