Rory
Kora hadn't called me in three weeks. She'd texted — short, careful things, *doing okay* and *don't worry about me* and the particular brand of reassurance that tells you exactly how much someone isn't fine — but the phone itself had stayed quiet, and I'd learned to read that silence as its own kind of information. So when her name lit up my screen on a Wednesday afternoon, no text first, no warning, my stomach dropped before I'd even answered it.
"Hey." I kept my voice pitched low out of habit, even alone in my apartment, even talking to the one person who already knew every version of it. "Everything okay?"
"Yeah. No. I don't know." A pause, the particular kind she used when she was deciding how much of the truth to hand over. "I just wanted to hear your voice. The real one, I me
