CHAPTER 4

“Karma taught me to become heartless, because this generation punishes people who love too deeply.”

“Could you find a way to let me down slowly?

A little sympathy, I hope you can show me.

If you wanna go, then I’ll be so lonely…

If you’re leaving, baby, let me down slowly.”

— Let Me Down Slowly

Here’s the deal with me.

I don’t know how life changes so quickly.

One moment, I was celebrating my little sister’s birthday beneath Christmas lights and a sky full of stars.

The next—

my life crashed so violently that sometimes I still hear the sound of it breaking inside my head.

Who knew that night would destroy everything?

Who knew I would be kidnapped…

tortured…

watch my sister die in front of me—

and somehow still become the villain of the story?

The day Evie died, the police searched the warehouse thoroughly.

They found the knife.

The same knife I had hidden for our escape.

The same knife covered in my fingerprints.

And worst of all—

my blood was on it too.

I still remember the silence inside that hospital room when they told us.

My parents looked just as shocked as I was.

I explained everything.

Every single detail.

How I found the knife.

How I stabbed the kidnapper in the dark.

How he stabbed blindly at the same moment.

How Evie was never supposed to get hurt.

But evidence doesn’t care about truth.

And people only believe what they can see.

The police slowly stopped treating me like a victim.

Instead, they looked at me like I was something dangerous.

Something unstable.

One officer even suggested that grief had made me “violent.”

Violent.

I wanted to laugh.

Because if they had seen the way I held Evie while she died, they would have known there was nothing left inside me capable of violence anymore.

My parents defended me at first.

They told the police I would never hurt my sister.

They begged them to keep investigating.

But grief changes people.

Slowly.

Cruelly.

At first, it was small things.

My mother stopped hugging me.

My father stopped looking at me for too long.

Then came the silence.

The cold dinners.

The empty conversations.

The way they would pause whenever I entered a room.

As if my existence hurt them.

And maybe it did.

I think losing Evie killed something inside all of us.

But unlike them—

I survived.

And sometimes survival is the cruelest punishment of all.

At school, things became worse.

People stared at me in hallways like I was cursed.

Some students whispered when I passed by.

Some were scared of me.

Others enjoyed tormenting me.

Girls who once worshipped me suddenly spread rumors about how I had been jealous of my own sister. Some boys would purposely bump into my shoulder and laugh. My desk was vandalized so many times that teachers eventually stopped asking who did it.

One day, someone left fake blood on my locker.

Another day, they wrote:

SISTER KILLER

across my classroom table.

And everyone just watched.

Nobody stopped it.

Nobody stopped anything.

Time passed anyway.

It always does.

Fast.

Mercilessly fast.

By the time I turned sixteen, our house no longer felt like a home.

It felt haunted.

My father buried himself inside meetings, business trips, and phone calls that lasted until midnight. Sometimes I wouldn’t see him for days even while living under the same roof.

My mother changed even more.

Grief consumed her completely.

She prayed endlessly.

Morning.

Afternoon.

Night.

She whispered Evie’s name like a prayer that heaven kept refusing to answer.

Sometimes I would wake up at 3 a.m. and find her sitting alone near Evie’s bedroom door with a Bible pressed against her chest.

She stopped liking physical touch.

Stopped smiling.

Stopped living.

It was like she had already left this world mentally and was only waiting for her body to follow.

And my father—

I think he became scared too.

Not of me.

But of what we had all become.

Sometimes I catch him staring at old family photos with an expression so empty it frightens me.

Like he knows our family died years ago and we’re all just pretending otherwise.

I don’t know what happens next.

Honestly—

I’m terrified to find out.

Because every time life gives me something beautiful, it takes it away twice as violently.

Maybe pain changes people eventually.

Maybe grief rots you from the inside until there’s nothing recognizable left.

I don’t know.

But I made one promise to myself long ago:

No matter how broken I become…

I will never turn into the kind of monster this world expects me to be.

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