Three months changed the shape of a life more quietly than most people imagined.
There were no dramatic montages. No sudden shift where the sky looked different and the city bowed in acknowledgment. Aurelia City remained what it had always been—glass towers catching light they did not earn, buses running late, vendors shouting over traffic, students surviving on cheap food and ambition. The world kept moving at its usual pace.
Jake was the one who had changed.
By the start of the first month, he had already crossed into a level of money that would have sounded absurd to the version of him who had woken up in a hospital bed staring at a ceiling too white to trust. Back then, every thousand mattered because every thousand meant breathing room. Every gain had felt like rescue.
