The truth did not arrive like an answer.
It arrived like a weight.
Once the possibility entered my mind, that Vivienne had been hiding the truth not out of malice, but conviction, it began to warp everything around it. Memory bent. Certainty thinned. I hated the thought precisely because it made sense.
People rarely believe they are villains.
They believe they are necessary.
I didn't contact her.
I didn't run.
I waited.
Three days passed before she found me.
She didn't bring anyone this time. No professionals. No gentle hands hovering near my elbows. Just herself, hair pulled back hastily, eyes rimmed red, breath uneven from running.
She stopped a few feet away, as if crossing the distance required permission.
"You shouldn't be here," she said softly.
"Neither should you," I replied.
Silence stretched between us, heavy with everything we had never said.
"They're looking for you," she continued. "They think you're unstable. That you're escalating."
"Am I?" I asked.
She opened her mouth, then closed it again. Her shoulders sagged slightly, the first real crack in her posture I had ever seen.
"I never wanted it to go this far," she said.
I laughed, but there was no humor in it. "That's what everyone says when it already has."
She took a step closer. I didn't move.
"You don't understand what they would do if you kept digging," she said. "What they already tried to do...back then."
My heart began to pound. "Then tell me."
She shook her head immediately. "No."
The refusal landed harder than any lie.
"You're still choosing," I said. "You're still deciding what I can handle."
Vivienne's eyes brimmed with tears, but her voice remained steady. "Because last time you almost broke."
Almost.
The word hollowed me out.
"What happened?" I whispered.
She pressed her lips together, jaw trembling. For a moment, I thought she might finally say it, might give me the truth whole and unfiltered.
Instead, she said her voice still firm but her eyes filled with tears, "Elara...my dear El'..., you..., you begged us not to tell you."
The world tilted.
"That's not true," I said automatically.
She met my gaze, unwavering. "You were terrified of yourself."
"Impossible!" I refused to believe it. Why, how?
Images flashed, fragmented, disordered. My own hands shaking. Voices rising. A sense of something terrible unfolding inside me, not around me.
"You weren't locked away as punishment," she said quietly. "You were locked away because you were hurting yourself. And no one knew how to stop it."
My stomach clenched violently.
"That's your version," I said.
"It's the only one that kept you alive," she replied.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to tear the words from her mouth and scatter them into the dark. Instead, I asked the question that had haunted me since the beginning.
"Did I ask you to leave me there?"
She closed her eyes.
"Yes."
The sound I made then barely resembled a voice.
The truth pressed in from all sides, not complete, not clean, but undeniable in its shape. This wasn't a conspiracy built on cruelty.
It was built on fear.
Fear of me.
"I was a child," I said.
"So was I," she replied. "And I chose what I thought would save you."
I stepped back, shaking.
All this time, I had believed I was fighting erasure.
What if I had been fighting containment?
And what if...deep down...I had known it was necessary?
As she walked away, she said one last thing, her voice breaking despite herself:
"If you keep going… you won't like who you find at the center of this."
That night, alone again, I pressed my ear close to my chest, not my stomach this time.
My heart beat fast and erratic, like something trying to escape its own cage.
For the first time, I wasn't afraid that I was wrong.
I was afraid that I had been right in the most devastating way possible.