It burns, like something scalding pressed against ice. My skin feels raw, overheated against the steady drizzle. I am a coal abandoned in the rain, hissing faintly as the contrast gnaws at me, leaving behind the clinging, unshakable itch of something that refuses to cool.
Bennett straightens, his posture crisp, but his eyes are distant—adrift somewhere deep in that labyrinth of a mind he never seems to leave. I doubt he ever does.
A strange sensation begins to stir inside me, quiet at first, then sharp and all-consuming. When I first arrived, I looked down on him, dismissing him as just another eccentric academic detached from reality. But now, standing this close and watching him retreat into himself, sheltering behind the fortress of his own intellect, I feel something unsettlingly familiar.
It’s like staring at a warped reflection of myself, one that overthinks, underfeels, and hides behind a wall of carefully chosen words.
“That’s a beautiful lie you just told,” he says, his calm voice slicing through the quiet like a scalpel. “And you almost believe it. But what you really mean is that sanitybetrayedyou.”
His words send a shudder through me, a stronger wave of discomfort pulsing beneath my skin.
It feels as if I am nothing more than a trembling mass of flesh under his microscope—my layers peeled away as his mind dissects me with curiosity, fingers metaphorically probing, pressing dents into my psyche just to see how deep they will go.
“It kept you alive when you didn’t want to be. Made you watch when you should’ve looked away. You talk like a man still standing in the ashes, pretending the fire was someone else’s.”
Each word slices deeper, like a fine, deliberate cut. A headache blooms in the center of my forehead, radiating toward my temples, pulsing in rhythm with my heartbeat.
“I’m so grateful I got the chance to meet a person like you,” he says after a pause, his tone almost reverent. “Finally, someone I can actually talk to.”
That’s absurd. He has plenty of people to talk to—students, colleagues, admirers who worship every word he spills. I’ve read the comments, the articles, the praise that practically licks the soles of his shoes. He’s not starving for an audience.
Unless what he wants to talk about isn’t psychology at all.
“I’ve seen people break,” he goes on, “not because of tragedy, but because of silence. The absence of meaning is far more dangerous than pain.”
I almost laugh. Almost.
The irony is too rich. For all his eloquence, he’s the one bleeding through those words. That’s his confession—his brother’s suicide. Every article mentioned how Bennett Johnson buried his grief under theories and papers, building meaning over the ruins.
How subtle.
It’s all unraveling far more easily than I expected. Bennett is fragile beneath that intellectual polish—an eggshell mind pretending to be armor. And I’ve cracked him right on time.
“We’ve only just started,” he continues, that manic edge sharpening in his tone, “but I already feel consumed by this conversation. Let’s go. I don’t have much time, and I want us to cover everything before it’s too late.” I drag a hand down my beard, staying rooted to the spot. His enthusiasm falters whenhe notices I’m not following, and his brows knit together in confusion. “What’s wrong?”
I exhale slowly, letting weariness tint my voice. “Actually, professor,” I begin, “I was hoping you’d help me with something else.”
He freezes, a spark of intrigue lighting his eyes.
“I’m interested,” I continue, “in diving deeper into what makes the human mind tip—what flips that hidden switch, what drives a person to step over that invisible line between sanity and madness—to do something unnatural, something that defies everything we call normal.”
My gaze locks on his, steady and unblinking. “For some, it’s a tragedy,” I add quietly. “For others, it’s meaning.”
Suspicion flits across his face like a shadow slipping over glass, subtle and fleeting yet impossible to miss. He studies me for a long, deliberate beat, his eyes slicing through the thin space between us, searching for the layers I have carefully draped around myself. Still, the glint in his gaze gives him away. He is captivated, and the ambiguity I offer only fans the flames of that fevered curiosity.
“Go on,” he says, voice low and coaxing—the kind of tone that belongs to someone who can’t help but lean closer to the flame.
I wet my lips, steadying my breath as I prepare to replay the conversation I’ve rehearsed a dozen times before. “I’m focusing on a very specific group of people,” I begin slowly, watching his reaction. “Individuals who were convicted of violent crimes—some sentenced to death, others condemned to spend the rest of their lives behind bars—cases that stand out because of how abruptly they snapped. I want to understand what really happens in those moments. What breaks.”
He tilts his head, his eyes narrowing with thought. “You don’t believe what others say, then?” he questions. “That some peopleare simply… broken? Or is the information about them not enough for you?”
“Is it ever enough for those who truly want to know more?” I ask, meeting his gaze evenly. “I think you know exactly what I mean, professor. People aren’t just born evil—I don’t buy that. They become what they are because of what happens to them. Circumstances, trauma, moments that bend their minds in ways they can’t come back from.”
The corner of his mouth dips, and he chews at his lower lip as if weighing how much to say. “What or who do you want to talk about?”
I let the silence linger, a deliberate pause thick enough to draw tension into the air as if it were a bowstring pulled tight. He does not realize it, but no measure of time could have readied him for the name that is about to leave my lips.
“About Iris McKale.”
