Page 161 of Hidden Echoes

My knees felt weak.

“That’s not true. That’s not—he’s different,” I whispered.

She crouched slightly to meet my gaze, her voice low and soft, like a mother soothing a sick child. “Zane. Was he tall? Beautiful? Gentle with you? Did he tell you you were more than your illness?”

My throat tightened. Tears stung my eyes.

“Yes,” I choked. “He did. Because it’s true. He—he loved me.”

Paulina nodded slowly. “Of course he did. Because he was everything you needed. The only thing your mind couldn’t find in this place. You created him to feel alive.”

I stared at her, my body trembling. “No. I didn’t. I couldn’t have made someone like him up. He was… the realest thing I ever had.”

She stood again, towering over me. “Exactly,” she said softly. “Because you built him that way. You made him real to you. You made him perfect.”

I was breathing too fast. I wanted to scream. But her voice kept wrapping around my neck like a silk ribbon. Choking me with reason.

“You told him you loved him,” she continued, “but what was he, Mia? A boy with no record, no presence, no one else who saw him but you. You think we didn’t investigate?”

My knees hit the floor. My fingers clawed at the fabric of my pants. “You’re lying. You have to be lying.”

“We showed you his picture once,” Paulina said, crouching beside me. “You stared at a blank page. There was no one there. You said you saw him. But the page was empty.”

No.

No.

I remembered his eyes. His trembling hands. The first time he said my name like it meant something. How could that be fake? How could something so intimate be artificial?

“I want to see him,” I whispered. “Let me call him. Let me—”

“There is no number, Mia. There is no him. There never was.”

I gasped.

It felt like my soul was falling out of my body.

“But I felt him,” I said, barely audible. “I still do. I still hear him sometimes.”

“I know,” Paulina said softly. “That’s your grief. That’s your mind protecting you from the truth.”

Tears blurred my vision.

Maybe I had created him. Maybe I was just… lonely enough. Sick enough.

“Let it go,” she said, brushing a strand of hair from my face with surgical precision, like she was straightening a doll. Her voice dropped into something sharper, colder. “He was never real, Mia. And this—” she gestured to the sterile room around us, the dim light, the locked door, “—this is your home. You’re safe here. You belong here. And the sooner you stop fighting that, the easier it’ll be to fix you.”

A part of me wanted to scream at her.

But a deeper part—some small, broken thing—curled inward and believed her.

Because if he wasn’t real…

Then I wasn’t broken for losing him.

I was broken for never having him at all.

That can’t be true.?That can’t be true.

---