Distant

Abby had always prided herself on being able to read people, especially Remo. It was one of the reasons she'd felt safe with him, why she had fallen for him so deeply. But lately, something was off. She could sense it in the way his eyes lingered on her when he thought she wasn't looking, the way his touch, though still gentle, held a hesitation that hadn't been there before. It was subtle—so subtle that it would have been easy to dismiss it as stress, as something external, if she didn't know him so well.

But she did. And it terrified her.

In the days since she first noticed the shift, Abby had tried to convince herself that she was imagining things, that Remo was just preoccupied with business or something else that had nothing to do with her. But the more she tried to push those thoughts away, the more they festered, growing into an all-consuming anxiety that gnawed at her from the inside out.