.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。. A COLD, LONELY NIGHT IN LA 【３：１６　ＡＭ】

Lily, not one to go to sleep early, found herself particularly sad this Tuesday night. The season was changing, the nights were getting more chilly, and ever after her break--if you could even call it that--with Michael Reeves, more lonesome than ever before. She grasped at her bedside table, feeling around for her newest addiction to numb the pain of her awful thoughts: cigarettes. Lily knows she shouldn't, not when she'd been repulsed by the idea of picking up anything that sizzled and smoked a mere three months ago, but it had become her secret; her only solace amid a desperation that feels more like abandonment than a chance to heal.

She scrounged around the top of her dark-oak drawer, fingers in search of a familiar plastic lighter she'd now have a hard time living without. Once found, without hesitation, she struck the flint wheel, igniting the end of her cigarette into a controlled flame. Smoke seeped from within its core. She puffed. The nicotine tasted awful. She did not care.

Minutes slipped by as she stared at the pale pink wall joined to the side of her bedframe. In the quiet stillness of the moment, her phone buzzed—a message from an unknown number jolting her out of reverie.

Lily slowly picked up her phone with her free hand, unlocking it and hastily opening the message; who was messaging her? And what could they possibly want?