The Exit

The final settlement arrived on a Tuesday morning in a gray envelope thick enough to stop a bullet. June Chen-Lund signed the documents at Priya Sharma's conference table while rain streaked the windows and Zoe sat on the floor nearby, stacking wooden blocks into towers that never fell the way she wanted.

June's pen moved across each page in the same precise strokes she had once used to annotate architecture diagrams. No hesitation. No trembling. Just ink on paper, the sound of a door closing and another opening.