> "I wasn't looking for the truth anymore.
I was just trying to find a version of myself that wouldn't kill me."
I didn't recognize the house until I was inside.
That's how memories work when they're stitched together by someone else's hands — they fit like skin but burn like fabric set on fire. It smelled like lavender and something older. Like plastic melted in the sun. Like grief in furniture.
The walls were painted in a shade I once called "comfort," but tonight they felt like surveillance.
A photograph blinked at me from the corner table.
Me, maybe ten.
Or nine.
Or not me at all.
Her smile was wider than mine ever was.
Someone had combed my hair in that photo. It was too smooth to be natural.
They wanted me to be seen that way — the good girl. The miracle. The product.
But I remembered screaming on the day it was taken.
And no one came.
---
There was a mirror near the staircase. I avoided it.
Not because I didn't want to see myself — but because I knew she might still be inside.
The version of me that said yes when she wanted to scream.
The one who kept the lie alive.
---
I heard a sound.
Down the hallway.
The sound of fingers brushing piano keys too softly to play.
Familiar.
Not the notes — the intent.
Like someone trying to remember a song backwards.
I followed the sound, barefoot. The floorboards did not creak.
That's when I knew this house was not real.
Because in real memories, floors always complain.
---
The room was dim.
One lamp.
One man.
He was sitting at the piano, head tilted, as if listening for something inside it.
He didn't turn when I entered.
> "You came back," he said.
I didn't answer.
My tongue had folded in on itself.
It knew something I didn't yet.
> "I kept her alive for you," he said again.
And then he turned.
---
It wasn't Joon.
It wasn't even someone I knew.
But his face had pieces of them all — the manager who told me to wear lighter makeup, the producer who rewrote my pain into a chorus, the interviewer who called my breakdown "branding gold."
He was everyone who profited from my silence.
And he was smiling.
---
> "She was never supposed to make it this far," he said, almost tenderly.
I looked around the room.
There were notebooks stacked on the shelves.
Each one had my handwriting.
But not my words.
Songs I never wrote.
Lyrics I never lived.
---
I moved closer to him.
My hands trembled, but not from fear.
From something deeper.
Recognition.
This was the room where they rebuilt me.
Where they silenced the version of me that remembered pain.
Where they buried the girl who screamed.
---
He stood.
Not quickly.
Deliberately.
He walked toward me, as if I owed him something.
> "I protected you," he said. "From the weight of remembering."
> "You stole me," I replied.
He laughed.
> "You were never yours to keep."
And that's when I felt it.
Not rage.
Not revenge.
A calm detachment.
The kind you feel when a fever finally breaks.
When the dream ends and you realize you've been bleeding in your sleep.
---
There was a letter opener on the piano.
Slim.
Silver.
Beautiful.
My hand reached for it.
I didn't stop it.
He didn't flinch.
> "You won't do it," he whispered. "You're the face, not the fire."
But he didn't know—
The fire was quiet.
And I had carried it too long.
---
I stabbed him.
Once.
Then twice.
Not with rage.
With memory.
With every moment I'd been rewritten, every lie I'd been told, every breath I'd been forced to sing with someone else's lungs.
He collapsed onto the piano.
A low note echoed into the floor like thunder from below.
---
I stood over him, shaking.
The mirror in the corner caught my face.
I looked older.
Not aged.
Awakened.
And then I whispered something I didn't expect to hear:
> "This is what survival feels like."
---
I walked out of the room.
Not slowly.
Not fast.
Just real.
And as I passed the hallway mirror again, I looked.
She looked back.
Not the version I hated.
Not the one they built.
Just… me.
No smile.
No lie.
Just blood on my hands and breath in my chest.
Alive.
Still mine.