The ceiling above him was a maze of weathered wooden beams, scarred by decades of rain and wind. Ethan's eyes traced each crack, each knot in the wood, desperately trying to anchor himself to something—anything—that might make sense in a world that had suddenly become incomprehensible.
*Where am I?*
The question echoed in his hollow chest as he turned his head left and right, taking in the unfamiliar room. Rough-hewn walls, a single small window letting in pale morning light, a wooden table that had seen better years. This wasn't their cottage. This wasn't the sanctuary where he'd made breakfast for Emberlyn just... how long ago? Time felt fractured, meaningless.
His mind remained shrouded in fog, memories lurking just beyond reach like shadows at the edge of candlelight. But his heart—his treacherous, broken heart—remembered pain with crystalline clarity.
Suddenly, tears began streaming down his face without warning or cause. They fell hot and silent, as if his soul was weeping for losses his conscious mind couldn't yet comprehend.
"What..." he whispered, pressing the back of his hand against his cheek. The tears wouldn't stop. They flowed like a river breaking through a dam, carrying with them an anguish so profound it stole his breath. "Why am I—?"
He wiped again, confused and desperate. Was his heart mourning something his fractured mind had forgotten? The tears felt like they carried the weight of worlds, of love stories ended before their time, of promises broken by forces beyond his control.
CREAK!
The door swung open with a gentle protest, revealing a small figure carefully balancing a wooden tray. The child with earnest eyes and hair that caught the morning light like spun gold. She moved with the careful precision of someone accustomed to caring for others.
"Oh! Uncle, you're awake!" Her voice carried genuine surprise and relief, as if she'd been worried about him.
Ethan stared at her through his tears, this stranger-child who seemed to know him. "Who... who are you?"
The little girl stepped closer, setting the tray—which held a simple cup of water and a piece of bread that looked freshly baked—on the small table beside his bed. "Me? I'm Anna!" She said it with the pride of someone introducing herself to a new friend.
"Anna..." The name felt foreign on his tongue. He shook his head, trying to dislodge the fog that seemed to have settled over his memories like morning mist. Nothing. The name meant nothing to him, yet she looked at him with such familiarity, such concern.
"Yes... Wait, why are you crying, Uncle?" Anna's small face crumpled with worry, her eyes reflecting his pain as if it were her own.
Ethan turned away, shame burning in his chest. A grown man, weeping in front of a child for reasons he couldn't even name. He wiped his face roughly, trying to compose himself, but the tears seemed to have a will of their own.
Before he could protest or pull away, Anna had climbed onto the bed and wrapped her thin arms around him in a fierce, protective embrace. The gesture was so pure, so selflessly kind, that it nearly broke him all over again.
"Don't be sad, Uncle! Anna is here!" she whispered, her small hand stroking his hair with the same gentle care a mother might show a frightened child. "Everything will be okay."
For a moment—one precious, impossible moment—Ethan felt something he'd thought he'd lost forever. Peace. This child's embrace somehow reached through the darkness consuming his soul and offered him a tiny flame of hope. His tears slowed, his breathing steadied, and for the first time since waking, he felt almost... human.
Anna finally released him, studying his face with the serious expression of someone far older than her years. Satisfied that some of his anguish had eased, she smiled—small but radiant.
Ethan cleared his throat, his voice rough with unshed emotion. "Where am I? How did I end up here?"
"You're at Rivermoor!" Anna spread her arms wide, as if encompassing the entire world. "We're all family here, Uncle! Every single one of us!"
Her expression grew more somber. "When we were coming back from town yesterday... we found you lying on the ground in the forest. You were covered in so much blood, Uncle. Grandpa said we had to bring you here, that we couldn't just leave you there to die."
The words hit him like physical blows. *Lying on the ground?* Images flashed through his mind—fragments of memory like broken glass. Rain. Smoke. Fire. The taste of ash and despair.
"I was... lying on the ground?" His voice was barely a whisper.
"Yes..." Anna's eyes filled with sympathy. "We don't know what happened to you, Uncle. But maybe... maybe you were trying to escape from a fire? There was smoke coming from somewhere near the place we found you."
"A fire?"
"GRRGHHH!"
Pain exploded through his skull like lightning, and with it came the memories—rushing back all at once in a torrent of agony that made him cry out. The cottage. Their home. Emberlyn's face, cold and unrecognizing. The crowd beating him. The explosion. Everything burning. Everything lost.
