The sound of the lock turning echoed louder than it should have.
The doctor was gone, but the silence he left behind lingered like a weight. I stared at the door long after it clicked shut, not because I expected him to return but because of the way he'd left. Quiet. Final. As if something had just ended… or something else was about to begin.
I slowly leaned back into the mattress, its cold stiffness pressing against the curve of my spine.
My eyes drifted across the room, though I already knew what I'd find. Walls too white. Light too harsh. Shadows that didn't belong to furniture.
And the notebook.
It lay neatly at the foot of the bed, exactly where the masked man had set it down before he left. I curled toward it, hand reaching halfway before I stopped. As if touching it might pull me back into everything I'd poured into its pages—every ache, every cry I hadn't spoken aloud. My fingers hovered above the cover.
I blinked against the ceiling lights, wishing for darkness. Wishing, more than anything, that I could vanish inside memory instead of this room. Jason's face came unbidden to my mind—his eyes steady, his voice soft when he said, "Then we start with memories."
He was trying. I knew that. But what did trying mean when I was unraveling by the second?
A soft breath escaped me, almost a sob but not quite. Just a hollow sound from somewhere deep inside.
I closed my eyes and saw my mother.
She'd always known the right words to say. Even when the world seemed determined to give me nothing but silence, she'd find a way to break through it. Her voice was my anchor, soft but firm. Now, all I had were fragments of her, scattered in my memory, like broken pieces of a puzzle that no longer fit together.
Would she be proud of me? Or heartbroken? Or both?
I turned, my eyes unconsciously flicking toward the door. It stood closed, unmoved, just as it had been since the doctor left.
But it didn't feel right.
The air in the room was still—too still. Not peaceful, not calm. It was the kind of quiet that presses down on your chest, heavy and suffocating, like the aftermath of something broken. Something lost.
I pressed a hand to my chest, trying to hold myself together. Not from fear, but from something deeper—something I couldn't name. It was like my body knew something my mind hadn't caught up to yet.
That door wouldn't stay shut forever.
The thought barely registered before it happened. A shuffle. The faintest sound, like someone brushing past the wall outside.
Footsteps.
I froze. My breath caught in my throat.
They stopped. Right there. Just outside.
And then… silence.
I wasn't sure how long I held my breath too, waiting for whatever came next. But as the seconds stretched into minutes, the air grew thicker, heavier. The footsteps hadn't resumed. They hadn't retreated. They had just… stopped.