Chapter 46. The Secret

It was a fatigue that felt unearned, as if someone had secretly pressed a damp cloth across her spirit. Not the kind of muscle-aching exhaustion born of honest labor, but a persistent weight nestled behind her eyes and a subtle resistance in every limb. Each step felt half-drowned, as though she were wading through water that refused to part.

Alyssa first noticed this strange lassitude on the long flight home from Tuscany. She watched the patchwork mosaic of vineyards and olive groves shrink beneath the airplane’s wing, then gave herself over to a tidy mental checklist: the abrupt shift in time zones, the altitude that made her head throb, the suspiciously bitter airport coffee she’d guzzled before boarding—and, most of all, the way time itself had seemed to fold and distort in that sunlit valley, where every vista felt too perfect to belong to this world. At the time, she believed these explanations would see her through.

But back in her city apartment, surrounded by th