Andee's hands wouldn't move the way they should.
The left side of her body felt unmoored - as though part of her had slipped into a fog she hadn't consented to. She blinked slowly, trying to pull the room into focus, but even the sunlight filtering through the blinds felt gentler, as though the universe had dimmed out of pity.
A nurse adjusted her IV. "You're lucky," she'd said earlier. "It was small. A warning, not a punishment."
But to Andee, it felt like betrayal. Her body - so long her silent shield - had given out. And she knew why.
It wasn't the stroke itself that terrified her. It was the reckoning it represented.
Her silence had demanded a price. All those years of tucking in her thoughts, scaling down her voice, absorbing without release - this was the debt come due.
Her body had said what her lips couldn't: I can't carry this anymore.
Just outside the room, Matthew stared down at the speckled floor tiles like they held an answer. He had never seen her this way. Pale. Hooked to beeping machines. Her voice slurred, her eyes too tired to fight.
And it pierced something in him.
He hadn't accused her. Not outright. But his silence had made space for suspicion. That wound - he now saw - was one of omission, not action. She had searched his face for permission to still belong, and he'd given her doubt.
"I should've known better," he whispered.
Inside the bedside drawer, beneath a stack of unopened brochures and tissues that chafed the skin, lay the letter.
It wasn't meant to be sent. Just written.
To my family,
I don't know what else to say to make you believe me. I didn't help Ethan. I didn't betray anyone. But I also didn't fight hard enough. I was tired of being the one who watches, who listens, who is always last to be heard - so I said nothing. Maybe that's my crime. But I loved all of you. Still do. Even now. Even when Ruby looks through me. Even when Mum can't meet my eyes. Even when Matthew waits for words I don't know how to say. I loved you when we ran wild in the garden. I loved you at the dinner table. I loved you in the noise, and I love you in the silence that came after. I don't know where we go from here. I just know I'm still here. - A.
Pain had a rhythm now.
Not sharp - but slow and crawling, like grief with a pulse. Her limbs ached. Her thoughts fogged. But none of it compared to the ache of exile - to being treated like a ghost in her own story.
Because in their eyes - Matthew's silence, her mother's averted gaze, Ruby's restraint - it lived there:
The possibility that maybe she deserved this.