Arzhen couldn't remember anything that happened in the cafe that day.
He had woken up in the hospital with a headache that split his skull and a tongue that felt too thick for his mouth. Everyone said something about a violent rampage.
But he…
He remembered the cafe. He remembered Cecilia walking in. He remembered standing up. He remembered opening his mouth to speak.
And then—nothing. A wall of static. A muffled roaring that might have been his own voice or might have been the sound of his sanity cracking. The rest was gone. Erased. Swallowed by whatever madness had seized him in those lost hours.
But although every single coherent thought had left him, disappeared from his mind like smoke through fingers—his feelings… stayed.
They stayed in his chest when he woke. They stayed in his bones when he rose from the hospital bed. They stayed in the hollow space behind his ribs when he returned to this empty, cold, dark living room and sat in his armchair and watched the rain.
