The clock on Elara's wall didn't tick; it pulsed. It was a digital, silent thing, much like everything else she owned. In her apartment, there were no slamming doors, no humming radios, no floorboards that groaned under the weight of a restless soul. There was only the soft, rhythmic sound of her own breathing, which, if she held it long enough, made her feel as though the room itself had disappeared.
Elara sliced a lemon with surgical precision. One thin disc, perfect and translucent. She watched it sink into her tea, the yellow rind bobbing against the ceramic. She was twenty-five years old, and she was a master of the "Quiet."
Her parents would have been proud—if they were the type of people to voice such things.
Growing up, Elara had learned that the highest compliment a child could receive was to be told they were no trouble at all. "No trouble" meant she had learned to tie her shoes before she was asked. "No trouble" meant she had learned to swallow her nightmares so her parents could finish their dinner in peace. She sat at her small, glass-topped table. It was set for one. It was always set for one.
She didn't feel sad, exactly. You have to know what warmth feels like to truly understand the cold, and Elara had lived in the permafrost for so long she'd forgotten there was any other way to breathe. She was self-sufficient. She was stable. She was a woman who could fix a leaky faucet and file her taxes and spend a rainy Saturday without speaking a single word to another human being.
She told herself this was strength. She told herself this was freedom.
But as she took a sip of her tea, the silence of the apartment suddenly felt heavy—not the peaceful silence of a library, but the suffocating silence of a tomb. For a split second, a wild, terrifying thought clawed at her throat: If I stopped breathing right now, how many days would pass before the world noticed the silence had deepened?
She set the cup down. Her hand trembled, just a fraction.
"I'm fine," she whispered to the empty kitchen.
The sound of her own voice startled her. It felt like a bruise—tender and out of place. She quickly stood up to wash her cup, scrubbing it until the porcelain squeaked, desperate to drown out the echoes of a girl who was still waiting, twenty years later, for someone to ask her how her day had been.
Outside, the first snow of the year began to fall, turning the world white and muffled.
Elara watched it from behind the glass, safe and tucked away, unaware that her long winter was about to face its first real sun.
Elara pulled on her coat—grey, like the sky—and stepped out into the city.
Her office was a place of glass and steel where she was respected for exactly the reasons she had been "loved" at home: she was reliable, she was quiet, and she never complained. Her boss, a man named Mr. Henderson, often walked past her desk without a word, dropping files in her "In" box as if she were a part of the furniture.
"Elara, I need these by five," he said today, not looking up from his phone.
"Of course," she replied. Her voice was always level, always polite.
She spent eight hours submerged in spreadsheets. To Elara, numbers were safer than people. Numbers didn't have moods; they didn't forget you existed; they stayed exactly where you put them.
During her lunch break, she checked her phone. One missed call. Her heart gave a small, traitorous thud, but it was only a notification from her pharmacy. No texts from her mother. No check-ins from Leo, her brother.
She remembered a dinner from a few months ago—one of the rare times the four of them were together. Leo had been bragging about a promotion, leaning across the table, his laughter filling the room. Her father had looked at him with a rare, sharp glint of pride.
"And how is the firm, Elara?" her mother had asked, her eyes already drifting back to the dessert menu before Elara could even inhale.
"It's good, Mom. I actually got—"
"Leo, tell your father that story about the client in Chicago again," her mother interrupted, her hand resting on Leo's arm.
Elara had closed her mouth, the sentence about her own achievement dying on her tongue. She had spent the rest of the meal counting the bubbles in her sparkling water. 214... 215... 216... She had realized then that she could have stood up and walked out the front door, and it would have taken them ten minutes to notice her chair was empty.
Back in the present, the office lights flickered as a storm rolled in. Elara finished the files at 4:55 PM. She placed them on Mr.Henderson's desk.
"Finished, sir."
"Right. See you tomorrow, Elena," he said.
He hadn't even used her real name. She didn't correct him; it felt like too much effort to remind the world she existed. She walked out into the cold evening air, her boots crunching on the fresh snow.
That was when she saw the flower shop on the corner. It was a burst of violent, impossible color against the grey street. And standing outside, shaking a damp umbrella and laughing at something on his phone, was a man who looked like he had never known a day of silence in his life.
He looked up just as Elara walked past. For a second, their eyes met—really met—and Elara felt a strange, sharp pang in her chest, like a dormant nerve suddenly waking up.
It was Julian. And for the first time in twenty-five years, someone didn't look through her.
He looked at her.