Chapter 47. The Discovery

It was late Wednesday morning when it happened. Pale light draped itself across Alyssa’s living room, filtering through the tall city windows in soft, dust-mote–filled beams. The day outside felt unusually hushed, as if the world paused, waiting for something impossible to set it right.

Max stood amid the half-empty apartment, conducting what he thought was a routine hunt for his missing headphones. He was convinced he’d left them here, somewhere amid Alyssa’s creative chaos—beneath a scattering of sketchbooks, half-used tubes of paint, and the small ceramic tray on her writing desk that held rogue coins, dried lavender buds, and a jumbled thicket of pens long since run dry.

He wasn’t snooping; he was simply searching. He shifted a stack of charcoal-smudged pads, inhaled the faint tang of coffee stained on the edge of a mug, ran a finger along the edge of a watercolor palette. Every object felt familiar, comforting even, until his attention drifted to the desk’s far cor