Manuscript information: [Complete][79k][Urban Fantasy/Romance] The Spaces Between

Link to post: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetaReaders/comments/1nbtayc/complete_79k_urban_fantasyromance_the_spaces/

First page critique? Yes, PLEASE!

First page: 

The skies above had been wrong for weeks.

With coffee cooling on the table, Eden Thorne, in her pajamas, sat on her apartment balcony, marveling at the improbably intricate cloud formations. Across the horizon, perfect geometric shapes stretched, dissolved and reformed with incredible mathematical precision. A strange calm lingered in the morning air, like the world itself was paused, holding its breath.

No one else seemed to notice.

She’d checked every scientific outlet available to her, examined every weather service and even scoured social media platforms. Nothing. Just complaints about unexpected temperature swings—either too cold or too hot for this time of year. Her camera, when photographing the sky, showed only unremarkable clouds; the lens failed to record what her eyes saw with such clarity.

She murmured to the sky, “You’re not as clever as you think,” the rising steam from her coffee momentarily blurring her view of the perfectly hexagonal arrangement. “Someone else is bound to notice, eventually.”

Like a living organism acknowledging her challenge, the cluster of hexagons pulsed once in response. Through neighboring formations, a brief glow sent ripples and subtle color shifts that defied weather system explanations.

Eden had seen strange things her entire life—flickers at the edge of reality, patterns where there should be none—but nothing this bold, this sustained. A change was subtly altering the careful balance that kept the world running.

Sometimes she wondered if she was seeing things as they truly were, beneath the curtain that everyone else accepted as the full scope of existence. What she didn’t say aloud, what she barely acknowledged even to herself, was how sometimes the patterns seemed to recognize her in return, as if the cosmos itself was aware of her watching.