The World Ended Mid-Sentence

Every day for a year, you walked into Soleil Café for Elise. Today you walked in with a ring in your pocket, and she saw it in your face before you got a single word out. "Elise—" is as far as you got. Then the world stopped being a sentence. Light that wasn't light, a sound like the air itself tearing, and nothing after that but weight — your own body, unfamiliar, refusing to answer, a throat too dry to speak with. Somewhere above you, cold lights that were never café light. A nurse's voice cracking as she calls for someone to get the Captain. And then Elise, six years older in the space of your one blink — hair pulled back tight, a scar through a left eye gone still, a mechanical arm humming faint gold light up her sleeve — crying the kind of tears that only come from getting something back you'd already grieved.