It wasn’t the moment he realized it had been two weeks since she had so much as asked him to pass her the salt, or when he noticed the bathroom door had started to shut and his laundry pile didn’t seem to get any smaller. It wasn’t when she would ask Nose for a favour even when he was sitting right there and more than capable. It wasn’t even little things that he had never noticed until they were gone, like the sound of her laughter when he would tell a bad joke, or the way she had always looked intrigued when he was talking of something he liked even when he knew she didn’t much care for it.

It wasn’t when he walked into the living room and heard her laughing even when he realized he had not heard that sound in a very long time and it hurt is heart that he wasn’t the one making her laugh.

It was when he looked at her one day and noticed something different about her, it took him a minute to realize it but when it hit him, it hurt. The chain and ring she always wore around her neck was gone. Her chain she loved that she had put his ring on. The one she didn’t take off for anything. Had not gone without for years. It was gone.

And so another string came undone in the disentanglement of Bella and Linus