The walls of the apartment seemed to shrink every day, the pale yellow paint peeling in long, jagged strips like dead skin sloughing off a corpse. Nancy sat by the window, her palm resting on the slight, firm curve of her abdomen. The air tasted of dust and stale tea, a stagnant cocktail that clung to the back of her throat. For weeks, the silence had been her only companion, a heavy, suffocating blanket broken only by the rhythmic ticking of a wall clock. Each tick felt like a countdown to a disaster she couldn't name, a metronome for her own slow dissolution.

Andrew was a ghost. He had vanished into the city's concrete veins without a word, leaving behind a void that pulsed with a dull, constant ache. He hadn't just left the apartment; he had erased himself from her existence, leaving her with a growing life and a heart that felt like it had been scrubbed raw with steel wool.