Lena sat up in bed, the cold sheet beside her a dead weight. Mark’s side. Empty. Again. The digital clock on the nightstand bled red numbers: 3:17 AM. Through the thin apartment walls, she heard the muffled thud of the building’s stairwell door. Footsteps. Too light for Mark’s heavy tread.
And in the dream she was still having—the one she hadn’t woken from at all—a phone buzzed on the nightstand. Not Mark’s. Hers. A text from an unknown number. No words. Just a photo. ntr nightmare
Her, asleep. The timestamp from five minutes from now. And behind her in the frame, standing in the bedroom doorway, a figure wearing a watch that caught the moonlight. Lena sat up in bed, the cold sheet beside her a dead weight
A long silence. Then the sound of his keys—the heavy jangle of the front door set. “You’re right,” he said quietly. “There isn’t. Not anymore.” Footsteps
He held up the phone. The photo was timestamped. Date, time, GPS coordinates. All wrong. All damning. And in the image, a man’s arm draped over her shoulder. She couldn’t see his face. Just a watch on his wrist—a stainless steel diver, same as Mark’s.