Mia POV
Nobody told me I could not explore.
Nobody told me I could either, but I decided that silence counted as permission and went anyway. What were they going to do, escort me back to the white room and lock the door? Maybe. But I had been sitting in that beautiful, expensive, suffocating room for three hours, and the walls were starting to feel personal.
So I explored.
The estate was enormous in a way that stopped feeling impressive after the first ten minutes and started feeling sad instead.
Room after room after room, all of them perfect. All of them are clean. All of them arranged like someone had read a magazine about how a house should look and followed the instructions exactly, everything in the right place, nothing out of place, no coffee rings on tables, no shoes left by a door, no sign anywhere that actual human beings lived and breathed and made messes inside these walls.
It felt like a stage set.
Beautiful. Hollow. Waiting for something real to happen inside it.
