Sia's POV

  A few days.

  That's all it had been.

  A few days and the house had already rearranged itself around the silence between us, the way a body rearranges itself around an injury.

  Working around it.

  Pretending it wasn't there. Moving carefully so as not to press on it.

  He wasn't locking himself in his room anymore. That was something. That was the only something I had.

  Everything else was a wall.

  Not a subtle one. He wasn't trying to be subtle.

  The difference in how he spoke to Mom and how he didn't speak to me was visible enough that Mom noticed within days, and Mom was someone who had learned, over years of long working hours and deliberate absence, not to notice things she didn't have the energy to address.

  "Did something happen between you two?" She caught me in the kitchen one evening, her voice quiet, her eyes doing the careful reading thing. "You seem so distant tely."

  The question nded in my chest like something dropped from a height.

  She doesn't know.

  The relief moved through me first, cold and immediate.

  He didn't tell her.

  He kept it.

  He chose to keep it.

  He still cares about protecting this family. He still cares about me enough to protect me.

  I held onto that. I held onto it the way you hold onto the one solid thing when everything else is moving.

  "Nothing happened," I said. My voice came out even. Practiced. "He's just still recovering. You know how he gets."

  She looked at me for a moment longer than was comfortable. Then she let it go.

  Was it a mistake?

  The question arrived every morning without fail. Before I was fully awake. Before I had decided anything about the day. Just there, waiting, the first thing.

  Did I move too soon?

  Did I break something that was just beginning to heal?

  Did I take the only fragile thing he had managed to rebuild and put my hands through it?

  No

  No. It was necessary.

  It was right.

  He doesn't understand yet but he will.

  I just need to reach him.

  I just need one real conversation, one moment where he lets me close enough to expin, and he'll understand.

  I tried.

  I tried every way I knew how to try.

  Gentle approaches and direct ones. Waiting until he seemed calm. Choosing my moments carefully, when Mom wasn't around, when the house was quiet, when there was nowhere obvious for him to redirect himself.

  Every single time, he found a way.

  An excuse to be somewhere else.

  A sudden need to use the bathroom. Eyes going deliberately to the window, the floor, the wall behind me, anywhere that wasn't my face.

  And when all of that failed, just silence. The particur silence of someone who has heard you and decided that responding would give you something you don't deserve to have.

  Why are you being like this, Rio?

  Why are you so far away when you're right here?

  It hurts. Do you know it hurts? Do you know every time you look through me it takes something that doesn't grow back?

  I tried his door at midnight once.

  Stood in the dark hallway with my hand raised, knuckles almost touching the wood.

  The click of the lock from the other side came before I could knock. Quiet. Deliberate.

  The sound of someone who had heard my footsteps and made a decision before I could make mine.

  I stood there for a long time afterward.

  The dark hallway. The locked door. The distance of three inches of wood between us that felt like something much rger and much less crossable.

  Weeks passed.

  Mom's shoulders had developed a permanent tension that she carried now the way some people carry old injuries, always there, occasionally worse, something you learned to move around.

  She watched us at dinner.

  Watched the careful geometry of how we positioned ourselves retive to each other.

  The space I left. The space he reinforced.

  "You two are so distant," she said one night, quietly, in my ear while Rio was in the other room.

  Her voice was not accusatory.

  It was something sadder than that. Confused.

  "He might still be dealing with everything, but you should help him. You should be the one pulling him out. He's trying so hard, Sia. Don't let him do it alone."

  Her words went into me like something pointed.

  I can't tell you why we're distant, Mom.

  I can't tell you what happened without pulling this whole family open.

  And I can't do that. I won't do that.

  So I'll stand here and take this and let you think I'm failing him when the truth is too complicated to say out loud.

  I nodded. I said I would try harder.

  I went to my room and sat on my bed in the dark and pressed my palms against my eyes until I stopped feeling like I was going to come apart.

  And then something shifted.

  His efforts stopped.

  Not gradually. All at once.

  The careful performance of someone trying to function, the small daily attempts to be present and intact, it all just stopped.

  He went back to his room and stayed there and this time it was different from before because before there had been a reason I could identify and now there was just absence.

  Ft and total and without expnation.

  Mom was frightened. I could see it in the way she moved through the house, quieter than usual, as if loud movement might confirm something she was trying not to confirm.

  Did I do this?

  The thought arrived without mercy.

  Is this me? Is this what I caused?

  I wanted us to be happy and instead I pushed him back into the dark and now Mom is frightened and the house is quiet and he won't come out and this is what I made.

  I gave him space.

  Real space, the kind that costs something.

  No approaches, no midnight visits, no carefully timed appearances in rooms he was about to enter.

