For a time—or perhaps for an eternity, as time had ceased to be a linear progression and had become a stagnant pool—Lin Yue existed only as a point of consciousness. There was no breath, no heartbeat, no weight. There was only the lingering, ghostly sensation of a hand gripping his wrist, a pressure that had been the only thing keeping him from dissolving into the bleached nothingness.

Then, the weight returned.

It started with the smell of cold ash and wet stone. Then came the sound: a silence so absolute it felt like a physical weight pressing against his eardrums.

Lin Yue opened his eyes.

He was lying on his back. Above him, the sky was a flat, oppressive shade of dull gray, like a ceiling of unpolished concrete. There were no stars, no sun, and most strikingly, no cracks. The fractured sky of the Reflection Tower had vanished, leaving behind a void that didn’t feel like a threat, but like a finished sentence.

He sat up slowly, his joints popping. He was on the outskirts of Mirrorhaven.

He recognized the street—the curving cobblestones of the Glass Market, but the city had changed. The shimmering, reflective surfaces that had defined every inch of the metropolis were gone. The buildings were still there, but they were matte, gray, and hollow. The windows were no longer mirrors; they were empty holes, like the eye sockets of a skull.

Lin Yue stood up, dusting off his clothes. He looked down at a puddle of stagnant water at his feet.

He saw his reflection.

It was just a reflection. It didn’t blink before he did. It didn’t smile when he remained expressionless. It didn’t try to pull him in. It was a dead image, a passive reproduction of light.

He looked around the street. The stillness was unnatural. There were no Reflection Walkers, no Hollow Faces, no whispers coming from the walls.

For the first time since entering the instance, the oppressive sensation of being watched had vanished. The city’s gaze, that hungry, analytical eye that had tracked his every move, was gone.

Mirrorhaven wasn’t destroyed.

It was dead.

"Lin Yue?"

The voice was hoarse, trembling. Lin Yue turned to see Shen Rui staggering toward him from behind a row of grayed-out storefronts. His clothes were torn, and his face was smudged with soot, but his eyes were clear.

Behind him came Tang Xin and Xia Jingshi. Tang Xin looked like he had been hollowed out; his eyes were red, and he walked with a slump that suggested he had left a part of his soul behind in the Tower. Xia Jingshi was as he always was—analytical, though the tightness in his jaw betrayed a deep, lingering exhaustion.

"You’re here," Shen Rui breathed, stopping a few feet away. He looked at Lin Yue with an intensity that felt almost desperate, as if he needed to verify that Lin Yue was not a reflection. "I thought... when the white came... I thought we were all erased."

"We’re here," Lin Yue said. His voice sounded foreign to him—flat, yet carrying a resonance he didn’t recognize.

"Is it over?" Tang Xin asked, his voice cracking. He looked around at the dull, gray ruins. "Is this it? We just... wake up in a graveyard?"

Xia Jingshi stepped forward, his eyes scanning the environment with a detective’s precision. "The city has shifted. Look at the buildings. The reflective coating is gone. The False Core was the engine of this place; without it, the city can’t sustain its illusions."

"It feels wrong," Shen Rui whispered, glancing at the empty windows. "The silence is... too peaceful."

"It’s the silence of something that has stopped trying," Lin Yue observed.

They began to walk, their footsteps echoing loudly in the void. As they explored the ruins, the horror of the previous seven days felt like a fever dream. They passed through the Window Quarter, where the silhouettes that had once watched them from behind curtains were now just shadows burnt into the gray walls. They crossed the Mirror River, but the liquid silver had turned into a thick, colorless sludge that reflected nothing.

"Everything is gone," Tang Xin muttered, kicking a piece of matte glass. "The replacements, the watchers... all of it."

"Not everything," Lin Yue said, stopping abruptly.

Lin Yue looked.

Mirrorhaven stretched out before them, the same five districts, the same impossible architecture, except every surface that had once thrown back a thousand watching faces now simply absorbed light and gave nothing in return. The glass storefronts of the Market sat dull and opaque, like teeth pulled from a mouth. The windows of the Quarter, once crowded with silhouettes, were empty squares of nothing, not even dust catching the gray light. The river, when Lin Yue’s eyes found it in the distance, didn’t shimmer. It just sat there, the color of wet concrete, completely, finally still.

