Page 106 of Oliver
Zahra’s face dropped, and for a moment, hope flared in my chest.
“I haven’t,” she said, adding a little shake of her head.
Her mother reached up and patted her cheek gently, the kind of touch that said more than words ever could.
"You will," she promised. "That boy can't live without you."
Zahra gave a small, noncommittal smile and looked out over the yard—right past the spot where I was hiding.
And in that look, that quiet, lingering absence, I saw the truth.
I was the one still stuck in orbit around Zahra, powerless to pull myself free, but Zahra? She’d be fine. More than fine. She would flourish.
The air thickened around me, every breath a battle as I forced myself to retreat. Step by step, I backed away from the house, from her, from everything I had once believed I could still have.
Because I loved her enough to let her shine without casting a shadow across her sky.
I wasn’t her gravity anymore.
I wasn’t her home.
And maybe...I never really had been.
Thirty-One
OLIVER
My red penhovered over the paper, suspended between correction and surrender.
The student had written that dark energy was responsible for the universe's accelerating expansion, but they'd confused the mechanism, claiming it exerted a ‘negative gravitational pull’ rather than creating positive pressure.
A simple error. Easily corrected. That was the thing about theory: it was clean, contained, predictable.
In practice, though? I couldn’t fix a damn thing.
The silence of my apartment pressed against my ears like the vacuum of deep space—absolute, unyielding, devoid of anything resembling life. I'd once found comfort in this stillness. Now it felt like a sentence.
Three weeks since I'd returned from Norman.
Three weeks of going through the motions, moving through the world like a ghost—teaching classes, grading papers, eating meals I couldn't taste.
Three weeks of telling myself this hollowness would pass, just as it had after every other loss.
It hadn't.
I set the pen down, removed my glasses, and pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes until bursts of light exploded across my vision.
The stack of ungraded papers loomed on my desk, a monument to the mundane existence I'd once found satisfying. Twenty-two papers. Twenty-two students whose understanding of astrophysics mattered to someone, somewhere.
Just not to me. Not tonight.
My phone lay face down beside the stack, deliberately positioned so I wouldn't see the screen light up. Not that it would. Emmet had stopped calling after I'd answered his insistent calls with a message stating I was fine.
Tobias was slower to get the hint, texting nonstop even after I'd ignored thirty-seven invitations to grab a drink and "talk about it." Thirty-seven. In three weeks. It would have probably been seventy, but most nights he was booked.
And Zahra...
Zahra was gone. As she should be.
