Those words hit differently than the rest. There was nothing around them this time, nothing trying to explain them away or make them easier to swallow. I just left them there between us exactly as they were.
“They said I’d been there for… a while,”I added after a second– though the number didn’t matter. It never really did. My mouth twitched, filling my mouth with a bittersweet taste.
“They took me after that. Authorities.”I exhaled slowly.
“Then I ended up where I ended up.”There was no reason to say it out loud. We both already knew.
I adjusted my position on the floor, pain and pins and needles crawling through my legs hard enough that they should’ve dragged my attention away from everything else, but they barely even touched me.
“He didn’t know where I was.”It came out detached in a way I couldn’t control.
“He said he kept looking even after that. Even when people told him to stop.”
My gaze dropped fully to the floor again, unfocused.
“He said he didn’t stop until he couldn’t find anything left to follow.”
I pulled a breath in through my nose and held it there for a moment before finally letting it out.
“He didn’t leave me,”I said it again, my voice rougher this time, like the words had already been dragged through me once before. There was nothing left to prove anymore. I just needed to hear them out loud again, even if I couldn’t fully understand why. The room went still behind me again. I kept my eyes forward. Something in me refused to turn around and see whatever expression he had on his face now. Everything started drifting for a second, the room around me going dull and distant, and then
“... Fuck.”Almost under his breath, but I heard it. I didn’t lift my head, didn’t look at him.
“But she was right, Zwierek.”The words stumbled on the way out, catching in the middle like some part of me regretted saying them the second they left my mouth. Then they just hung there between us with no way to pull them back.“No.”His voice stayed low, but something in the way he said it still hit hard enough to stay under my skin.
“She wasn’t.”I felt my teeth press together at how fast the answer came. Not the words themselves. The speed of it. Like he’d already heard that sentence in his head long before I ever said it out loud.
“They did this to you,”he went on, and this time his voice carried something heavier beneath it. The kind of anger people try to keep under control when they know letting it out fully would change the entire room.
“Everything before. All of it. That’s what shaped you.”My fingers curled tight against the floor. My eyes fixated on the same spot.“If she hadn’t,”he stopped himself, exhaled once,then continued.“If you hadn’t been dragged through that from the start, you wouldn’t be here. None of this would have happened.”
I let the words sit. Not because I agreed, because I didn’t. There was something in it that sounded right if you didn’t look too closely. Something that could almost make sense if you wanted it to. If you needed it to. But… no.
My throat moved when I swallowed. Something in me pushed back anyway, stubborn, sitting deep enough that he couldn’t reach it just by talking. It wasn’t her, it wasn’t just before, it wasn’t just… fate or whatever the fuck he wanted to call it. He was in it too, he just didn’t say that part.
Little Ghost, you hear that, don’t you?
The way he says it. The way he almost makes it sound real. Like there actually is a clear line, a place to put the blame so it doesn’t stain everything else. You’d almost believe him if you wanted to, I could if I wanted to, but I didn’t.
I let out a breath, slow and uneven.
“She didn’t just leave,”I said after a moment. My voice came out lower this time, rough in a way that felt harder to keep under control.“She…”I paused, my brow pulling together for a second. The words felt uncomfortably familiar the moment they left my mouth.
“She ended it. She killed herself.”
And there it was. Out in the open, impossible to take back or turn into anything else. The room stayed exactly the same, but I still felt it somewhere deep in my body. Air left through my nose as I finally forced myself to move. I leaned back, pulling my hand from the floor into my lap, my fingers tightening hard enough in the fabric of my shirt to hurt.
“She saw something wrong before anyone else did,”I said, staring ahead now instead of down, but not really seeing anything.“She couldn’t live with it.”
The words stayed between us, raw enough that neither of us wanted to touch them.
“And I get that.”That one left my mouth before I had time to think about it, and once it was out there, I let it stay. I dragged a breath into my lungs and let it out again, but my body still felt too tight for it to make any difference.
“I understand why she did it.”Silence.
“I think about it too.”I felt it somewhere low in me the second it left my mouth, even though I never intended to put that much of myself into it.
“Not all the time,”I added quickly, like that mattered. Like that changed anything.“Just… sometimes.”My fingers tightened, fabric twisting in my grip.“When it gets too loud.”