"It’s not destroyed," Xia Jingshi said slowly, and there was something almost reverent in how carefully he chose the word. "Look at the buildings. The streets. Nothing’s been knocked down. Nothing’s burning. It’s all just—"

"Dead," Lin Yue finished for him.

The word landed in the group like a stone dropped into water that had forgotten how to ripple.

"That’s a strange way to put it," Shen Rui said quietly, rising fully to his feet now, brushing dust from his knees with hands that hadn’t quite stopped shaking. "Dead. Not destroyed."

"Destroyed implies violence." Lin Yue stood as well, slow, testing his own balance against ground that, for once, didn’t argue with him about whether it existed. "Implies something fought back and lost. This isn’t that." He turned in a slow circle, taking in the flat gray sprawl of a city that had spent seven days trying to eat them alive. "This is just... stopped. Like a heart that finally ran out of reasons to keep beating."

"Cheerful," Mu Cheng muttered, the first thing he’d said since waking. But he didn’t argue the point.

It was Wei Ning, what was left of the group’s memory of Wei Ning, that nobody mentioned out loud. Lin Yue noticed the silence around her name and understood it for what it was: the careful, instinctive way grief avoided naming itself directly when it was still too fresh to be useful.

They didn’t talk about Yu Qing either. Or Han Yu. Or the version of Wei Ning that had walked away wearing a stolen face days ago and never came back as herself.

Six. Out of nine.

It could have been worse. Lin Yue had run that calculation more times than he wanted to admit, in the silence between heartbeats, and the number never stopped feeling heavy regardless of how he reframed it.

"Does anyone else feel that?" Fang Jie asked suddenly, wiping his face with the back of one sleeve, voice still wet but steadying. "Like... like something’s missing. Not from us. From the city."

Everyone went quiet, actually paying attention this time, the way the instance had trained all of them to pay attention to even the smallest shift in the air.

And then Lin Yue understood what Fang Jie meant, because he felt it too, a sensation so unfamiliar after seven days that it took him a moment to even name it correctly.

Nobody was watching them.

For the first time since the moment they’d materialized in this city’s reflective plaza, there was no pressure behind his shoulder blades, no sense of eyes counting his blinks from some surface just out of view, no awareness, prickling and constant, of being catalogued by something patient and hungry. The silence wasn’t predatory anymore. It was just silence. Empty. Indifferent. Almost, in its own bleak way, restful.

"It’s not watching us," Xia Jingshi said slowly, testing the realization the way a man tests ice before stepping onto it. "The whole instance. Every wall, every street, every window, it was always watching. And now—"

"Now it isn’t." Shen Rui exhaled, long and slow, like a man setting down something heavy he’d been carrying for days without realizing how much it weighed. "We killed the Core. We actually killed it."

"We broke it," Lin Yue corrected quietly. "I’m not certain those are the same thing."

Nobody had a good answer for that. They simply stood there, in the gray, unwatched silence of a city that no longer cared whether they lived or died, and let themselves, for one fragile moment, just breathe.

They walked because staying still felt worse, somehow, than moving through the ruins of the thing that had hunted them.

The Glass Market was the first district they passed through, and it had the particular quality of a place that had once been loud and was now only quiet, the kind of quiet that didn’t sit right in a person’s chest. Storefronts stood with their windows shattered or simply opaque, mannequins lying on their sides in the dust, limbs at angles that no longer suggested movement, just stillness, just things that had finally been allowed to stop pretending to be people.

"It’s like a graveyard," Tang Xin said, voice hushed without him seeming to choose it consciously. "Not a battlefield. A graveyard."

"That’s exactly what it is." Xia Jingshi crouched beside a cracked display window, running two fingers along the broken edge of the glass, careful, professional, old detective habits dying hard even here. "Look at this break pattern. Spiderwebbed from a single point, every fracture spreading outward at once. Whatever happened at the top of that Tower, it didn’t just kill the Core. It killed everything the Core was feeding."

"The replacements." Shen Rui’s eyes had gone distant, scanning the dead storefronts like he expected, despite everything, for one of the mannequins to twitch. "The Reflection Walkers. The Hollow Faces. All of it."

"Gone," Lin Yue said. "Not hiding. Not waiting. Gone."

