Then nothing.
The shift took everything from the moment the sound started to the moment I came back. A clean cut in the tape of it — one frame and then another frame with no frames between.
"Do you know what you shifted into," Lumi says.
"No." I breathe. "But I know what the wounds looked like from the file. Large. Precise." My hands are still on the table. "Whatever came out of me didn't hesitate."
Lumi is quiet for a moment.
"The corner," she says. "After."
I went to the corner of the basement and I sat down on the cold concrete floor and I put my back against the wall and I stayed there.
That's all.
I stayed there while the dark stayed dark and then went grey and then went lighter in the thin strip under the door and I watched the light change and I didn't think. I was only capable of sitting in the corner with my back against the wall waiting for whatever came next because whatever came next was going to happen regardless of whether I moved.
"I sat in the corner," I say. "I watched the light change under the door. When they found me I told them I didn't know what happened. Because I didn't."
My voice stays level. I let it.
"And now you do," Lumi says.
Lumi's pen resting on the page, several pages now, more than it felt like while I was saying it.
"He had his hand on my throat," I say. "And worse was coming. And my body did the only thing it could."
It settles somewhere in my chest — not peace, not resolution, just the weight of something true finding the place it was always supposed to occupy.
"I was fourteen," I say. "I was alone in a basement. And I was more than he knew."
Lumi sets her pen down.
She looks at what she's written. She doesn't rush it — she reads it the way she does everything, fully, giving it the weight it requires.
Then she looks at me.
"Is there anything else," she says. "Anything from that night you haven't said."
I go back through it. The stairs. The dark. The book I never found out how it ended. Curtis James and the cold of his hand and the words he said like they were reasonable. The heat. The sound. The corner of the basement floor and the light changing under the door and sitting there until morning.
"No," I say. "That's all of it."
She looks at Dalton. He nods once — not permission, just confirmation.
She squares the pages against the table.
"We'll both sign it," she says. "Witnessed and dated. I'll make sure it reaches the right person before the session." She holds my eyes. "You did well."
My throat does the thing I don't give it permission to do. I breathe through it, one breath, two, until it passes. Dalton crosses the room and sits beside me and his hand comes to the back of my head and holds — warm and certain, the bond running steady — and I lean into him and let it.
Lumi waits. She sits with it the way she sits with everything — fully present, not managing, not filling the space. Just there.
After a while I straighten.
"Tomorrow," I say.
"Tomorrow everyone knows the truth," she says.
