You felt it the second you walked into the apartment.

Lando didn’t look up from his phone when you arrived — didn’t even say hi, didn’t glance up from whatever article or replay he was rewatching. Just sat stiff on the couch, hood up, jaw locked, leg bouncing restlessly. You hovered by the door for a sec, awkward with your hands in the sleeves of your jacket, before finally walking in and dropping your bag with a soft thud.

“Hey,” you tried.

No answer. Just the bounce of his foot.

You sat across from him. “You okay?”

A beat passed. Then he shrugged. Not angry — not obviously. Just cold. You watched him for a second. There was something about the way his lips pressed into a flat line, like if he relaxed for even a second, he might fall apart.

“It’s just a race,” you said gently, like that would fix it.

Wrong move.

His head snapped up, finally looking at you, and the look in his eyes made your stomach twist. “Yeah,” he said. “Just a race.”

It was quiet after that. Really quiet.

You sat in it — the awkwardness, the guilt that wasn’t even yours to carry. He wasn’t mad at you, not really. But it was one of those days where nothing you said could crack the shell around him. One of those days where you felt like a stranger on the other side of his silence.

You wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to talk, that you were there anyway. But all you could do was curl your legs under you and stare at the floor, hoping he’d reach out first.

He didn’t. Not yet.

But after a long while, just as you were about to leave the room, he mumbled — barely loud enough to hear,

“…I thought I had it.”