Rain lashed against the windows of the coffee shop, mirroring the tempest brewing inside Amelia. Liam had just recounted the camping trip, and it felt like she was listening to an entirely different story. He remembered it as a rollicking adventure, full of laughter and inside jokes. She saw only the cold, the relentless drizzle, and the gnawing anxiety of being lost for hours in the dense forest. "You really think it was *that* fun?" she managed, her voice tight, a tremor in her hands as she reached for her lukewarm latte.
The way he dismissed her fear, chalking it up to “being a drama queen,” caused a fresh wave of something unpleasant to wash over her. It was as if her experiences, her anxieties, were irrelevant, erased from the narrative. She found herself picking at a loose thread on the sleeve of her sweater, her eyes fixed on the tiny imperfection as if it held all the answers. The silence stretched between them, heavy and suffocating.
She finally pushed back her chair, the scrape against the tile a jarring sound in the quiet cafe. "I should go," she said, her voice a flat monotone. He just shrugged, oblivious. It was as though she did not matter.