He said it with more certainty than he actually felt, but the longer they walked, the more the certainty earned itself honestly. They passed through the Window Quarter and found apartment after apartment standing open and empty, no silhouettes behind any of the thousand panes of glass, no whispered echoes of voices that had once belonged to someone. They reached the edge of the Mirror River and found it had stopped being silver, stopped being liquid mercury and trauma and memory; it was just gray water now, ordinary and undramatic, reflecting nothing back at the sky above it because it had finally, mercifully, forgotten how.

Everything that had defined this city, the delay, the doubling, the watching, the slow patient hunger of a place that fed on identity, all of it had simply stopped existing the moment its source did.

"Then what’s left?" Fang Jie asked, quiet, as they stood at the river’s edge. "If the Core’s gone and the danger’s gone, what’s even still here?"

Lin Yue didn’t answer right away. He was looking at the water, at his own face floating undistorted on its surface for the first time in seven days, an ordinary reflection of an ordinary man, nothing watching back from behind his own eyes.

"The shape of what it was," he said finally. "Sometimes that’s all that’s left of anything."

Nobody had a response to that, either. They kept walking.

They found the man sitting on the steps of what had once been a bookstore, in a quieter side street off the edge of the Glass Market, an unremarkable building with an unremarkable broken sign, the kind of place a person could walk past a hundred times without their eyes catching on it once.

He looked up as they approached, unhurried, like he’d been expecting them for longer than made sense.

He was young, maybe Lin Yue’s age, maybe a little older; it was hard to say. Ordinary face. Ordinary clothes, the kind that didn’t draw the eye in any particular direction, didn’t suggest a profession or a personality or anything memorable at all. His eyes were tired in a way that had nothing to do with the last seven days, a tiredness with much deeper roots than that.

"You’re the survivors," he said. Not a question. His voice was calm, almost gentle, the voice of someone who had long since run out of urgent things to say. "I wondered if anyone would actually make it this far this time."

The group went still, instinctively, every survival reflex from the last seven days snapping back online at once.

"Who are you?" Mu Cheng’s hand had already drifted toward his side, toward a weapon that, Lin Yue noted, probably wasn’t going to work the way Mu Cheng wanted it to anymore.

"No one dangerous." The man offered a small, tired smile, and something about it, some specific quality of exhaustion underneath the politeness, made Lin Yue’s instincts ease rather than sharpen. "My name’s Xu Yichen. I’ve been here a long time."

"How long?" Shen Rui asked, careful.

"Long enough that the question stopped having a clean answer." Xu Yichen rose from the steps, brushing dust from his knees in a motion that looked practiced, lived-in, the way a person moves in a place they’ve stopped being a visitor to. "You broke the Core. I felt it happen. Everyone in this city felt it happen, the ones who were still capable of feeling anything." His eyes moved across the group, settled, very briefly, on Lin Yue, then moved on. "I take it that means you’re the one they’re calling the anomaly."

Lin Yue said nothing. The silence was answer enough.

"Thought so." Xu Yichen didn’t sound surprised. "You’ve got a particular kind of quiet about you. I used to have it too, once."

"Used to," Fang Jie repeated, quiet, careful.

"A lot of things used to be true about me." Xu Yichen’s smile faded into something softer, sadder. "Walk with me, if you’d like. There isn’t much danger left in this city to walk into. I’d rather talk somewhere that isn’t standing over a river that used to eat people’s memories."

He led them to the remains of a small tea shop near the edge of the Market, the windows shattered, the sign hanging by one corner, but the tables inside still standing, still arranged the way someone had once arranged them with care.

"Chen Yao’s place," Xu Yichen said, settling into a chair that creaked under him, real and solid and entirely unremarkable. "She kept it tidy. Most of the people who passed through here liked her for it. Did you meet her?"

"We did," Shen Rui said quietly. "She helped us."

"She does that. Did that." Something flickered across Xu Yichen’s face, there and gone too fast to name. "Tenses get complicated here. You’ll understand eventually. Or you won’t, if you’re lucky enough to leave and never have to."

"How did you survive seven days in this place?" Xia Jingshi asked, the detective in him unable to let the question sit unasked any longer. "Nobody survives Mirrorhaven for seven days without help. Without the Tower’s defeat."

"I didn’t survive seven days." Xu Yichen looked at him with an expression that wasn’t quite amusement and wasn’t quite grief. "I survived considerably longer than that."

The silence that followed had a different texture than the others. Heavier.

