She didn't check her watch. She didn't plan her next move. She walked until the car was a speck, then until it disappeared. She sat down cross-legged in the middle of nowhere and watched a single cloud take twenty minutes to dissolve. She listened to her own breath as if it were a language she was only now learning to speak.
Her phone was in the car, three miles back, turned off and buried under a sweatshirt. For the first time in a decade, no one knew exactly where she was. And the silence was not empty. It was full. Full of the whisper of wind across the salt, the thud of her own heart, the slow, deliberate crunch of her footsteps. alina lopez all the time in the world
But time was not an enemy. Time was a medium. And Alina Lopez, for one crystalline afternoon, had all of it. She didn't check her watch