Its pages held the worst of me. Cruel thoughts. Violent choices. A chronicle of the monster I once was.
But that chapter was over.
With quiet reverence, I began tearing the pages out one by one. The sound was sickening, like flesh being pulled from bone. My throat tightened as I dropped the torn sheets into Lee’s fireplace. The flames caught quickly, devouring the past with greedy tongues of orange and gold.
I watched in silence, tears pricking the backs of my eyes—not from grief, but from the strange hollowness of letting go.
The journal was gone.
And with it, the final piece of who I used to be.
A strange calm settled over me in Lee’s cluttered front room. For the first time in years, I felt clean.
Empty, yes—but also ready.
It was time to begin again.
I took a deep breath and returned to Jack’s house.
The moment I stepped through the front door, I felt it—the absence.
No footsteps. No voice. No questions.
Just an eerie stillness, pressing in around me like fog.
I moved quietly from room to room, the silence growing heavier with each step. Then I saw him sitting in a chair by the window, his back to me, still as stone.
He didn’t turn when I entered. His posture was rigid, unmoving, as if he’d been frozen in thought for hours. I cleared my throat softly.
Nothing.
I stepped closer, my heels brushing against the wooden floor. Still no reaction.
That’s when I felt a coldness in the air, not from the weather, but fromhim.
Jack was ignoring me.Deliberately.
And for reasons I didn’t want to admit, it cut deeper than I expected. I was the one who wanted out—the one who had set all this in motion. I had assumed—naively, maybe—that Jack would cling to the hope of reconciliation. But now, faced with his silence, the rejection slammed into me like a wave.
I swallowed the ache rising in my chest and forced my voice to stay calm.
“Jack… are you okay?”
Still, he didn’t respond.
His silence was more honest than any argument we’d ever had. I couldn’t even meet his gaze, afraid of what I might see there.
“Jack,” I said gently, “I’m sorry, my love. But I’m leaving… just for a little while.”
I hesitated, then added, “I’m going to look for the Moon Dagger. I need time. We need time. This… whatever we are now, it’s not working.”
At last, he moved—just slightly—a slow nod.
When he finally spoke, his voice was so quiet I almost missed it.
“I think what broke us… was that we stopped chasing what we believed in.”
He paused, staring out the window, eyes distant. “The daggers. The myth. The story we used to tell ourselves.”