  Just presence at a distance, which was the hardest thing I had ever done, which required a kind of self-restraint I hadn't known I possessed.

  Fine

  I told myself this quietly, in the dark of my own room.

  If my presence is what's hurting you, then I'll remove it.

  I'll be furniture. I'll be a fact of the house rather than a person in it.

  I'll be your childhood, your past, something that exists in the background without demanding anything.

  If that's what you need I'll become that.

  I know how to wait

  But the way he ignored even mom stung more. She was happy to have her son back, Happy to see her son fight. But I took that from her.

  I have to fix this

  I will

  His door was unlocked.

  I noticed it one afternoon the way you notice something that has been wrong for a long time finally going right. The small absence of the click that had defined the past weeks. I stood in the hallway and looked at it and something rearranged itself in my chest.

  I knocked. Harder than I meant to.

  Nothing

  I pushed the door open.

  He was lying on the bed. Hair undone, spreading across the pillow in the way of someone who has stopped caring about such things.

  Body thin in a way that still shocked me every time I saw it. Eyes open, looking at the ceiling, then shifting slowly to me when the door moved.

  The look in them stopped me.

  Not the flinching. Not the careful avoidance.

  Something else. Something I didn't have a word for.

  A deep, searching stillness, as if he was looking at me from a very long distance and trying to determine what he was seeing.

  As if I were something unfamiliar that he was attempting to categorize.

  "Are you okay, Rio?"

  My own voice surprised me.

  It came out ft. Recorded. The voice of someone performing the shape of a question without the feeling behind it, because the feeling behind it was too rge and too complicated to attach to words right now.

  He looked at me.

  For a moment something moved through his eyes.

  Something that flickered in and went deep again, like a light seen through very dark water.

  His face arranged itself around a thought I couldn't read, turning it over, examining every side of it.

  Then he spoke.

  "I don't remember anything"

  The words nded in the room without drama. Quietly. The way the most significant things tend to arrive.

  What

  I opened my mouth. Closed it.

  The questions were all there, lined up, each one pressing against the one in front of it, but my mouth had stopped cooperating entirely.

  "What?" That was all that came out. Just the one word, thin and insufficient.

  "I can't remember who I am." His voice was careful. Slow.

  The voice of someone reading from something internal, transting it as they went.

  "Where I am. Who you are. I can't remember any of it. Not a single thing that should matter."

  The silence that followed was the kind that grows.

  I felt it expanding in the room, pressing against the walls, filling the space between us.

  He's not joking.

  The thought arrived with certainty.

  Rio has never once in his life made a joke that looked like this.

  Whatever this is, it's real. Whatever is happening inside him, it's real.

  "I keep reaching back."

  He exhaled slowly, his chest falling with it.

  "And there's nothing there. No faces. No names. Not even a feeling of what I'm supposed to be. Just." A pause. Long enough to feel.

  "Nothing."

  He kept talking.

  I stopped hearing the words.

  He doesn't remember

  The thought arrived slowly. The way rge things arrive, in pieces, each one having to be processed before the next can be admitted.

  He doesn't remember what happened between us.

  He doesn't remember my confession.

  He doesn't remember the weeks of silence and locked doors and Mom's worried eyes and my hands pressed against my face in the dark.

  He doesn't remember any of it

  His breathing had slowed.

  The effort of that much speech settling into him like weight, his body rexing against the mattress, eyes growing heavy at the edges.

  I waited until the words had stopped.

  "You really don't remember anything?"

  My voice came out differently than I expected. Fragile.

  As if the question itself was made of something that could break.

  "No." Quick. Certain.

  "Any...thing?"

  He gave a small nod. Slow and deliberate.

  A confirmation that required almost no energy because the answer was so complete it needed nothing added to it.

  Nothing

  I stood in the doorway of his room and the afternoon light sat golden on the floor between us and something moved through me that I didn't look at directly.

  Something warm and quiet and terrible.

  Something that understood, with a crity I hadn't felt in months, that the road behind us had just been cleared.

  That every mistake I had made in it had just been quietly, completely erased.

  He doesn't remember

  A small sound moved through me. Not quite a ugh. Something lighter than that. Something that had no business being there and arrived anyway.

  I won't make the same mistakes.

  Not this time. I know what I did wrong.

  I know where I moved too fast and pushed too hard and let the wanting show before the foundation was ready.

  I know all of it now.

  And he remembers none of it

  So we begin again

  Slowly. Carefully. The way you build something you intend to keep

  And this time, Rio

  This time

  You will fall

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  AnnouncementHey Guys, sorry for the te upload. I got quite sick in the past few days. But I will be posting regurly now. And also if you wanna read chapters advanced, you can check nout the link below. I will also be posting illustrations there.

  Link of the story..