Selene's POV
The morning light seeped into the bedroom slow and indifferent, pulling gold across the floorboards, the edge of the bed, the still shapes of two people breathing in different rhythms.
Selene woke without opening her eyes, the kind of waking that wasn't really waking at all — just surfacing through the weight of sleep she hadn't truly fallen into.
Beside her, Cassian's breathing was steady. Controlled. As if even in sleep, he refused to be caught off guard.
She stayed still for a long time, wrapped up in the cocoon of thin sheets, not touching him, not reaching. It was easier like this. Simpler to pretend that the distance between them wasn't a living, breathing thing curling itself around the quiet.
Once, mornings had meant something else.
Once, she had woken up feeling like she belonged somewhere.
To someone.
Now she didn't know what she belonged to anymore — this bed, this house, this version of a life that looked perfect if you didn't touch it too closely.
Selene turned her face slightly toward him, careful not to let the mattress shift too much under her.
Cassian was facing the other way.
Of course he was.
It struck her then — not with violence, but with the slow, aching kind of grief that feels like standing outside your own life, watching it slip through your fingers.
There was a time when she would have said something.
Laughed, touched his shoulder, whispered something foolish just to hear the low rumble of his answering voice.
Now, she didn't even know what words could possibly fix what silence had already broken.
She closed her eyes again, the tight knot under her ribs pulling tighter, and thought —
Is it still love if it only hurts quietly?
Is it still love if you're too afraid to reach for it?
The clock ticked on the bedside table, loud against the hush of early morning.
Cassian shifted once, drawing a slow breath, but didn't turn toward her.
Selene pressed her forehead lightly against the pillow and let the moment pass, another small thing unsaid, another thread in the tapestry of everything they refused to admit out loud.
Outside, the world was waking up.
Inside, they remained — two people lying side by side,
closer than breath,
and farther than they had ever been.
The hours slipped by like water through cupped hands.
Selene heard Cassian move first — the soft creak of the bed frame, the whisper of his feet touching the floor.
He didn't look at her.
He didn't say anything.
She stayed curled up for a few more minutes, listening to the low hum of his existence. The clink of a mug being set down in the kitchen. The hiss of the kettle heating water. The small, familiar sounds of a life they had built together — sounds that once would have comforted her.
Now, they only sharpened the loneliness sitting at the bottom of her chest.
When she finally rose, Selene moved slowly, like someone trying not to wake a ghost. She found her cardigan draped over the armchair, pulled it tight around herself, and stepped barefoot into the kitchen.
Cassian was there, leaning back against the counter, coffee in one hand, phone in the other. His shoulders were tense under the worn fabric of his shirt, the way they always were when he was already somewhere else in his head.
He glanced up briefly when she entered — a flicker of acknowledgment, polite and distant — then looked back down at his screen.
Selene's fingers curled tighter around the edge of her sweater.
Something inside her almost reached out.
Almost.
Instead, she moved past him wordlessly, pulling down her own mug, pouring herself some coffee.
Their morning unfolded in fragments.
Two bodies moving in the same spaces, orbiting each other with a kind of aching precision, careful not to collide, careful not to ask for too much.
At the table, she stirred sugar into her coffee she barely tasted.
Across from her, Cassian scrolled through emails with the detached focus of someone who had long ago decided what mattered most.
And maybe that was the part that hurt more than anything else.
Not the silence.
Not even the distance.
But the quiet, dawning realization that somewhere along the way, she had stopped being the thing he chose first.
Selene set her mug down a little too hard, the clink echoing between them.
Cassian didn't flinch.
Didn't even lift his eyes.
She stood up before she could think too much about it, grabbing a set of keys from the counter, the need to breathe — to just move — clawing at her ribs.
"I'm heading out for a bit," she said, voice steady, almost casual.
Cassian nodded once without looking at her.
"Okay. Drive safe."
That was it.
No where are you going?
No come back soon.
Just an easy letting go, as if she was already half-gone anyway.
Selene lingered for a heartbeat longer than she should have, waiting for something she couldn't even name.
When it didn't come, she turned and walked out the door, the cool morning air hitting her cheeks harder than she expected.
And as she slid behind the wheel of her car, gripping the steering wheel until her knuckles whitened, Selene realized something simple and awful:
Sometimes, you don't leave because you're angry.
You leave because you're lonely —
and you can't remember the last time someone noticed.
Selene's hands gripped the steering wheel harder than necessary, the leather cold beneath her fingers. The car's engine hummed steadily beneath her, the sound too familiar, too much like every other day she'd spent driving with Cassian, side by side. She used to love these drives — the way the world felt quieter when they were together in the car, just the two of them, like they were the only people who mattered in the world.
But today, the silence felt thick, suffocating.
Her foot pressed gently on the accelerator as she navigated the streets. She didn't know where she was going. It didn't matter. The miles blurred together in a wash of grey pavement and muted morning light. She didn't even have the radio on — just the hum of tires against the road and her own thoughts.
The car seemed to carry her somewhere distant, far away from the house, from Cassian, from the weight of the space they shared but no longer filled.
Her mind wandered.
What was she supposed to do with this feeling?
This overwhelming sense that no matter how close they were, they were always just... out of reach?
She remembered a time when everything between them felt effortless. How she would wake up in the mornings, tangled in the sheets with him, and know, with a certainty that startled her, that they were both exactly where they needed to be. She would laugh at the way he'd push the covers off, even though it was cold, and how she'd roll over just to curl against him, feeling his heartbeat beneath her ear.
She remembered the way his voice would soften when he spoke her name — the tenderness of it, the way it felt like an inside joke only the two of them shared. How he would look at her across the table, the faintest smile on his lips as if to say, this is it. This is us.
But that version of them was fading. She could see it slipping through her fingers like sand, slipping away despite all her efforts to hold on.
