Promises and Pomegranates by Sav R. Miller

PROLOGUE
AS A CHILD, I got used to silence.
The kind found in sleepy hospital rooms, hidden between the dull,
intermittent beeping of an electric monitor and the steady drip of an IV bag.
With each interruption, nurses entering to draw blood or family members
coming to offer false moral support, my body craved the void.
I fell in love with the innate stillness of it—the calm it provides, the
secrets you can wedge into its depths.
Learned to seek it out in times of chaos, a force to ground myself in.
Eventually, it became a necessity.
The most difficult addiction to curb.
An obsession.
A… condition.
My peers in college, and later my colleagues, dubbed it a psychological
disorder. Said my brain had wired itself to short-circuit under certain stimuli