“You don’t experience life, Talia. You dissect it.”
Nathan’s voice slithers through my thoughts. Three years of his observations, his critiques, his careful dismantling of who I am. Last night’s fight echoes in my skull.
“You’re like a computer pretending to be human,”he said, standing in our bathroom—my bathroom now—while I packed his toothbrush.“Every response calculated for optimal outcome. Every emotion filtered through some probability matrix.”
“That’s not—”My fingers fumbled with the toiletry bag, dropping the zipper pull.
“It is.”He stepped closer. His cologne, usually pleasant, became sharp in the small space. Invading. Claiming territory one last time.“Three years, Talia. Three years of living with someone who processes feelings like data points.”
I exhale slowly, shoving the memory into a mental subfolder.Delete.
Focus on Victor. He’s never late. The man sets his watch to the atomic clock. Twenty-three minutes constitutes a massive deviation.
My gaze tracks across the café for the twentieth time. Three laptops glow at separate tables, their owners hunched over screens, islands of isolation. A man in a gray suit scrolls through his phone. The barista with a rose tattoo climbing her collarbone leans against the counter, attention flicking between customers and the clock above the door.
Outside, late-afternoon light casts long shadows across rain-slick pavement. A delivery truck idles at the curb, hazard lightscreating rhythmic orange pulses. Across the street, a black SUV sits in a no-parking zone.
Tinted windows. Engine running. Exhaust pumping a gray cloud into the cool air. No driver visible. A parking ticket curls beneath the wiper, rain-spotted and ignored.
Anomaly.
Everything about that vehicle screams wrong.
A cyclist coasts past, head ducked against the wind. Two teenagers laugh near the corner, sharing earbuds, oblivious to everything beyond their bubble of youth and music.
Movement snags my peripheral vision.
Victor. Finally.
He darts down the sidewalk across the street like prey that knows the predator is upwind. His usual professorial shuffle is gone, replaced by quick, jerky movements. Shoulders hunched against more than cold. The messenger bag he clutches against his ribs might as well be welded there.
Our eyes meet through the glass.
Relief softens his features for a heartbeat. He lifts a hand.
The cup burns against my palms. I set it down carefully, deliberately. No sudden movements. Nothing to draw attention. My heart hammers a frantic rhythm against my ribs, entirely at odds with my still hands.
Victor steps off the curb and into the crosswalk.
The SUV’s engine roars.
No.
The word dies in my constricted throat—lost in the sudden scream of tires. The vehicle launches forward. Zero to forty in the span of a breath. No horn. No brake lights. Just mechanical violence given purpose.
Time fractures.
The meaty crack of steel striking bone echoes through the glass. A sound, wet and ruinous, physics winning against biology.
Victor pinwheels through the air. The messenger bag tears free. Papers explode like startled birds, white confetti raining down on a murder.
His body hits the asphalt with a wet slap that silences the street.
Behind me, sharp gasps. Ceramic shattering on tile. A child’s piercing scream. The mother clutches her twins, pressing their faces into her chest to shield them from the data.
The SUV fishtails. Corrects. Vanishes around the corner. Tires squeal. The stench of burning rubber floods through the door as someone rushes out. Chemical and acrid. It tastes like violence.
I’m already moving. My legs obey before my brain finishes the calculation.
