Description
The plane thudded onto the runway and for a few heartbeats Ella Green let herself pretend the city she was
leaving had never existed. Outside the tiny oval window frost traced delicate patterns across the glass, and the
patchwork of lights below blurred into a single, comforting glow. She pressed her forehead against the cold
and closed her eyes, tasting a strange mix of relief and guilt that had been growing inside her for months.
Christmas in the city had been a calendar of late nights, client dinners, and fluorescent-lit
triumphs—sketches signed, towers approved, flights to Paris that felt like proof she’d been worth it. She’d
built a life as if it were a structure: rational, efficient, angular. But in the hollow between one project closing
and the next contract beginning, that structure had started to show hairline cracks. The ache was small at
first, missed calls, a plant that had wilted on her balcony—until it widened into a low thrum that woke her at
three in the morning.
