Ethan woke to the sound of absence.
Not silence—silence was a presence, a weight, a medium through which other sounds moved. This was the negative space where Sophia's breathing had been. The particular rhythm of her sleep, the wet click of her swallowing, the subtle creak of her weight shifting against the mattress springs. These had been the baseline frequencies of his existence for seven decades, and now they were deleted, leaving a ringing void that was not tinnitus but grief.
He lay still, counting his own heartbeats. Arrhythmic. Specific. The doctor had called it a bundle branch block years ago, a slight delay in the electrical impulse that kept him alive. It made his pulse feel syncopated, improvisational, like jazz in a world that had expected classical precision.
*One-two. One-two-three. One.*
Sophia would have called it stubborn. The heart refusing the metronome.
