The house, a mausoleum of his personal making, greeted him with its customary pre-dawn hush as he stumbled through the door. Jennifer, a distant memory already consumed by her work; his youngest, a whisper in the halls of academia; Christina, lost to the city’s relentless pulse; Grayson, cocooned in the temporary sanctuary of his paternal grandparents’ embrace. But something clung to the air, an unseen weight he couldn’t yet name. A void where Christina’s space, a shared battlefield with her son, should have vibrated with life. It was an emptiness that pricked him, a subtle discord in the recognizable symphony of his home.