I wait.
“My mom,” he starts.
Stops.
I don’t move.
I don’t breathe.
“She was never sick.”
The words land slow.
I heard them.
I understood them.
Yet I don’t understand them.
• • •
“Cassian —”
“She chose.” His jaw is tight. His eyes are somewhere else. “She chose to go. That’s — that’s what the sirens were. That’s what that night was.”
The room tilts slightly.
Eleven years old.
The lights through my curtains.
Red and blue.
The way he came through my window and sobbed into my chest and I held him and said nothing because I had no words.
I thought she was sick.
Everyone said she was sick.
She chose to go.
“Cassian —”
“I didn’t know how bad it was.” He says it fast. Like he’s been holding it for years and now it’s coming out whether he wants it to or not. “I knew things were bad at home. I knew she was getting— I knew. But I didn’t know she was going to —”
He stops.
His hands are pressed flat against his knees.
Holding something down.
• • •
“She left me there,” he says. Quiet. “With him.”
I sit down.
Not next to him.
