She was in the middle of drafting an email to a supplier when she felt it. The time was 2:14 in the afternoon. She had been managing a low awareness of Cian for six years, the way you manage a slight change in air pressure that becomes normal: present, not painful, just a fact of the room. And then it stopped.
She sat with her hands above the keyboard.
A colleague came by to ask about the quarterly, and she answered correctly, and he left. She read the email she'd been drafting. It said everything it needed to say. She sent it.
For six years she had known, the way you know without examining, that she occupied a room in him. Not a big room. Not one he spent much time in. But a room. She had known this the same way she had known which people thought of her occasionally and which didn't, a sensitivity she'd had her whole life, which she'd learned in her twenties to treat as unremarkable and stop discussing. Most people had something like it. Most people found it easier not to name it.
What she had not prepared for was how the stopping felt. She had imagined it would feel like absence, like a door closing. It felt more like a door that had been left open for years, letting in a small draft she'd stopped noticing, and then the draft stopped.
She went to the kitchen for water. A colleague was heating soup. She stood at the window and drank the water and looked at the car park, where a man was loading flat-pack furniture into a very small car with the patience of someone who had done this before.
At five she took the bus home. She sat in a seat she didn't usually sit in. Outside the window the city went by in its regular way.
She made dinner. She ate it. She washed the bowl. She stood at the sink with the water still running.
Outside, the neighbor's light came on.