She'd been gone four hours when I finally admitted the apartment felt wrong.

Not wrong like something was broken or missing. Wrong like a frequency shift — everything exactly where it had always been, and yet the whole space slightly off, the way a song sounds when it's been transposed into the wrong key. Same notes. Different feeling entirely.

I stood in my kitchen and drank the last of the coffee she hadn't finished and told myself this was fine. Normal. She was a college girl going back to college. I was a twenty-seven year old man with a job and a life and a best friend who trusted me...