I was twelve when the sky split open.
The blast didn't sound like thunder. It sounded like the end. One second, I was yelling—something stupid, something that didn't matter—and the next, his arms were around me, and we were flying through the air.
Adris always told me I had bad timing.
I hit the ground before I knew he'd pushed me. Dust choked the world. I couldn't see, couldn't breathe. I screamed for him, and the only answer was the fire. People said it was brave. Said he saved me.
No one said it was my fault.
I don't remember what happened next. Just that I woke up in a stranger's house, my ears ringing, my body intact, my family gone. The woman who took me in had quiet eyes and a room full of locked drawers. She called me "darling" with the kind of voice that cracked around the edges. She made tea she never drank, smoked cigarettes, and she couldn't remember lighting them. She stopped cooking dinner a year later. She stopped talking altogether. Sometimes I find her sitting in the hallway, eyes fixed on something behind her skull. She calls me by someone else's name. I answer anyway.
I go to school. I work jobs. I fold my life into neat corners and pray no one sees the mess underneath. No one asks why I don't talk much. Why I flinch at fire alarms, why I walk to the edge of rooftops and look down like I'm waiting for permission.
That's where I met him.
He didn't stop me. He didn't try to save me. He just leaned against the railing beside me and said,
"Kinda late for soul-searching, don't you think?"
I don't know why I laughed.
But I did.
And when I saw him again, days later, in a school hallway I'd walked a hundred times—I didn't question it.
Not until much, much later.