Semua Bab The Softest Kind of Ruin: Bab 11 - Bab 13

“I always knew it would end like this.”She hadn’t meant to stay late. But lately, time didn’t behave like it used to. It slipped sideways—soft, ungraspable—folding her days into fog. Hours bled into each other like spilled water, and she drifted through them with the quiet precision of someone performing a life they no longer owned. Smiling. Nodding. Pretending.Everyone thought she was healing. She let them. Wore normalcy like a coat two sizes too big—awkward, heavy, impossible to shrug off.The city tonight felt suspended. The kind of quiet that doesn’t soothe—it warns. Silver light pooled beneath flickering streetlamps. Leaves skated down gutters. Somewhere, music spilled faintly from an open window, but even that felt far away. Disconnected. Like the world was holding its breath.She walked.Not hurried. Not slow. Just enough to feel in control. Her fingers curled around her keys, the jagged metal biting into her palm—a small pain, a sharp reminder: You’re awake. You’re here. The

She didn’t remember the collapse—only the cold tile beneath her knees, the smell of blood that wasn’t hers, and William, gasping beneath her hands—pressure applied too hard, too late, like trying to stop time with fingers and breath.Then… silence.The doctors called it shock. Dehydration. Acute stress response. Words that circled the truth without touching it. Words that didn’t come close to what it felt like to break.Yvette found her. Three days later. Curled on the bathroom floor. Her body hollowed out, her voice gone. William had already been rushed into surgery. The apartment reeked of old copper and something worse—something missing.There were bandages on her hands—scrapes from broken glass, maybe. A bruise darkened her ribs. A stitched cut on her shoulder she didn’t remember getting.She never asked how Yvette found her. Never asked who called the ambulance. There were bigger things to understand.She spent two nights in the hospital. The walls didn’t feel sterile. They felt