I press my forehead against my knees and stay very still, because if I'm still enough, maybe it isn't true. Maybe stillness is the only thing left that I can control.
There’s a sound. Like…like…a wrapper. A candy wrapper.
My head jerks to the side, and I suck in a breath when I see the heart-shaped lollipop lying next to me on the floor.
Pink.
I don't move. I don't breathe. I stare at it like it might disappear if I look away. Like Mary disappeared, like the blood disappeared, like everything in this room that isn't stone or pain disappears the moment I stop watching it.
It doesn't disappear.
It's just there. Pink, heart-shaped, the wrapper catching what little light exists in this gray nothing-place, and for a moment I can't move at all because my mind can't decide what category to put it in. Hallucination. Memory. Trap.
Halloween night.
The thought arrives quietly. Not loud like Mary's voice, not layered and wrong. Just—quiet. Familiar. A voice I know the shape of even when I can't hear it clearly.
Even monsters deserve love sometimes.
I reach for it. My hand is shaking and I don't trust it, I don't trust anything right now, but I reach anyway, and my fingers close around the wrapper and it's solid. Real. Crinkles under my fingers the way real things crinkle.
“Sophia,” I whisper. Hold the candy.
Pink. Heart-shaped. The one that started everything, the one I kept until…
Until I don't know when. Until everything became a room with a drain in it.
I press it against my chest. Both hands around it now, holding it the way you hold something that might be the only true thing left in a world that has stopped being reliable.
“Sophia Sinclair.”
Green eyes. Gold hair. A kitchen in Paris, sunlight, the smell of cinnamon. Her hands on my face. Her thumb on my scar.
“I’m sorry.” Fresh tears spill out. “I’m so fucking sorry. I don’t know what happened,” I continue, like she’s here. Like Sophia’s here and she’s listening. “In this room, I don’t know what happened…with her. But I want it to stop. And I need you to love me.” A sob breaks loose. “Please…please still love me. I’ll do anything.”
I'm rocking. I don't realize it until I notice the movement, back and forth, the way you rock something to make it stop crying, except there's nothing to rock except myself.
"Just don't leave." My voice cracks all the way through the crying. "Please don't leave me. I know what I am. I know what she's made me into. I know what's… what's inside me, what I'm capable of, what I might have—" The thought of Mary surfaces, and I shove it back down before it can finish, before it can become the thing it almost became a few minutes ago. "I love you. Always you. Only you.”
The compass on my hand. Black ink. North.
I trace it with my thumb—not pressing, not trying to remove it, just touching it the way you'd touch something fragile, something you're afraid might break if you're not careful.
"Please," I say into nothing. "Please still love me.”
I press the lollipop against my lips, eyes closed, breathing the faint sugar-smell.
When I open my eyes, there’s a needle in my hand. The lollipop…there was no lollipop.
I stare at my own hand holding the needle, and for amoment I don't know whose hand it is. It looks like mine. The compass is there, the bruised knuckles, the lines I know. But it doesn't feel like mine. It feels like something is wearing my hand the way Mary was wearing—was wearing?—
Don't.
The needle is very close to my arm.
I watch it get closer the way you watch something happen to someone else. Distant. Slow.
There's a voice somewhere—small, very far away, sounding almost like me, the me from before, the me that used to be certain about things. And it's sayingno, don't, put it down,and the voice gets smaller the closer the needle gets, until it's not even a voice anymore, just a feeling, just a pressure, easily overridden.
