And I skip forward the video.
Big mistake, because the scene I skipped to is the one where Caleb’s hands are yanking mine behind my back, and Josh’s fingers are pressing against my cheeks to open up.
Bile surges sharp and fast in my throat.
My knees almost give. I can’t breathe, my body is remembering too much at once, every sound, every smell, every desperate heartbeat from that day. My hands are trembling so violently the image blurs, but I can’t look away, the panic flooding me until I can’t feel my fingers.
The sound of the office door opening rips through the suffocating haze. My head turns slowly, like it’s the only speed I can manage.
Alex is in the doorway. Breathing hard, like he just ran here. His tie hangs loose around his neck. His face, worried and almost scared, makes something in my chest twist in a way I don’t have the strength to name.
His gaze drops to the camera clutched in my hands, then back to me.
And in that moment, I know. I can’t run from this anymore. The truth. The rot under my skin. The memories aren’t going back in the box. I can’t outrun what happened.
How did my day go from light to this crushing black?
“Lucas,” he breathes, stepping toward me.
I stumble back, shaking. My hand presses against my chest, trying to rub out the ache. It doesn’t work. So I hit it. Once. Twice. Harder, because maybe pain will replace the pressure, but it only gets worse.
The camera slips from my fingers, the sound of it hitting the floor swallowed by the roaring in my head.
My vision smears at the edges. My knees give.
And then Alex is there, solid and warm, catching me before I hit the ground. My body collapses against him, too weak to hold itself up.
He cups my jaw, tilts my face toward him. His touch is tender, but my brain is too loud to register it fully. His face hovers above mine—too beautiful, too close. Angelic in a way that feels cruel, like he’s here to take my soul.
His eyes are soft, so painfully soft, and that hurts worse than anything.
His lips move. He’s saying something. I can’t hear it.
All I hear is my heartbeat—slamming in my ears, pounding in my skull, thrumming in my fingertips.
My chest is heaving. My breaths are short and shallow. I’m gulping for air, but it’s not enough, it’s never enough. My thoughts are breaking apart like shards of glass, slipping through my fingers before I can hold on.
I feel the edges of the room folding in, my vision tunneling, my body shutting down, one piece at a time.
And then, just like that, it’s gone, everything quiets, and my world folds in on itself and goes dark.
FORTY-EIGHTEEN
LUCAS
I press myself deeper into the hospital bed, as if the mattress could swallow me whole and hide me from Alex’s presence. I keep my body curled toward the wall, away from him. I haven’t moved since I woke from whatever heavy slumber had dragged me under. His scent lingers in the air, slipping past my defenses and filling my lungs. I turn my face into the pillow, pressing my head hard into it, desperate to breathe in its stale, cotton scent instead of his.
Life has never been fair to me. That isn’t self-pity — it’s fact. I’ve carried it like an unshakable truth, as if I were born to pay for my mother’s sins… or as if I were the second life of someone the universe still wanted to punish.
I remember waking up in a hospital bed five years ago. My mother was there, slouched in the chair beside me, her eyes swollen and red. She spoke, I saw her lips move, but I heard nothing. Nothing at all. It was as if the world had been turned off. The silence was absolute, and my mind was too numb even to panic. She tried to make me speak, but I couldn’t. My brain refused to form words and wouldn’t push sound out of my throat.
The silence… God, the silence.
At first, it swallowed me whole, suffocating me in its completeness. But somewhere within that suffocation, I found... bliss. I no longer had to hear the world. The shouting. The cruelty. The way people’s voices could stab into you like glass. All gone.
And my voice — I think I killed it myself. Even when my throat ached to clear itself, my brain wouldn’t let it. I didn’t want it to. Staying quiet was easier. Silence made me invisible. And being invisible meant I was safe.
I stayed in that silence for years. But I also remained in the dark pit that came with it, a depression so deep I didn’t function for months after the incident. Even a year later, I was still sinking. It was Martha who quietly saved my life, who pulled me back into the world. She was the one who took me to get hearing aids, who signed me up for ASL classes. I learned to move my hands as if they were my new voice. But I did it all mechanically, as if my body were just following commands without my consent.
