The drive back was quiet in the way that had nothing to do with comfort.
It was the same SUV, the same driver, the same navy interior that had carried her to the island the night before. But the morning light changed everything — stripped away the candlelight and the stars and the particular unreality of midnight on a private beach and replaced them with the flat, honest light of a Friday morning, the city reassembling itself outside the window as they crossed back over the bridge.
Liam sat on his side of the car. Aurora sat on hers. The distance between them was the same as it had always been in professional settings — appropriate, unremarkable — and felt nothing like it.
She kept her eyes on the window. He kept his on his phone, or appeared to. She didn't check. The silence had texture to it, the specific density of two people who had said things the night before that couldn't be unsaid and had now returned to a world that required them to behave as if they hadn't.
