Page 64

Woke.

Back in bed.

Sheets cold now.

The scar on my thigh was bleeding. Fresh. Red. The word was new.

LIAR.

I ran to the mirror.

Touched my face.

Still young.

Still not mine.

I pressed both palms against the glass.

And the girl behind it smiled.

I guess you never really know. What’s real? What’s a dream? Where it begins or where it ends—or if it ever ends at all.

Sometimes I think I should’ve set this place on fire, and let it all burn with everyone still inside. But maybe that wasn’t the end of my story. Maybe that was just the beginning.

Maybe this is a dream. Maybe I was meant to start from scratch. Or maybe… I’m just another version of myself, drifting through some fractured dimension, split off from reality.

What is real?

Do you know?

When you stare into the mirror, what stares back? Is it really you—or something wearing your face? Are you real to yourself? Or just a reflection stitched together by what others see?

And all of this—this noise in my head—is it buried deep in my brain, locked away in some dark corner? Or is it a nightmare, and I’m just waiting to wake up?

I once heard about a dream within a dream. Maybe I’m one of those people. Maybe I never woke up.

And if I didn’t? If this is still the dream?

Then what I did—what Ibecame—wasn’t a choice. It was the script I was handed. A glitch in the sequence. A bleed-through from some other version of me, the one who didn’t survive the fire but learned how to live inside the ash.

I tried to be good. I swear I did.

But goodness doesn’t grow in a mind like mine. It gets swallowed. Chewed up. Rewritten in red.

People say you find yourself in the wreckage. But what ifyou arethe wreckage?

What if the only thing left to find is silence?

And maybe that’s the truth I keep circling back to:

That I was never lost.

I was erased.

And this, this flickering, fractured echo of me, is all that’s left.

End of chapter.

Epilogue

“Somehousesdon’tneedghosts—just memories sharp enough to bleed, and someone too broken to leave them behind.”