The floor is bare. The centre of the room is empty, except for a single chair. It is not bolted down. It has been placed.
That chair wasn’t here before.
My pulse finally stumbles. I step inside anyway, the door closing behind me with a soft, practiced click that I feel in thebase of my spine. The quiet wraps around me like an old coat, recognising the shape of my silence. I stand there for a long moment, breathing in the smell and the absence, letting it crawl under my skin. I let the memories rise without fighting them for once.
This place taught me how to disappear—not by force, but by the sheer weight of patience. And as I stare at that chair waiting in the dead centre of the room, I understand something with a terrifying, crystalline clarity. Whatever River wants from me next isn’t happening to me. It is happening here. Inside the place that taught me how to stay still long enough for someone else to decide when I was finally allowed to leave.
I stand there for too long—long enough for the room to finish remembering me. The electrical hum settles into something steadier, as if it has adjusted its frequency to accommodate my presence once more. My skin prickles with the eerie sense of fitting back into a mould that never truly stopped existing.
The chair waits. It is positioned perfectly, its legs aligned with the faint scuffs on the linoleum, suggesting that the room prefers things arranged in this specific, clinical way. I do not sit. That distinction matters. I circle the chair instead, my fingertips grazing the air just above the backrest, avoiding the touch. The padding on the walls bears marks I didn’t remember consciously, but recognise with my body—depressions where foreheads were rested and hands were pressed until the physical ache drowned out the noise in my head.
This is where time used to stretch into an infinite, flat line. Minutes folding into hours until my body stopped asking the questions my mouth was no longer allowed to voice.
I close my eyes—not all the way, just enough to let the shadows in. The quiet presses in immediately, thick and expectant. It is the kind of silence that doesn’t need to rush you, because it knows you will give it exactly what it wants eventually.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. Once. I don’t reach for it. It comes again—insistent, but not urgent, like a knock from a guest who already knows they’ll be let in. I pull it out. There is no message, just a live audio connection. Open. Listening.
My breath catches in my throat. “You said you wouldn’t follow me,” I whisper. My voice echoes strangely, swallowed by the padding before it can even find a corner to bounce from.
A pause follows. Then: “I didn’t.”
The voice through the phone is soft, even, and utterly unhurried. It is older than Damien’s, and far calmer. It doesn’t push against the silence; it waits for it. My knees threaten to buckle.
“You’re here,” I say.
“No,” River replies, his voice a low hum. “You are.”
The distinction lands like a blade sliding between my ribs, precise and cold. “I told you this place was yours,” he continues. “I told you I wouldn’t step inside it.”
“Then how?—”
“You don’t need me for this part,” he says gently. “You never did.”
I swallow hard, the sound loud in the void. The chair creaks. I freeze. I didn’t sit. I didn’t even touch it. My gaze snaps to the observation window, the glass dark and unreflective, but I can feel the awareness behind it now. It isn’t eyes or movement; it is pure, concentrated attention.
“This is where you learned stillness,” River says, “but you never learned what to do with it once it worked.”
“I was a child,” I say, my chest aching.
“Yes,” he agrees. “And you were brilliant.”
The word makes bile rise in my throat. “Don’t,” I whisper.
“I’m not praising you,” he says quietly. “I’m naming something you were never allowed to claim.”
The lights flicker once, an acknowledgement from the building itself. “You think this ends with answers,” River continues. “With a memory you can catalogue and file away to tell yourself you’ve reclaimed it.”
The chair creaks again, a subtle, inviting sound. “It doesn’t,” he says. “It ends with a choice.”
My fingers curl around the phone. “What choice?”
Silence. Not absence, but a deep, heavy consideration.
“Sit,” River says. It isn’t a command; it is an assumption.
My body reacts before my mind can intervene—my knees bend, my weight shifts—and I stop myself at the very last second, breath tearing out of my chest in a jagged gasp.
“No,” I say. The word shakes, but it is mine.
