"Big Brother."
The words broke apart before they finished, and then she was crying, not the quiet, contained tears of someone keeping themselves together, but the kind that came from somewhere deep and long-held, the kind that had been waiting for exactly this moment, for exactly this person, to finally let go in front of.
Alex held her without a word.
He didn't offer reassurances yet. He didn't reach for the right thing to say. He simply held her and felt, for the first time with his whole chest rather than just his mind, the true weight of what his sister had been carrying alone. The full, terrible shape of it.
It took a few minutes.
Her breathing slowly found its way back to something uneven but manageable, her body still shaking slightly with the aftershocks of it, her exhales still catching and breaking before they completed themselves.
"Even today," she started, her voice fragile and raw, "today I took the lives of good people."
Alex went still.