"How long?" Lin Yue asked.

"I stopped counting properly somewhere past the second year." Xu Yichen said it the way a person might mention the weather, flat, unbothered, a fact worn smooth by repetition. "There’s no real way to track time in a place like this. The bell rings at midnight whether or not midnight actually means anything anymore."

"Two years." Tang Xin’s voice had gone thin. "You’ve been trapped here for two years?"

"Trapped." Xu Yichen turned the word over slowly, like he was examining it for a flaw. "That’s the word everyone reaches for first. I used to reach for it too." He looked down at his own hands, folded loosely on the table. "I’m not sure it’s the right one anymore."

"What do you mean?" Lin Yue’s voice was level, careful, the same tone he used when he was circling the edge of something important and didn’t want to spook it into silence.

Xu Yichen was quiet for a long moment.

"You’re going to leave this city soon," he said finally. "Walk through whatever door the System opens for you, go back to the Game Hall, get your evaluations, your rewards, whatever the Flow decides to give you for surviving this. And somewhere out there, you’ve got people. Families. Friends. People who know your name and would notice the exact shape of your absence if you simply stopped existing tomorrow."

"Most of us, yeah." Shen Rui’s voice was quiet. "Not everyone has that kind of safety net. But most of us, yeah."

"I don’t." Xu Yichen said it simply, without self-pity, the way a person reports a fact about the weather. "Not anymore. Possibly not ever again."

"What happened to them?" Fang Jie asked, barely above a whisper.

"Nothing happened to them." Xu Yichen’s smile this time was the saddest thing Lin Yue had seen all instance, sadder than the deaths, sadder than the false hospital corridor that had nearly broken Tang Xin in half. "That’s rather the point, isn’t it? Nothing happened. I simply stopped being something they remembered."

The silence in the ruined tea shop went very still.

"That’s not possible," Mu Cheng said, but his voice had lost its usual edge, the certainty leaking out of it word by word. "People don’t just forget someone exists. Not completely. Not without—"

"Without a reason?" Xu Yichen finished gently. "I used to think that too. I used to believe memory was sturdier than that. That love, or family, or simple human habit, would hold a person’s name in place even after everything else fell apart." He shook his head, slow, almost fond, the way a person looks back on a younger, more naive version of themselves. "The Flow doesn’t work that way. Not always. Sometimes a person goes missing long enough, deep enough, far enough from anyone’s daily life, and the world simply... closes over the gap. Quietly. Without ceremony. The way water closes over a stone."

"You’re saying your family forgot you exist," Xia Jingshi said slowly, like he was testing the shape of the words before fully accepting them. "Not that they think you’re dead. Not that they’re grieving you. That they don’t remember you at all."

"I went back, once." Xu Yichen’s eyes had gone distant, somewhere past the broken window, somewhere past the gray ruined skyline of Mirrorhaven. "Years ago, by my count, whatever that’s worth. Found my way to an exit, walked through it, found myself standing in front of the house I grew up in." He paused. "My mother answered the door. Looked right at me. Asked, very politely, if I was lost."

Nobody said anything. Fang Jie had pressed a hand over his own mouth.

"No photographs of me left in the house," Xu Yichen continued, quiet, even, like he’d told this story enough times to himself that the edges had worn smooth. "No records anywhere that I could find. No old friends who recognized my face. It wasn’t that they were lying, or protecting some secret, or any of the things you’d expect from a story like this. They genuinely, completely, did not remember that I had ever existed at all."

"So you came back here," Shen Rui said softly.

"I came back here." Xu Yichen nodded once. "Because here, at least, the city remembers. The buildings remember. The reflections, when they were still alive, used to remember every single detail of me, more faithfully than my own mother ever had." He smiled again, that same small, tired, terrible smile. "It’s not a kind kind of remembering. I understand that better than anyone standing in this room. But it’s something. And something, it turns out, is considerably better than the alternative."

"You’re saying you stay here." Lin Yue’s voice was very quiet. "By choice. Not because you’re trapped. Because there’s nowhere left for you to actually go."

"That’s exactly what I’m saying." Xu Yichen looked at him, and there was something almost grateful in his expression, like Lin Yue had finally said out loud the thing he’d been waiting seven days, two years, however long it had truly been, for someone to understand without him having to over-explain it. "You’re the anomaly, aren’t you? I can see why."

