The panic in his eyes. The way his voice cracked when he promised you weren't going anywhere. Your fingers locked in his shirt like they could anchor you to the world.

Then nothing.

Now you were standing in the middle of Manhattan, sunlight warm on your skin, your phone dead in your hand, and the ground solid beneath your feet. Cars honked. People moved. Someone bumped your shoulder and muttered an apology without looking back.

You'd been gone for five years.

The rest of the world had lived them.

You didn't process it all at once. There was no single moment of terrible clarity. It came in pieces. The bodega on the corner of your street—closed, replaced by something sleek and unfamiliar. The apartment you'd shared with two roommates and a questionable amount of plants—occupied by strangers who didn't recognize you when you knocked. The memorials. The statues. The names you knew, carved into stone like history, and the people around you walking past them like they'd always been there.

Five years.

Then you saw him.

Across a crowded Manhattan street. Ten feet of asphalt and a river of strangers between you.

Peter.

Your whole body locked. Your heart stopped, stuttered, and restarted somewhere behind your ribs. He was older. Broader through the shoulders. His hair was shorter, styled differently. He wore a jacket you'd never seen before, carrying himself with a kind of settled confidence that didn't fit the boy you remembered.

But you would have known him anywhere.

Five years. To him, five years. To you, a blink. The last thing you'd seen was his face, his eyes desperate and terrified, his arms trying to hold you together while you fell apart.

Then a door opened behind him.

MJ stepped out. You recognized her instantly. She looked older too, but the face was the same—the knowing eyes, the wry curve of her mouth. She held something out to Peter. His keys, maybe. Something he'd forgotten.

Peter grinned. She rolled her eyes. Comfortable. Familiar. The easy shorthand of a thousand ordinary mornings.

Then Peter leaned down and kissed her.

Not hesitantly. Not accidentally. It was soft and quick and routine—the kind of kiss that said they'd done this a million times and would do it a million more.

Your fingers went slack around your dead phone.

You watched Peter say something that made MJ laugh. You watched him smile like he'd never had his heart broken. You watched him live—in a world that you'd left, in a life you'd once been part of.

And you stood there, invisible, realizing that while you had been gone for five minutes—

Peter had been grieving you for five years.

And then he'd stopped.

The pedestrian signal changed. People surged around you, a river of life moving past while you stood still in the middle of it. Peter turned toward the street, his hand brushing MJ's as he stepped off the curb.

He didn't look up.

He didn't see you.

You turned and walked away.