Chapter 5

White.

Cold.

A sharp smell stings her nose.

The little girl opens her eyes.

A ceiling she doesn't recognize. Lights too bright. Sounds too loud.

Machines beep softly beside her, steady and unfamiliar.

Her body feels small. Heavy. Broken.

A man sits near the bed, dressed in a police uniform. He looks tired, like he hasn't slept. When he notices her eyes open, his expression softens.

Police Uncle: Hey. (He says gently.) You're safe now.

Safe.

She doesn't know what that means.

Tears spill down her cheeks without warning. Her fingers curl into the sheets, clutching them like they might disappear too.

The man says something else— her name, maybe— but the words drift away.

The room fades.

And then—

I'm back.

Standing in my room. Breathing too fast. Hands clenched tight in my lap.

Tears blur my vision.

Now I remember.

Not as a child. As myself.

The mirror didn't come to me.

I invited it.

And it has been keeping its promise ever since.

I was ten.

My hands were still small. My voice still thin.

But I remembered everything. And I told them anyway.

I told the police how my father was stabbed. How my mother screamed. How they laughed while she begged. How she fell and never stood up again.

I told them about the black door. About the room they warned me never to enter. About the mirror that didn't break.

I told them how the men vanished.

How the darkness took them.

How it smiled at me.

They listened.

They nodded.

They wrote things down.

And then they looked at each other.

One officer crouched in front of me and said softly,

"You imagined it, sweetheart."

Another said it was trauma, shock, hallucinations.

A doctor used a longer word that means the same thing.

Not real.

The mirror became a broken object. The room became a childhood fantasy. The men became unknown attackers who fled.

No one wrote down the truth.

When my relatives came, they didn't touch me.

They whispered instead— about curses, about bad luck, about how death followed this child.

"She brings misfortune."

"She's unstable."

The words settled on me like a curse.

No one offered me a home.

They argued about responsibility like I wasn't sitting there, like wasn't listening. When the word orphanage slipped into the room, something inside me finally broke.

That's when he spoke.

The police uncle.

He had been quiet all this time, sitting near the window, eyes tired in a way only grief can carve into a face.

Police Uncle: I'll take her. (He said.)

Everyone turned.

He didn't hesitate.

Police Uncle: I lost my daughter. (He continued, voice steady.) Illness. Ten years old.

His eyes met mine.

Police Uncle: No child should fight the world alone.

That night, I went home with him.

Not my home.

But a home.

He didn't ask questions I couldn't answer.

Didn't correct me when I spoke about things he didn't understand.

He just gave me bed, food, silence— when I needed it.

I tried telling them at school.

I shouldn't have.

I said what really happened— left nothing out.

They smiled first. Then they laughed.

Someone repeated my words, twisting them into a joke.

Ghosts. Mirrors. Magic.

By the next day, desks were farther away. Eyes avoided mine.

It wasn't just them.

Their parents whispered.

Warnings were given.

They were told to stay away from me.

I became that girl. The strange one. The broken one.

I ate alone. Sat alone. Walked home alone.

At ten, loneliness feels endless.

That's when I learned something important.

Survival required forgetting.

So, I erased things.

The dark room became a story I no longer told. The mirror learned silence. I trained myself to call it imagination. A lie.

I told myself I didn't need monsters to be afraid.

Loneliness was more than enough to hollow me out.

Then Nari appeared.

She didn't question my quiet. Didn't notice how I turned away from glass. Didn't disappear when everyone ese did.

She filled the space with words, with presence, with a smile that trusted the world far too much.

She stood beside me— never asking what she was holding me back from.

With her, the emptiness loosened its grip.

And, slowly— carefully— I let myself forget.

I grew older. I learned how to live. I learned how to pretend.

It worked.

Until now.

The house exhales around me.

Wood groans softy, as if stretching awake. The air presses closer, thick and warm.

Content.

Aware.

I feel it watching.

The house knows what I know. It knows that I remember.

Somewhere beyond the light, glass vibrates— a low, eager hum.

Waiting.

And for the first time since I was ten—

I understand.

The past never vanished.

It only waited— patiently— for me to accept it.

Just like the mirror.

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