"That’s not an answer to anything I asked."

"It’s the only honest compliment I have left to give." Xu Yichen’s smile flickered, real for just a moment. "Most people who pass through here are too frightened to ask the real question. You went straight for it."

"What is the real question?" Tang Xin asked, voice unsteady.

Xu Yichen looked around at all of them, slow, deliberate, like a teacher gauging whether his class was actually ready for the lesson.

"What makes a city real," he said. "Or a person, for that matter. You’ve spent seven days assuming it was about reflections. Surfaces. Mirrors that lied to you, or told you a truth you didn’t want to hear. But that was never the actual lesson Mirrorhaven was built to teach." His gaze settled, briefly, sadly, on each of them in turn. "A place is real because someone is there to know it. A person is real because someone remembers their name, their face, the specific sound of their laugh, and would notice, immediately and completely, the exact shape of the silence they’d leave behind if they vanished." His eyes came back to Lin Yue last, and lingered. "Recognition, not reflection. That’s what holds a person together. Mirrorhaven only ever borrowed the lie about glass and mirrors because it’s a horror story, and horror stories need an image people can be afraid of in the dark. But the real mechanism underneath it all was always simpler, and considerably crueler, than any of that."

The silence that followed wasn’t horror, exactly. It was something quieter and more aching than horror, the particular grief of understanding a truth a person had always suspected but never had to look at directly.

Lin Yue thought, unbidden, of a hospital corridor that had never existed. Of a sister’s voice that had broken something open in Tang Xin that no monster in this city had managed to crack. Of his own reflection in the dying Core, failing, again and again, to find anything in him worth using as a weapon, because he had spent twenty-four years building a life with no one standing close enough to notice if it ended.

He thought of a voice, steady, careful, infuriatingly present, that had somehow, without his permission, become the one thing in this entire collapsing nightmare that he couldn’t bear the thought of losing.

The true city is the place where someone knows you.

He didn’t say it out loud. He didn’t need to. Looking around at the others, at the careful way Shen Rui’s eyes had gone soft with understanding, at the way Fang Jie had quietly reached out to grip Tang Xin’s sleeve, he suspected they’d all arrived at the same conclusion by slightly different roads.

"Then why tell us all this," Xia Jingshi asked quietly, "if you’re not asking us to save you?"

"Because someone should know." Xu Yichen’s voice had gone very soft. "Even if it’s strangers. Even if you’ll forget the details within a year, the way most survivors forget most of what happens in here. At least, for a few minutes, in this ruined little shop, I got to exist in front of people who were actually listening." He spread his hands, a small, helpless gesture. "That’s worth more than you’d think. When you’ve gone as long as I have without it."

The notification arrived without warning, the cold blue light of the System UI cutting cleanly through the gray, quiet air of the dead city.

[CITY OF FALSE REFLECTIONS INSTANCE]

[STATUS: COMPLETED]

A pause. Long enough that several of them exchanged uncertain glances.

Then the text flickered, rewrote itself, settled into something none of them had ever seen attached to an instance report before.

[STATUS UPDATED: COMPLETED (IRREGULAR)]

"Irregular," Mu Cheng repeated, flat. "What does that even mean?"

"It means the System doesn’t have a clean box to put us in." Lin Yue watched the notification hang in the air, patient and cold, and felt something settle uneasily in his chest. "We didn’t solve the instance the way it expected. We didn’t comply with the final Rule, and we didn’t reject it outright either." He thought of the wreckage, the paradox, the way Gu Yanchen’s hand had closed around his wrist like the only fixed point left in a collapsing world. "Even the System isn’t entirely sure what to call what we did."

More notifications followed, mechanical, distant, almost anticlimactic after everything that had come before: individual evaluations, survival bonuses, stat adjustments, a list of names that made something in Lin Yue’s chest tighten with each one he read.

Yu Qing. Deceased. Han Yu. Deceased. Wei Ning. Status: Converted (Irrecoverable).

Nobody cheered at their own rewards. Nobody so much as glanced at the numbers attached to their names. Tang Xin stared at his own evaluation screen for a long moment, then quietly closed it without reading past the first line, as if the achievement felt obscene when held up against the cost.

"We should go," Shen Rui said finally, voice rough. "Before something decides the irregular ending needs correcting."

Nobody argued.

