Chapter 35 - CH 35 - Adrian's Descent

If Amelia's world had contracted into a sharp, focused, and fiercely defended point of ambition a diamond forged under immense pressure then Adrian's expanded into a vast, echoing, and increasingly derelict hell of his own making. The silence from her end of the universe was no longer a strategic pause, a temporary wound that time and explanation might heal. It had become a void, absolute and judgmental, a cosmic rejection. The blocked number was a wall he could not scale, its impenetrable surface reflecting back only his own failure. The finality in her voice on that last, shattered phone call "You're just like your father." was a verdict from which there was no appeal, a life sentence passed down by the one person whose opinion had ever truly mattered. And in the crushing, soul-grinding solitude that followed, he began to fear, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that she was right.