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When the world ends, it doesn’t scream.It exhales.Sara McKenna was supposed to be somewhere else. Mourning quietly. Honoring the trip she and her father had planned before his heart gave out and left her unmoored. Montréal was meant to be a pause. A brief detour before returning to Dublin, where med school and responsibility waited like a scalpel. Sharp, clean, inescapable.But then the silence came.No alarms. No warning. One moment she was flipping a crêpe, barefoot in a stranger’s borrowed flannel shirt. The next, the city emptied. People vanished. Cars crashed without drivers. Helicopters spiraled into the river. Phones rang to no one. Even the sky seemed to hold its breath.Everyone is gone.Everyone except her.With no idea what happened, or why, Sara must navigate a city turned graveyard, where the boundaries of reality feel increasingly unstable. At first, it''''s just survival: food, water, shelter. Logic. Lists. She’s always been good with those.But Montréal isn’t empty. Not entirely.Animals linger in strange, unexpected places. A standard poodle with unnerving instincts. An Irish wolfhound who becomes her shadow. A black cat that seems to appear and disappear at will, watching her with sharp too knowing eyes. Shadows stretch longer than they should. Objects and places hum faintly with resonance, as if remembering something forgotten.She clutches her father’s urn and her medical knowledge like shields against the growing strangeness that envelops everything. Yet as days slip into weeks she begins to notice changes. In the world, in herself. The science she trusted and learned falters in the face of quiet, uncanny phenomena her father once warned her of.This is not a story of fire, chaos, and systems. This is a slow, intimate unraveling.A world undone by silence and stitched back together by one woman’s will.As she grapples with profound solitude, Sara discovers that loneliness can be a crucible. The place she claims becomes more than shelter. It responds to her. Grows with her. Becomes hers in ways she doesn’t yet understand.With only her father''''s ashes and her own resolve, she will adapt. Grieve. Endure. She will face down the vast emptiness and build something new from the void.The question isn’t whether she’ll survive.It’s who she’ll become in the process.Something ancient was broken.A veil torn.A cascade that swept the world clean and left her behind.Or perhaps, Left her to begin again.