Aurora's POV
I knew before he spoke.
Some losses announce themselves through silence, through absence, through the sudden wrongness of a room that once held a voice. You enter a space and feel the echo where someone should be. The air holds their outline like a bruise.
This wasn't like that.
This loss arrived intact.
Breathing.
Standing in front of me with the same face, the same eyes, the same scar at the corner of his mouth from a skirmish years ago that we both pretended wasn't serious. Everything about him was familiar.
Except the way he held himself.
Belief doesn't change faces.
It changes posture.
He stood straighter than usual when I entered the antechamber. Not rigid. Not defensive. Just… resolved. As if he had practiced this moment privately, tested different versions of it in his mind, and decided exactly how much of himself he would bring with him when he finally said the words.
That was when the humor left me completely.
Not gradually.
Not reluctantly.