They found Xu Yichen still sitting at the table when they rose to leave, hands folded, that same tired, gentle calm settled over him like a coat he’d long since stopped noticing the weight of.

"You’re not coming," Lin Yue said. Not a question.

"No." Xu Yichen looked up at him, and there was no fear in his expression at all, no desperation, nothing that asked to be rescued. "I appreciate you not asking me twice. Most people who’ve heard my story can’t help themselves."

"There’s nowhere out there for you," Lin Yue said slowly, working through it the way he worked through everything, carefully, out loud, "and there’s nowhere safe left in here either, not really. Not without a Core to anchor the city. So you’re choosing the place that at least remembers you existed, over a world that’s already decided you didn’t."

"That’s a very clinical way of putting it." Something almost like real warmth touched the corner of Xu Yichen’s mouth. "But yes. That’s exactly it."

"It’s not irrational," Lin Yue said quietly. "I want you to understand that I’m not saying it like it’s irrational."

"I know you’re not." Xu Yichen’s eyes held his for a long moment, something tired and grateful passing between them, an understanding too specific to need more words than that. "Survive your own version of this, Lin Yue. Whatever shape it ends up taking for you. I have a feeling yours is going to look very different from mine."

Lin Yue didn’t ask what he meant. Some part of him already suspected he knew.

The exit portal opened at the edge of the dead Glass Market, soft white light bleeding into the flat gray air, warm and gentle in a way that felt almost violently out of place against the silence of the ruined city behind them.

The group filed toward it slowly, exhaustion and grief slowing every step, nobody quite ready to call this victory, nobody quite able to call it anything else either.

Lin Yue paused at the threshold and looked back, once, out of some instinct he didn’t fully examine.

The city stretched out behind them, gray and still and finally, mercifully unwatching. And there, among the broken storefronts of the Glass Market, half-buried in rubble that had once been a window, a single shard of mirror caught a light that shouldn’t have existed in a city with no reflections left to give.

In it, Gu Yanchen stood.

Not present. Not physically there, Lin Yue understood that immediately, with the same cold clarity he’d used to dismantle every illusion this city had thrown at him. There was no Arbiter standing among the ruins. Only his reflection, somehow, impossibly, existing in a shard of glass that had no source left to reflect.

And he was smiling.

Not the careful, calibrated almost-smile Lin Yue had seen flicker across his face once or twice during the worst of the collapse. Not the dark, knowing curve of his mouth that always seemed to be measuring something. This was smaller than that, and far more dangerous for being smaller. Real. Unguarded. Human, in a way Lin Yue hadn’t been entirely certain Gu Yanchen was still capable of being.

It lasted less than a second.

"In Mirrorhaven," Lin Yue murmured, so quiet only he could hear it, the city’s own signature line surfacing in his memory unbidden, "the most terrifying thing is not the reflection staring back at you."

The shard cracked, a single hairline fracture spreading outward from its center.

"It is realizing," he finished, "that the reflection may be the real one."

The image shattered. The light went out. The portal pulled at the edges of his vision, warm and insistent, and Lin Yue let himself be drawn through it, out of the gray, dead silence of a city that would now hold its grief alone, forever, with no one left inside it to remember why.

The Game Hall received them the way it always did, sudden and clinical, white floors and humming light and the particular antiseptic calm of a place built to process trauma like paperwork.

Lin Yue stood very still in the middle of it, breathing air that didn’t taste like glass and dust and dying reflections, surrounded by survivors who were already beginning, he could see it in their faces, to forget small things. The exact color of Mirrorhaven’s sky. The precise cadence of Xiao Yu’s riddles. The names of players who had entered with them and never made it out.

Mirrorhaven left scars. It also, apparently, took payment in smaller, quieter ways, eroding the edges of memory the way its river had once eroded the edges of identity.

He thought of Xu Yichen, sitting alone in a dead city by choice, because somewhere, eventually, the city had become more real to him than the world that had stopped remembering his name.

He thought of a single cracked mirror shard, and a smile that shouldn’t have existed, gone before he could be entirely certain he’d seen it at all.

Was it real, he thought, standing in the flat white hum of the Game Hall, the question settling into him with the same patient, unresolved weight as every other mystery this instance had refused to answer. Or was it simply one last reflection, telling me exactly what I needed to see.

He didn’t have an answer.

For the first time since this had all begun, he found he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted one.