I can see you

Chapter 32

                        (ROSY'S POV)

I hadn't slept in days. Not because I was scared. Not because of fear. Not even because of the dream I kept having, the one where I wandered a house I couldn’t name, opening doors only to find versions of myself curled in corners, hiding under beds, staring blankly into flickering light. I think fear needs hope to exist and I’d run out of that weeks ago.

I stayed awake because my mind wouldn’t stop circling one thought: What if this is all I am now? Someone who used to be Rosy. Someone who used to be Riya. Now just static between two dying signals. Even when I closed my eyes, I kept seeing rooms I didn’t recognize but somehow missed. Shadows of girls who looked like me crouched in corners, staring like I was the ghost.

One of them whispered, “You’re almost done.” I didn’t know if it was meant to soothe me… Or erase me. “You’re almost done,” another said, like it was a kindness. Or a threat.

I didn’t sleep because I was empty and empty people don’t dream. They just wait. And I’d been waiting so long I didn’t remember what it felt like to want anything.

Edward didn’t ask if I was okay anymore. Maybe because he already knew. Maybe because he was afraid of the answer. Or maybe, just maybe, because he wasn’t sure I was the one who’d answer.

This morning, he handed me tea and I didn’t say thank you. Not because I didn’t want to but because I just didn’t have the performance in me. Words didn’t feel like real things anymore. They felt like habits, something we said to keep the silence from swallowing us. I think we both kept talking just to pretend we were still part of something that had a future. Like if we strung enough sentences together, we could still believe this story might end well.

He sat across from me with his coffee and opened his laptop like we were coworkers, not lovers or even survivors. Just two quiet figures moving through a slow, shared collapse. His face was pale with exhaustion. His hands trembled when he thought I wasn’t looking.

Love had weight once. It had a temperature. It used to live in the space between our hands. Now that space had cooled. We sat across from each other like people who used to pray and now just mouth the words.

I watched him. I always watched him now.
He thought he was being subtle, but I saw the file he kept opening on his desktop marked only with a single letter: K.

Killian.

His name still made my chest lock up. Not because I missed him but because I didn’t.
Because his name felt like a switch and once it flipped, I was no longer sure who I was trying to be.

Edward had become obsessed. He dug through city records, property listings, bankruptcy files, even scanned satellite maps looking for hidden buildings in the forest. I caught him muttering to himself once—coordinates, orphanage names, dates. He was unraveling or maybe just tying his own noose slowly.

I left the house that afternoon without telling him. I walked until the air felt different. Until the buildings started to look like teeth, dull and decayed. Somewhere past the edge of town, I sat down on a park bench and watched a duck land badly in the water. It flapped twice, off balance, then righted itself.

I stared for a long time, wondering what it meant that even ducks had more instinct than me. I wasn’t sure if I still existed. Not fully. The dreams were getting worse. They felt less like nightmares and more like warnings. I’d wake up certain I’d done something, said something or hurt someone but the memory would slip through me like steam.

One night, I woke up with the taste of blood in my mouth. My own tongue, bitten hard. Another morning, I found my hair in a bun that was tight, too precise, the way Riya used to do it. The way my mother used to do it.