The next few days passed in a fragile kind of calm that almost felt like healing. I buried myself in finals prep, the kind of all-consuming focus that left little room for anything else. Mornings started with burnt toast from Sofia and ended with late-night study sessions where my eyes burned from staring at case briefs. The anonymous text faded into the background, just another piece of noise in the chaos that had become my life. Maybe it had been a bluff. Maybe Lila was finally running out of moves.
I even started replying to Damien’s texts more warmly. Nothing big, just small updates about my day. He responded in kind, never pushing, never asking when I was coming home. It felt… safe. Like we were rebuilding something slowly, one careful message at a time.
Sofia noticed the shift, of
