(Liam's POV)
The silence that followed Linna's words was not empty; it was heavy, suffocating, and terrifyingly loud. I couldn't breathe. The air in my throat suddenly felt like freezing river water, thick and unyielding, filling my lungs until I was certain I was being dragged under the surface over and over again. My chest heaved violently, but no oxygen came. I was drowning right there on the dry pavement, caught in an invisible, violent current.
"Liam?" Linna's voice drifted to me as if from across a vast, fog-shrouded ocean, thin and laced with a growing panic. "Why are you asking about him? Why do you look like... like you're losing your mind?"
I couldn't answer. I could feel the hot, agonizing sting of tears finally breaking free, tracking burning lines down my cold, numb cheeks. I blinked, but the world only blurred into a smeared, sickening canvas of streetlights and shadows.
"This is just a joke, right?" I murmured. The words were a broken, pathetic rasp. A desperate, breathless laugh caught in my throat, sounding more like a sob. "Aaron is alive. He has to be. Linna, stop it. I saw him just two weeks ago. We stood right there in the crumbling courtyard of the old castle... we made a promise to each other. He held my hand and told me that after I settled everything here, we could finally, truly be together."
Linna stepped closer, her hands reaching out in the dim light, trembling, but hovering uselessly in the air as if she were terrified that touching me might cause me to shatter entirely.
"I remember it so clearly, every single detail," I rushed out, the words tumbling over one another in a frantic, chaotic torrent. I spoke faster and faster, as if sheer volume and speed could force my reality to be true. "I remember when he got involved in that horrible car accident. I was the one who sat by his bed for days. I helped him recover at the hospital. I literally forced him to move into my apartment just so I could cook for him, watch over him, and make sure he healed faster. We reconciled, Linna. We patched up the years of silence. We became friends again after all that time apart."
I swallowed hard, the next admission scraping against the raw lining of my throat, thick with an agonizing, suffocating weight I had buried beneath layers of denial for years.
"And that's when I finally realized... I liked him. So much more than just friends. I've loved him for a very long time, Linna. Years. I was just too damn cowardly, too afraid to accept the fact that I was completely in love with my best friend. Even... even when I brutally rejected his confession two years ago. I broke his heart, and I spent every day trying to fix it."
The confession left me entirely hollowed out, my voice trembling with the raw, bleeding truth of a regret so profound it felt like a physical sickness.
Linna stared at me, her mouth slightly open, the pieces of a painful puzzle she had been trying to solve for months finally clicking together behind her eyes. A dark, devastating wave of sorrowful understanding washed over her features, replacing her confusion with pure heartbreak.
"So that's why..." she whispered, her own voice cracking under the sudden weight of the revelation. "That's why you keep visiting that old castle every single day. That's why you sit on that exact wooden bench by the river bank for hours, just staring into the water. That's why you became so deeply sentimental about those places. I always asked you why you went there, why you looked so lost, but you never bothered to answer me. You just shut me out. That's why you changed so completely six months ago... right after you got involved in that terrible car accident."
I froze, the blood in my veins turning to ice. My eyebrows furrowed in deep, jarring confusion, the tears still spilling over my eyelashes and dripping off my jaw.
"What do you mean, *I* got involved in a car accident?" I corrected her quickly, a sharp, defensive edge of panic fueling my words as I took a step back. "Aaron was the one in the accident. Not me. I was the one taking care of him. Aaron!"
"There was no Aaron, Liam!" Linna suddenly cried out, her voice exploding into the quiet night, shattering the stillness of the alleyway. A tear finally escaped her eye, catching the amber light of the streetlamp. "Six months ago, *you* were the one who crashed. You were the only one in that car accident! You were in the ICU, unconscious, and then in the hospital room for almost an entire month. And when you finally got discharged, you weren't you anymore. You changed completely. You became so distant, so cold, so entirely hollow to me. That's when you started escaping to the old castle every single day."
She took a ragged, trembling breath, pressing a hand to her chest as if trying to hold her own heart together. "The doctor told me it might be a psychological side effect of the head trauma, a coping mechanism for the stress, but as time passed, you just slipped further and further away into your own head. That's when I thought... I thought you just didn't love me anymore. I thought you had found someone else and were hiding them from me. But I never imagined..." Her voice broke into a ragged gasp. "I never thought I was battling a ghost from your past."
Her words slammed into my sternum like a physical blow, threatening to break my ribs, but my mind desperately clawed for an escape hatch, pushing back violently against the terrifying reality she was trying to force upon me.
"But what about when I got sick?!" I demanded, my voice rising to a frantic shout, my chest heaving as I yelled against the suffocating truth. "What about the day I had that terrible, hallucinating fever? Aaron took care of me! He stayed by my side all night, he wiped my forehead, he cooked me soup—it tasted exactly like yours, Linna! Explain that to me if he's a ghost!"
"Because there was no Aaron helping you when you were sick, Liam!" Linna shouted back, her frustration, anger, and utter heartbreak boiling over. "There is no Aaron who cooks soup like I do! *I* was the one who took care of you! I was the one who rushed to your apartment, who stayed by your side through that entire horrific high fever!"
She was crying openly now, the tears streaming down her face as her shoulders shook violently. She took a desperate step toward me, pleading with her eyes for me to wake up.
"Do you have any idea what it was like for me? In the middle of the night, you were sweating, screaming, crying out his name over and over again, begging him not to leave. But it was me holding your hand, Liam! I stayed with you day and night, ignoring my own life just to keep you safe. There is no Aaron. There has only been me for the past two years!"
Her voice cracked completely on the final word, a devastating, breathless sob escaping her lips as she covered her mouth, her eyes wide with the agonizing pain of a woman who realized she had been loving a man who was already living in another reality.
I stared at her, completely paralyzed, my breath catching in my throat. The entire architecture of my life, my memories, my very sanity had just shattered into a thousand jagged pieces around my feet, and I didn't know how to move without cutting myself. I couldn't look at her tears, I couldn't face the crushing weight of her devotion, and most of all, I couldn't look at the terrifying truth she had just bared to the world.
Without a single word, unable to offer comfort or receive it, I turned on my heel and left her standing there, entirely alone under the flickering, uncaring streetlamp.
I began to walk. I didn't have a destination, a goal, or a home to return to. I just forced one boot in front of the other, walking faster and faster until my stride broke into a frantic, aimless march through the dark, empty streets. I moved blindly through the shadows, praying that the sheer speed of my flight could somehow outrun the horrific reality settling into my bones, and hide the monstrous, unbearable ache bleeding through the center of my heart.