Sleep didn't visit me that night.
Truth has a strange way of sitting on your chest - not attacking, not screaming, just… waiting. Heavy. Certain. Breath-stealing.
Alex - no. My brother.
I whispered it once into the dark, and it swallowed the room whole.
Morning came like punishment. I stood in front of the mirror, watching my own eyes as if I might suddenly look different now that my blood carried secrets I never asked for.
Maya called.
I didn't answer.
Maya - the only person who never asked for explanations, who showed up with silence when I needed quiet and noise when I needed distraction.
She cared for me more than I ever believed I deserved.
But I wasn't ready for softness.
Not today.
Not when softness felt like weakness, and weakness once got me destroyed.
Downstairs, the house hummed with its usual comfort - the muffled clink of cups, the television someone forgot to mute, birds that didn't care about fractured families.
Dad sat in the kitchen, reading the newspaper like our world wasn't about to crack open.
Or maybe it always had been cracked - I was only now seeing the fault lines.
He looked up at me.
"Did you sleep?" he asked softly.
"No," I replied. "Did you?"
He lowered his gaze.
That told me enough.
Silence stretched - uneasy, taut, fragile.
"You should've told me," I whispered.
He swallowed. "I was trying to protect you."
People always say that. As if hiding pain prevents it from existing.
"Secrets don't protect," I said, my voice shaking. "They rot. Quietly. Until everything tastes like rust."
I stepped outside.
The world looked exactly the same - bright, ordinary.
Yet nothing in me was.
Truth doesn't change landscapes.
It changes the person standing in them.
I exhaled, steadying myself.
Then my phone buzzed.
One new message.
And suddenly my spine froze.
Josh: You're back in town. We need to talk.
I stared at the screen.
Of all days. Of all moments.
Fate really had a sick sense of humour.
I locked the phone.
But my heartbeat didn't slow.
The past wasn't done with me yet -
and apparently, neither was he.