Chapter 15 – Adrian's Silence
The days stretched into a week.
At first, Adrian waited with patience. He told himself letters took time. That maybe she was busy, or tired, or simply waiting for the right words. He checked his mailbox twice a day, fingertips brushing the envelopes as though her handwriting might appear if he only searched hard enough.
But the mailbox remained empty.
By the fifth day, patience curdled into unease. By the seventh, unease became a voice.
It started quietly, whispering when the apartment was too still.
She read your letter and saw the truth. She saw what you are. Broken. Sick. Too heavy to carry.
Adrian pressed his palms against his ears, as if he could block the thoughts from getting in. But the monster didn't live outside of him. It lived beneath his ribs, in the hollow space grief had carved.
He tried to distract himself — books, music, pacing the apartment until his legs ached — but the silence pressed in from all sides.
Each night, he unfolded her old letters, tracing the ink with his finger. He read them aloud to the empty room, her words a fading echo that couldn't silence the new ones rising inside his own head.
You scared her. You told her too much. No one wants to hold the truth of you. She was the last chance, and you ruined it.
He remembered the blotch of ink where his hand had trembled writing his friend's name. He had left it on the page, thinking it was a mark of honesty. Now it looked like a stain. Proof of weakness. Proof that even his writing was corrupted.
Sleep became impossible. When he closed his eyes, he saw the twisted wreckage of metal he'd imagined so many times — the plane that had taken his friend. And now, layered over it, he saw an image that didn't exist: Selene turning away, her face blank, her hands folding his letter into silence.
By the tenth day, the monster's voice was no longer whispering. It was sharp, relentless.
She doesn't want you. She never did. You are too much. You will always be too much.
Adrian sat at his desk, pen poised above paper, desperate to write something, anything. But the page remained blank. His thoughts were tangled, his hands shaking too badly to form words.
He slammed the pen down, the sound startling in the quiet. For a long moment, he sat in the dim lamplight, trembling, breathing hard, fighting the urge to rip her letters apart just to prove to himself they had ever existed.
Instead, he pressed them to his chest, curling forward until his forehead touched the edge of the desk. His breathing slowed, but the monster did not quiet. It hissed inside him, circling every space where hope had once lived.
And yet, even as the voice tore at him, Adrian clung to one fragile truth: she had written before. Maybe she would again.
The monster laughed at that, but he held on anyway, shaking, waiting, drowning in silence.