Why hasn’t it changed in over a decade?
That’s when I hear movement outside the room.
The jangle of keys. The front lock turns. There’s a pause before the door closes, followed by footsteps.
Fuck.She’s not supposed to be home for hours.
Her voice follows, quiet, humming a tune I don’t know.
My blood stills. There’s no time to leave through the window. No time to do anything but hide, because I have no intention of reintroducing myself to her in her own apartment.
I drop to the floor and slide beneath the bed. Dust sticks to my hands. The air is tight, stale.
From here, the world reduces to sound and shadow—the soft fall of her steps, the creak of the floorboards beneath her weight.
I hear the water running in the bathroom, before she steps into the room and moves around, unhurried. I hear the rustle offabric. The small, fragile sound of her setting something down on her bedside table.
I close my eyes and breathe her in.
Something shifts in my chest, something quiet and sharp. I tell myself I’m only here to understand what she’s looking for. But even I can hear the lie in that.
She mutters to herself as she moves around the room. Something about a deadline. Her voice is low, threaded with frustration and fatigue, the kind that doesn’t invite comfort. Each word falls too close, brushing the edges of my restraint.
Then she steps closer to the bed—and that’s when I see it.
A scar. Thick and pink, carved deep into her skin, a twisted map of trauma that runs from the edge of her ankle up along the curve of her calf before disappearing beneath the shadow of the bed frame. It isn’t new. It’s old—faded and healed, but not forgotten. It’s ugly in a beautiful way. The kind of imperfection that demands attention, that whispers for me to look closer.
I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t even notice. But my gaze catches there and refuses to let go.
There’s a story in that scar. Was it an accident? A punishment? Something she ran from, or something she endured?
I recognize its provenence. It doesn’t belong to innocence. It belongs to survival. To a body that’s fought and lost and still kept breathing. And maybe that’s why I can’t look away—because survival recognizes itself.
Rowan Hale thinks she’s the only one here looking for answers. Digging. Hunting. Pulling at threads she believes no one else has noticed.
But the truth is, she isn’t alone.
She isn’t the only one searching.
We all are, in one way or another—circling the same shadows, chasing the same ghosts, hoping we find what we’re looking for before it finds us first.
The bed creaks as she sits down. The noise shoots through me like a current. My hand curls against the floor to keep it from reaching out to touch her leg as my fingers itch to scale the length of the scar. I watch the dip of the mattress, and imagine the way her shoulders slump, the exhaustion bleeding from her in waves.
She exhales. A sound too human, too soft for this room.
For a heartbeat, I think about what it would feel like to speak. To break the silence. To let her know someone sees her—even the parts she keeps hidden behind her scars.
After a while, her breathing steadies—deep, rhythmic, unguarded. The kind of sound that makes the world slow down to listen.
I wait until her breaths fall into a perfect rhythm. Then I move—inch by inch—sliding out from beneath the bed as the air thickens around me.
Every sound feels amplified. The whisper of fabric, the stretch of wood, the pulse in my throat.
By the time I’m standing, she’s asleep. Oblivious to me standing in her world, surrounded by everything she is.
I shouldn’t be here. But leaving feels wrong. Because for the first time in a long time, I’ve found something I can’t stop looking at. Even as she sleeps.
Who are you, Rowan Hale?
