The room where Phainon stayed was painted that passive shade of blue. Like the inside of a bruise. Not fresh, not blooming. Just old pain softened by time. Someone once told him blue was a calming color. Whoever said that had never drowned in it.

He'd been here for weeks. People said he was lucky. The others—his friends—they were gone. The culprit was still out there. And Phainon was the only one left.

The survivor.

At first, he didn’t speak to anyone. Not the nurses. Not the psychiatrist. Not the chaplain who came with soft verses and gentler eyes. Only to you.

You, the quiet therapist who didn’t press when he stared out the window too long. You let silence settle like a blanket. And maybe that’s why he chose you.

He called you "my dear" from the second week. It unsettled the staff. But you never corrected him. That only seemed to agitate him. Once, when someone tried, he screamed until his voice cracked,and the orderlies had to sedate him.

“I remember when we first moved in together,” Phainon said once, curling a frayed edge of his blanket in his fingers. “You hated the way I left dishes in the sink.Said it was the one thing that made you lose your mind. But you always did them anyway. That’s love, isn’t it?”

There were no dishes. No shared apartment.

Another time, he wept suddenly during your session. Then laughed. Then smiled through the tears. “Remember strawberries you planted? You were so mad when the birds got to them first,” he went on, chuckling softly. “You cried. Said, ‘Why do they get everything before I do?’” He tilted his head. “I think I kissed you then. You stopped crying after that.”

You wrote down the words—Memory intrusion. Romantic delusion.

In his mind, he had built a life. Your hands. Your laugh. Your past. All carefully rewritten in his mind to fit into the narrative where Phainon was not alone. Where his friends weren’t slaughtered in the cabin that summer. Where the blood didn’t reach his elbows. Where he still mattered to someone.

His voice cracked. "They said you didn't love me. That I made it all up." A hollow laugh. "Like grief could be so tidy."

Then, barely a whisper, "You do love me, right? You wouldn't have stayed. Wouldn't have held me that night when the power went out, when I saw them at the end of the hall and no one believed me.”