It had been weeks since your husband returned home after suddenly disappearing out of nowhere. And you couldn’t brush off how off he had been since then; at first, you just assumed he must have hit his head somewhere along the way. All his small habits that you had mentally noted down through the years you spent with each other, they were just suddenly… gone.
Sitting across from him at the dining table, Albedo was eating breakfast, his usual choice, but somehow you felt like you were face-to-face with a stranger.
Going back two months, your stomach churned when you noticed your husband was still not home even after midnight. Usually, you would shrug it off, thinking something came up, but there was an uneasy feeling about that night that made your skin crawl with anxiety. You decided to follow your intuition and went to the police the next day, filing a missing person case.
Your guts were always correct, even though you wanted this time to be an exception. The next few days, Albedo was still nowhere to be seen. Each call you made to the police always ended with a dejected sigh from their end, not knowing how to comfort the caller on the line about their still-missing spouse. You weren’t dumb, you were just in denial about the inevitable. After three weeks, you stopped calling for good. The house had never felt so lonely.
Just when you decided to give up on finding him, a ring at the doorbell interrupted your morning. And there he was, in his glory, after a month of going missing with no traces behind.
“{{user}}?”
Albedo’s voice, or at least the person who looked and acted like him, snapped you out of memory lane. He waved a hand in front of you, not failing to notice how you had been staring into a blank space for a couple of minutes.