The Quiet Kind of Breaking

Taylor doesn't know when it started feeling like this-like every day is something she has to survive instead of live.

She wakes up tired, goes to work pretending she isn't, and comes home to a silence that somehow feels louder than everything she's endured outside her door. Twenty years old, and already fluent in the art of holding it together where no one can see it breaking.

Then there's Travis.

Her coworker. Her almost-thought. The boy she shouldn't notice but does anyway. He exists in the small spaces of her day-between shifts, between breaths, between the versions of herself she shows the world and the one she hides.

He doesn't fix her. He doesn't even try.

He just... stays.

And Taylor isn't sure what scares her more:
the idea of being seen,
or the possibility of not being invisible anymore.

A story about quiet unraveling, soft moments that hurt more than they heal, and the kind of connection that doesn't ask you to be okay first.