Emma's POV

The night air, thick with the scent of damp earth and distant city fumes, pressed in around me like a shroud. This was my last night in the home , the only space that felt truly mine since the world had splintered. My belongings, meager as they were, lay in a few battered cardboard boxes, each one a relic of a life I was about to abandon. The familiar clutter of textbooks, thrift-store finds, and sentimental trinkets — a faded photograph of Mom and Dad, a chipped mug Jake had painted for me in elementary school — felt like fragments of a dream, soon to be swallowed by a reality I could barely comprehend.