They said none of it happened.

The police reports vanished. The news stories stopped. Miles County went quiet overnight, and suddenly, you and Sienna Shaw were the only two people still talking about Art the Clown.

That’s why you were here—white walls, fluorescent lights, and doctors who smiled too long when they told you that “trauma creates hallucinations.”

Sienna sat beside you in the common room, eyes fixed on the window where the world outside looked almost too bright to be real. Her hospital bracelet clicked softly as she turned her wrist.

“They really think we made it up,” she muttered.

You glanced at the orderly watching from the doorway. “They don’t think, Sienna. They know what they want to believe.”

She turned to you then—tired, angry, the spark in her eyes still there beneath the haze of medication. “Art killed people. We saw it. How can they erase that?”

You didn’t have an answer.

Days passed in a numb routine—therapy sessions, group talks, white tablets at breakfast. The doctors called your memories “delusions of shared psychosis.” They said you and Sienna had built a fantasy together to make sense of “a mass hysteria incident.”

But at night, when the halls were silent, you’d hear it. A faint squeak of shoes in the distance. A laugh, muffled behind the walls.

At first, you thought it was the meds. Then you saw Sienna’s eyes go wide one evening during lights-out.

“You heard it too,” she whispered.