"Uncle, are you okay?!" Anna gasped, reaching out to comfort him.
But Ethan, overwhelmed by the sudden return of his nightmare reality, shoved her away without thinking. The pain was too much, the memories too raw, and he couldn't bear anyone touching him when his entire world was collapsing.
THUD!
"AHH!" Anna cried out as she tumbled off the bed, her elbow scraping against the wooden floor.
The door burst open immediately, revealing several children who had clearly been hovering nearby, worried about the strange man in their sanctuary. Their eyes went wide with shock when they saw Anna on the floor, a thin line of blood seeping from the scrape on her arm.
"ANNA!"
A boy with messy gray hair and eyes like storm clouds lunged forward, his face contorted with protective fury. He was perhaps fourteen, built lean but strong, with the look of someone who'd learned early that the world was a dangerous place.
"HOW DARE YOU HURT HER!"
THWACK!
The punch caught Ethan square in the cheek, snapping his head to the side and filling his mouth with the taste of blood. Stars exploded across his vision, but before he could even process the first blow, another fist crashed into his temple.
This boy—Grey, he would later learn—fought with the desperate intensity of someone protecting family. Each punch carried not just anger but genuine love for the little girl Ethan had accidentally hurt. The blows rained down with surprising force for someone so young, and Ethan found himself utterly unable to defend himself.
*I'm so weak,* he thought as another punch split his lip. *So pathetically weak. If I can't even protect myself from a child, how could I ever protect Emberlyn? How could I be worthy of her love?*
The self-loathing was almost worse than the physical pain.
"GREY, STOP!"
The voice that boomed through the room carried absolute authority. Grey's fist froze mere inches from Ethan's face, his entire body going rigid at the command.
"BUT, GRANDPA—!" Grey's voice cracked with frustration and lingering fury.
"That's enough! Everyone out! Lily, take Anna and treat her wound immediately."
"Yes, Grandpa," a girl with kind eyes and steady hands quickly helped Anna to her feet, shooting Ethan a look that was disappointed rather than angry—somehow worse than hatred.
Grey climbed off the bed reluctantly, but not before fixing Ethan with a glare that promised this wasn't over. "You hurt Anna," he said quietly, and those four words carried more menace than any shouted threat could have.
As the children filed out, Ethan caught glimpses of their faces—confusion, wariness, protective anger. These weren't just random orphans. They were a family, bound together by something stronger than blood, and he had just violated their sanctuary by hurting one of their own.
When the door closed, leaving him alone with the old man, Ethan covered his eyes with his arm, trying to hold back the fresh wave of despair threatening to drown him.
*Weak,* he berated himself. *You're so pathetically weak, Ethan! You can't defend yourself. You hurt an innocent child. You couldn't protect your home, couldn't make your wife remember you, can't even control your own emotions.*
The litany of failures felt endless. *If you can't even handle a fourteen-year-old boy, how were you supposed to protect Emberlyn from whatever made her forget you? How were you supposed to be the husband she deserved?*
"I apologize for Grey's actions," the old man said, his voice carrying the weight of years and hard-won wisdom. "But you should know—Anna is precious to all of us here. We've all lost family, lost homes, lost the people we loved most. She's the heart of this place, and when someone hurts her..."
"There's no need to apologize," Ethan replied, his voice thick with guilt and self-loathing. "It was my fault. She was just trying to help me, and I... I pushed her away like some kind of monster. Thank you for saving me. I don't deserve your kindness."
The old man—Garrick, though Ethan didn't know his name yet—studied him with eyes that had seen too much suffering to judge harshly. "Get some rest. And don't forget to eat the food Anna brought you. In this house, we don't let people go hungry, no matter what mistakes they've made."
The kindness in those words, offered despite what he'd done, nearly broke Ethan completely.
CREAK!
The door closed behind Garrick, leaving Ethan alone with his demons.
The moment he was truly alone, the walls he'd built around his heart crumbled completely. Muffled sobs filled the small room, raw and broken sounds that spoke of a man who had lost everything that gave his life meaning.
"Sob... sob... Huhuhuarghhh!"
He cried for Emberlyn—for the way she'd looked at him with cold unfamiliarity, for the love story that had been erased from existence, for the home they'd built together that now existed only in his memory. He cried for his own weakness, for the innocent child he'd hurt, for the future that seemed impossible to imagine.
Most of all, he cried because he was alone. Completely, utterly alone in a world that no longer remembered his greatest joy had ever existed.