Just long enough to confirm the truth.
“River.”
Everything inside me fractures.
Not explodes —fractures.
Clean breaks. Sharp edges. Irreversible.
Because now I understand.
River didn’tremindme of the asylum.
He didn’tguess.
He knew.
And whatever happened the night I stopped talking…
Damien was part of it.
“You knew,” I whisper. “You fucking knew.”
Damien doesn’t flinch.
He never does.
But I can feel it now—The crack behind his silence.
The guilt he’s been burying like a corpse.
“You knew it was him,” I breathe, the realisation sinking in like teeth through skin. “Even before I remembered.”
He exhales once through his nose.
Not denial. Not shame. Just… inevitability.
“I suspected,” he says quietly. “There were pieces. Patterns. A name scratched into the underside of your bed frame. A moth wing pinned to the vent. But you were slipping so fast I didn’t have time to confirm it.”
My legs feel unsteady.
I sink down onto the edge of the bed—no strength left in my spine.
“You let me think I was crazy.”
“I let you survive,” he snaps, voice sharp enough to cut. “You were already halfway gone. If I’d told you then, if I’d said his name, it would’ve undone what little you had left.”
“So you letmebe the one to resurrect him.”
Silence.
A colder one now.
Not anger. Not grief.
Something tighter.
“I saw him in your head before you ever said a word,” Damien murmurs, stepping toward me. “In the way you twitched when moths hit the light. In the way youpausedwhen the air got too quiet.”
