Page 115 of Fractured Devotion
Because I’m tired of being the one people look at like I’m glass.
I’m not going to shatter. Not yet.
Not today.
The hours drag.
I bury myself in work, scrubbing through behavioral data, adjusting Echo’s filtration parameters, and checking thermal monitors—anything to keep my hands moving and my mind too distracted to think.
But every so often, I catch myself drifting. My eyes go to the hallway where Harper used to appear, bright-eyed and eager, and my fingers hover too long over her access permissions. I should revoke them, but I don’t. Not yet.
I know what grief looks like on other people. I’ve catalogued it, analyzed it, and fed it into algorithms. But on me? It doesn’t compute. It just festers.
“Dr. Varon?” Mara’s voice is too soft, like she’s trying not to startle me.
I glance up. Her hands are clasped at her front, her knuckles white.
“I, um… I took care of the interview summaries. I just left them on your desk.”
“Thank you,” I say.
She hesitates. “Are you… okay?”
I nod once, too sharply.
She nods back, then leaves quickly, her footsteps hushed.
I stare at the closed door for a long time.
The silence in the room feels heavier now, layered. I need to do something, anything, to pull myself back from the edge I keep hovering near.
So I move to the terminal. I open Echo’s archive folder, the one with legacy files we never use. There’s a corrupted entry, one that shouldn’t even be there.
TEST_0704_REDLINE.
There’s no timestamp and no operator ID. Just an audio file with seven minutes of recorded noise.
I click play.
At first, it sounds generic, an old recording, maybe someone else’s patient session mistakenly buried in the archive. A child sobs. Not the tantrum kind but the broken, muffled kind. A soft lullaby plays under it, like something from a warped music box. Then comes the scream.
It comes from a man ripped open by grief. It’s guttural. The pain is too precise, too intimate.
And then, something inside me ruptures.
I know this sound.
But not from someone else. From me.
The blood, red against white tile. My mother’s perfume, cloying gardenia. And the closet door. My tiny knees against splintered wood. A memory I didn’t consent to remember.
This isn’t someone else’s trauma.
It’s mine, coming from my memory like it’s a fresh one.
My hands start shaking.
I don’t remember getting up. I don’t remember leaving the diagnostics room.
