Chapter 2:What the Leg Remembers

*Wren's POV*

When I blink, he's gone.

Not gone the way people leave a room with no door swinging, no scrape of a chair, no ripple through the crowd where a body should have moved. Just gone, as the doorway swallowed him back into whatever dark he came from, and for one long, ringing second I genuinely don't know if I imagined him at all.

My hands are still on the keys. I don't remember lifting them off. Marek is saying my name, Wren- hey, Wren from somewhere that sounds very far away, and when I finally turn my head toward him, he's got that look he gets when I go somewhere he can't follow, careful and unsurprised, like he's done this before. He probably has. I don't remember most of it when it happens.

"You good?" he asks, setting a fresh glass of water in front of me like it's an offering to something he doesn't fully understand.

"Fine," I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel, which is its own small victory. "Thought I saw someone."

"A lot of people are here." He shrugs, but his eyes flick to the doorway anyway, quick and instinctive, the way anyone's in a place like this. Nothing there now but the usual smoke and the usual shadows. "You want your set list for the second half, or are you calling it early tonight?"

I should call it early. My hip is a slow-building fire under the bench, and whatever just happened has left my hands not quite steady, a fine tremor I hide by curling my fingers around the water glass as I need it for something other than a prop.

"Early," I say. "I'm tired."

That part, at least, isn't a lie.

The walk home takes twenty-six minutes tonight. My hip makes me pay for every one of them, dragging like it's decided to hold a grudge against the version of me that dared to feel something back there in that bar recognised, or hunted, or both, I still can't tell which, and the not-knowing is its own kind of exhausting.

I don't remember deciding to think about the accident. It just arrives, the way it always does, uninvited and total, like weather.

I'm nineteen. I'm laughing at something my friend Delia said, walking home from the practice hall with my coat unbuttoned because it's one of those rare warm nights, and my hands still smell like rosin, and I have no idea, not even a flicker that in eleven minutes I will stop being the version of myself I've spent my whole life building.

Three men. I never learn all their names, not really, not until much later, and by then it won't matter because they'll already be dead. One of them says something to Delia that makes her go quiet and small in a way I've never seen her go. I say something back I don't even remember what, just that it was defiant, the kind of thing a girl who has never been made to feel unsafe says because she genuinely doesn't understand yet that safety was never guaranteed to her, it was just something she'd been lucky enough not to test.

The car comes fast. I remember the sound before I understand what it means: an engine too close, too deliberate, aimed. I remember Delia's hand closing around my wrist and yanking, and I remember not being fast enough, because for nineteen years I had never once had to think about how fast I was.

I remember the pavement. I remember a sound that didn't feel like it belonged to my own body, a wet, wrong crack and then very little else until the hospital, and the fluorescent lights, and a doctor's face arranging itself into the careful shape people use right before they tell you something is going to be permanent.

I don't remember them laughing. Delia told me later that they laughed, driving away, like it had been sport. I've built the sound of it in my head so many times it feels like a real memory now, even though it isn't. Maybe that's worse.

My front door is eleven steps from the corner, and I count them the way I always do, the way I've counted every set of steps since counting is a kind of control, and control is the only thing I've had since the night control stopped being something I could take for granted.

Seven. Eight….

I stop.

There's something on my doorstep that wasn't there this morning.

For a moment my whole body goes very still, the specific stillness of an animal that's learned the hard way that movement draws attention. My hand tightens on my cane. My pulse climbs into my throat and stays there, thick and loud, drowning out the ordinary sounds of the street, an auto somewhere, a dog barking two blocks over, the low electric hum of the streetlamp above me flickering once, twice.

It's a single white flower. Not from a shop. I understand the shops around here, and none of them sell anything this deliberately, expensively beautiful. Laid across the top step with a precision that feels less like a gift and more like a signature. Beside it, folded once, is a small square of heavy cream paper, the kind that costs more than I make in a week.

I don't want to pick it up. Every instinct I've spent six years training screams at me to turn around, to go back the way I came, to disappear into the city the way I've made a religion of disappearing.

But my hand is already reaching for it before my mind finishes deciding to let it.

I unfold the paper with fingers that have gone strangely numb, and there, in handwriting too precise to belong to anyone careless, too controlled to belong to anyone kind, are six words that stop my heart cold in my chest.

I know what they took from you.

No name. No signature. Nothing but that flower, that paper, and the terrible, intimate certainty that whoever left it on my step wasn't guessing.

I look up at the empty street, at the dark windows and the flickering lamp and the shadows between them that could be hiding absolutely anyone.

Somewhere out there, someone has been watching me long enough to know the one thing I have never told a living soul not Marek, not Delia, not even Talia.

And I have no idea if that terrifies me because it's a threat.

Or because some broken, starving part of me has been waiting six years for someone to finally say it out loud.