That moment came on a Thursday night.

  He'd reached his usual spot by the railing overlooking the river, and this time, instead of pretending, he spoke.

  "Are you going to stand there all night?"

  He turned, expecting... what? An explanation? An apology? Instead, he caught only a glimpse of her—dark hair, pale skin, those eyes—before she turned and ran.

  And then something happened that he couldn't explain.

  His heart didn't just ache. It broke.

  Suddenly his legs wouldn't hold him. He knelt on the path, one hand braced against the cold ground while the other clutched at his chest, fingers digging into his shirt as if he couldn’t physically hold himself together. For a terrifying moment, he thought he was having a heart attack—the pressure was there, the crushing weight, the inability to breathe. But this was no medical emergency. This was something far worse.

  It was the pain of having something essential ripped from his chest. Not his heart—his heart still beat, stubborn and cruel in its persistence—but something deeper. Something he hadn't known existed until this moment, until she ran, until he felt the tearing sensation of her absence like a wound that would never close.

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  He knelt there, one hand braced against the cold ground, the other pressed to his chest as if he could feel the phantom threads that had just been severed, and felt tears streaming down his face before he even realized he was crying. Great, heaving sobs tore from his chest, sounds he didn't recognize, sounds that belonged to someone else entirely. It was grief, pure and primal, the kind of loss that had no name. As if something essential had been severed from him. As if she had taken a piece of his soul when she ran.

  The dreams came back to him then—not the vague impressions of recent weeks, but the full force of a lifetime of them. Mountains. Snow. A woman with dark hair standing at the edge of a cliff, reaching for him. A voice calling his name in a language he shouldn't understand. And always, always, the feeling of loss. Of something slipping through his fingers. Of being left behind.

  He knelt there for what felt like hours, his body shaking, his mind a battlefield of images and emotions he couldn't process. When the tears finally stopped, when he could breathe again, he stayed on the ground, too drained to move. It took him another hour—maybe two—to compose himself enough to stand, to walk back to his penthouse, to pretend that any of this was normal.

  She wouldn't follow him again. He was sure of it. Whatever game she was playing, he'd scared her off for good.

  But a few days later, he felt it again. That pull. That awareness of being watched. And this time, instead of fear or confusion, he felt something else. Resolve.

  He needed to get to the bottom of this. He needed answers. And he wouldn't let himself feel weak again.

  And now, after speaking to her directly, after feeling her touch on his face and recognizing something in it that his conscious mind couldn't name—now the malfunction had become a full system crash.