Aurelia had not slept properly since the incident in the corridor. The exhaustion wasn't merely physical; it was a corrosive, psychological weight that settled behind her eyes like powdered glass.
Every time she closed them, she saw the fractured expression on his face, the way reality seemed to splinter around him.
She clung to the rationalizations like a drowning woman to driftwood. She told herself the sleeplessness was the price of discipline, the relentless administrative burden of managing a son who had become a volatile variable in her carefully ordered world.
She checked his meals with obsessive precision; she monitored his movements with the cold calculation of a warden.
A guard now stood silently outside his door, not as a punishment, but as a necessary barrier between Theo's fractured psyche and the rest of the world. She convinced herself that this vigilance was her duty, a necessary tax paid for the preservation of order.
