“There was someone else,” he said. “He left. Before the—” He paused. “Before I lost control.”
“Who?”
He didn’t answer. But the way his bandaged hand tightened around the towel told me everything. This wasn’t random violence. This wasn’t a man destroying property for the thrill of it.
This was a man who had been backed into a corner—metaphorically or otherwise—and had finally broken in the only direction he had left.
I heard footsteps in the hallway. Fast, multiple sets. The sound of people who were not coming to help.
Reed heard them too. The transformation was immediate. His spine straightened. His jaw set. The vulnerability that had been visible seconds ago—raw and exposed—vanished behind a mask that clicked into place like armor.
His eyes went flat. Cold. The eyes that people feared.
“Leave,” he said. The voice was back. The command voice. “Go out the service entrance. Tell them you were downstairs the entire time. Tell them you heard nothing.”
“I can’t—”
“You can and you will.” He was already moving, pulling himself upright. He was taller than I expected—much taller—and the bathroom suddenly felt like it was shrinking. “What you saw here doesn’t exist. You didn’t see me. You didn’t speak to me. You were in the kitchen when the ceiling came down.”
The footsteps were closer now. Someone was talking urgently into a phone.
“You’re bleeding,” I said.
He looked at his hands. Banded, still dripping. He pulled the towels off and dropped them into the bathtub. The porcelain was streaked with his blood. He wiped his palms on his ruined vest with an efficiency that suggested he’d done this before—cleaned up after himself, hidden the evidence of whatever was happening underneath.
“It’ll stop on its own.”
“Those wounds need—”
“Need nothing.” He straightened. Adjusted the torn seam of his vest with a surgical precision that would have been funny in a different context. “You were never here, Ellis.”
He said my name. He’d remembered it. In the middle of whatever collapse was still reverberating through him, he had heard me say it once, and he had filed it away.
That terrified me more than anything else in the room.
I stood. My legs were stiff from kneeling on the tile. The bathroom was small enough that we were standing close enough to hear each other breathe.
“I know what you’re doing,” I said.
“Do you.”
“You’re putting the wall back. Because someone’s coming, and you can’t let them see what I saw.”
His expression didn’t change. But his breathing did—a half-beat of hesitation, just long enough to confirm I was right.
“And I need you to understand something,” I continued. “I’ve spent my whole life watching people build walls to survive. I know what the inside of those walls looks like. And I know what it costs to live inside them.”
“You’re twenty-three years old. You don’t know what it costs.”
“I aged out of foster care at eighteen. I’ve been punched, kicked, left in closets, handed off to strangers, and told to be grateful for every terrible thing that happened. I’ve lived inside walls so thick I forgot what air tasted like. So don’t tell me what I don’t know about the price of pretending to be fine.”
The silence between us was absolute.
The footsteps stopped outside the door. I could hear breathing—the kind of breathing that means someone is standing just on the other side, gathering courage.
Reed looked at me for one final second. Something passed between us—not a word, not an agreement. An understanding. The kind that forms when two people who’ve been broken by the same mechanism recognize each other in a burning building.
Then the bathroom door burst open.