She turned onto a street she didn't recognize. It wasn't the kind of place she'd usually drive to — the narrow lanes, the tall trees that lined the road like silent witnesses. But she didn't stop. She didn't care where she was going anymore. She just needed to feel something outside the house, outside the walls that were slowly becoming suffocating.
When she finally found a quiet spot, a small parking lot tucked behind a row of old, ivy-covered buildings, she parked the car and sat there for a moment, letting the silence settle around her. She kept her hands on the wheel, resting her forehead against it for a moment, and just breathed.
It wasn't until then that she realized how desperately she needed to cry.
It wasn't the kind of cry that would be loud and desperate. No. This was the quiet kind — the kind that sits heavy in your chest, that threatens to break you down from the inside out. She wasn't ready for it. She didn't want to face it. But there it was, blooming inside her, uncontrollable.
She shut her eyes, taking a deep breath, but when she opened them again, it wasn't the tears that hit her. It was the loneliness.
The way she couldn't remember the last time Cassian had truly seen her. The way he looked at her now, with a distance she couldn't close, no matter how hard she tried. The way the silence between them had become louder than any words they could have spoken.
Her fingers trembled as she wiped away the first tear that escaped. But then another came, and another, and soon she was crying, the sound muffled against the steering wheel. Not angry tears. Not frustrated ones. Just... sad.
Sad for what they had lost. Sad for the love that felt like it was slipping through her fingers, even when she was doing everything she could to hold on.
And maybe, just maybe, it was the first time in a long while she'd allowed herself to feel something real.
Selene wiped at her face, though the tears kept coming. She stared out the window, not really seeing anything, just letting the world pass by as her mind wandered. The silence in the car felt like it was closing in on her, wrapping around her chest until breathing became an effort. It was suffocating, this stillness.
Why couldn't they go back? Why couldn't they just find their way again?
There were days when it felt like they were still together in all the ways that mattered. She would catch Cassian's eye across the room, and for a second, she would believe that spark of connection was still there. But then the moment would slip away. And it always did.
It was the small things that haunted her. The moments when she would reach for him in the middle of the night, instinctively, and find him miles away, even though he was right there. Or the way he no longer asked about her day, no longer seemed to care about her thoughts, her feelings. The way their conversations had become so... trivial, as if they were two strangers passing through life together, not two people who had once been in sync with every beat of their hearts.
She had tried. She really had.
She thought back to the times when she'd told herself that everything would be okay, that things would get better. She thought she could fix it — that maybe all they needed was time, or space, or a change of scenery. But it wasn't that simple. Because the more she tried to fix it, the more she realized that the distance between them wasn't just about time or circumstances. It was something deeper. Something that neither of them had the strength to confront.
Maybe that was what scared her the most.
Maybe it wasn't that they had lost something, but that they had let it slip away so slowly that they hadn't even noticed it until it was too late.
Selene leaned back in her seat, staring at the rearview mirror for a long moment, as if searching for something in her own reflection. She couldn't find it. The person she had been when Cassian had looked at her like she was everything to him. The person who had woken up each morning, knowing she was loved in ways words couldn't express.
Was it too late? Was there even a way back?
She had asked herself these questions a hundred times before. The answers were never clear, just fragments of what had once been. And it was starting to feel like she was running out of time.
Her hand rested on her chest, fingers lightly brushing the place where her heart was. The ache there had been constant, but it had been quiet, almost unnoticed, until now. It was as if her heart had become a thing of its own, whispering reminders that she couldn't ignore.
She closed her eyes again, this time allowing herself the space to feel everything she'd been holding inside — the fear, the loneliness, the sadness.
And then, something shifted.
The tears started to slow, and in their place came the unmistakable sound of a voice, a question, floating in the quiet of her mind.
Why was she still here?
Not in the car, not driving through the night. But with Cassian. With a life that no longer felt like hers. With a man who had become more of a ghost than the person she used to know.
The thought settled heavy on her chest, and for a moment, the car felt too small, too confining. She needed to know — needed to understand — if this was really it. If they were really beyond the point of return.
She didn't know what answer she was hoping for. But whatever it was, it was buried deep beneath layers of silence that neither of them could break. And in that moment, she realized something: maybe the hardest part wasn't the distance. Maybe it was the waiting.
She was waiting for something — for him to notice. For him to come back to her, to reach out and remind her that he hadn't completely slipped away. But the truth was, she had been waiting for so long that she'd forgotten how to stop.
She wiped her eyes again, took a steadying breath, and started the car. The engine roared to life, and she pulled back onto the road, heading toward nowhere in particular. The city lights flickered by like a distant memory of something she once knew. Something she once thought was real.
But now, everything felt like a waiting game.
And she didn't know how much longer she could keep playing.
The night stretched on, the city lights flickering in and out of view as she drove without destination, without purpose. The world outside was a blur, just like the thoughts tumbling in her mind. It was as though she were suspended between two versions of herself — the woman who had once believed in the love they shared and the woman who no longer knew if it was enough to keep her here.
Her hands gripped the wheel tighter, the hum of the engine beneath her a constant, grounding rhythm. She didn't want to admit how much she had been holding on, but the truth was, she was scared of what might happen if she let go. She had already given up so much, already allowed so many things to slip through her fingers — would losing Cassian, too, be the final blow to everything she had once believed in?
But as the miles passed, so did the weight in her chest. The tightness began to ease, and for the first time in a long time, she allowed herself to breathe, to simply be. To not think about what was missing, but to feel what was still there. The quiet strength she had long forgotten. The quiet hope that maybe, someday, they would find their way back. Or maybe, just maybe, she would learn to find herself without him.
The road ahead seemed endless, but Selene realized it didn't matter. Because the only thing she could control right now was the choice to keep moving.