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Alex had always been a boy of equations and propulsion charts, the kind who solved physics problems for fun and corrected sci-fi films under his breath. At thirty-two, he ran a company that designed and engineered parts for aerospace systems; fuel-efficient nozzles, advanced thermal shields, gyroscopic stabilizers. Real rocket-science stuff. And he was annoyingly good at it. His world was made of precision and possibility, of launch windows and escape velocities. But tonight? Tonight, he just wanted the silence to swallow him whole. He had landed in the city that morning, straight off a red-eye flight from Berlin where he’d spent three days locked in negotiation with a defense tech firm. His calendar had been an obstacle course of investor briefings and engineering updates, ending with a final roundtable where he had to explain plasma propulsion to a man who thought Mach 2 was a car model. By the time he got home, even gravity felt like a suggestion. Alex’s apartment was...well, very...

Spare a moment for my nonsense, will you?  Indulge me I promise it’ll be mildly poetic. Back at it, like we never left at Miles’s office somewhere midtown, minimalist. Smells like control and caffeine. There’s a click of a pen. A screen flickers. A vendor; sweaty with ambition and some very questionable fonts in his pitch deck is halfway through saying something about “synergistic market expansion.” Miles, blinking slowly like someone who’s just realized his soul is leaving his body via spreadsheet, leans back. His specs are sliding down just enough to make him look like the love child of a TED Talk and a Jane Austen character. And then there it is. Nat (in his head): “If I hear one more man use the word ‘synergy’ like it’s an aphrodisiac, I’m going to put a blueprint through the shredder just to cope.” Miles (blinks, smirks): “Tell me more about your radical views on site planning, darling. This guy just told me that market penetration is about intimacy. I think I nee...

The House At the very edge of nowhere, where GPS signals got lazy and birds flew in circles like they were lost too, stood a house that had long since retired from polite society. It wasn’t haunted in the traditional sense—no creaking attic demons or moaning mirrors—but it did hum with the kind of lived-in drama you’d expect from a place that had seen love letters scribbled on napkins and arguments thrown like dishes. The porch greeted you with a groan, but not a threatening one—more like the sigh of an old auntie who has seen too much and is mildly judging your shoes. Vines had taken liberties with the siding, curling in all the right (and wrong) places, like nature trying its hand at interior design. A shutter hung at a 45-degree angle, as though too emotionally exhausted to stay upright. Dust coated every surface with the kind of flair that screamed “vintage,” and inside, the smell was part wood, part memory, part “someone used to burn cinnamon candles here.” The air was thick with ...