“I wanted to exist. The world told me I didn’t. Malik always understood that about me — the way my heart wasn’t broken so much as missing, a hollow space I kept trying to define. I stare at my reflection, searching for the woman everyone keeps insisting I should already know. I never have an answer.

My fingers drift to the forest‑green baseball cap hanging beside the mirror, tracing the frayed edge, the almost‑vanished multiplication sign Malik bought me the night of the Ed Sheeran concert. The memory hits like sunlight — warm, impossible, gone too fast — and for a moment I’m back in that crush of bodies, his hands tucking my curls behind my ears as if he could anchor me to the world.

Then the city snaps back into focus.

“Miss, you getting in or not?” the cab driver calls, slicing through the haze.

I blink, step back from the curb, and nod. The echo of Malik’s voice fades like mist, leaving only the weight of the letter in my bag and the ache of everything I’ve lost. I climb into the cab, the door closing on the last of the gold light, and let the city swallow me whole.”

---

“If this Douglas — Malik’s lover, or whatever he was — mattered so much, why didn’t Malik mail the letter himself? No. Of course he couldn’t. Like always, he left it for me to handle. His messes. His habits. His secrets.

The lights dim. A hush ripples through the theater as the overture swells. When Douglas Vale steps into the spotlight, color detonates behind my eyes. The first note hits the core of me, sharp and familiar, as if it recognizes me. I don’t recognize him. I don’t want to.

Then he looks at me. Directly at me. As if he felt me watching. As if the music built a world just big enough for the two of us to stand inside it.

The applause shatters it.

I remind myself why I crossed an ocean. Why I’m here with a letter Malik should have delivered himself. I should leave — drop it at the box office and run — but I wanted to see him. To see what Malik saw.

The first act ends. I push toward the exit, but the door swings open and I stumble back.

“Sorry,” a warm voice says — his voice — as a hand closes around mine. “Steady there.”

I don’t laugh. I don’t smile. I don’t breathe.

“You’re not Malik’s type,” slips out before I can stop it.

His brow lifts. “Sorry?”

“Nothing.”

Always nothing. Always running. But he’s still looking at me, still steadying me, still standing in the space Malik left behind — and I hate how much that matters.”

---

“Mercy… Malik was murdered.”

The darkness takes me before the scream does. When I come back to myself, nothing is the same. Nothing has been the same since Malik died six weeks ago. Nothing. I am nothing.

The cab ride is a blur of streaked lights and swallowed breath. By the time we reach Brooklyn, the city feels like a cage I can’t claw my way out of. I shove bills at the driver and stumble into the cold.

“This was your dream,” I shout into the empty street, staring at the darkened sign of The Daffodil Café. Our café. The place he wanted to build into something bigger, brighter, more than I ever believed I deserved.

I climb the stairs, unlock the door, and step inside. The slam echoes through the empty front of house. The kitchen lights flicker on — harsh, cold, unfeeling. I toss my coat aside and brace myself against the steel prep table. The cold metal grounds me for half a second.

Mehmet’s face appears on the tablet screen, bleary and afraid. “Tell me what you know,” I whisper. “Malik was murdered.”

The word murdered hangs between us, heavy as a dropped stone.

And that’s where the world finally, fully breaks.”

---