The apartment was quiet in the specific way of midnight—not the silence of emptiness but the silence of a city that had shifted registers, the daytime noise replaced by something lower and more constant. Liam had been lying in the dark for approximately twenty minutes, doing the thing he did most nights when sleep was close but not yet arrived: nothing. Watching the ceiling. Letting his mind run down like a clock.
He had almost made it.
His phone lit up the room.
He looked at it for one second—the name on the screen, the hour—and answered before the second ring finished.
"Diana."
"Liam." Her voice had the particular texture of someone who had been awake for the wrong reasons. Controlled, but thin at the edges. "I'm sorry to call at this hour."
"Tell me."
