Vincent watched the door close.
Then he looked down at his gloved hand.
“Elena hated gloves,” he said.
The words surprised me.
I stayed quiet.
“She said they made me look like I thought the world was dirty.”
“Did you?”
“No.” His voice was distant. “I thought the world could leave fingerprints.”
The rain began again against the window, soft and steady.
I adjusted the blanket near his side. “Were you engaged?”
His eyes lifted to mine.
“Caleb told me enough,” I said.
Vincent turned toward the lake. “Yes.”
I waited.
“She was a musician,” he said after a while. “Not famous. Not trying to be. She played piano in a restaurant near the river three nights a week because she said music sounded better when people weren’t listening too hard.”
The image was so unlike the fire, the fear, the man in the bed, that it almost hurt.
“She knew your world?”
“Enough to dislike it.”
“But she stayed.”
“For a while.”
“What happened?”
His jaw tightened.
I thought he would stop.
Instead, he said, “The official story is simple. Elena drugged me during dinner. Disabled security. Set the house on fire. Tried to leave with documents from my safe. She died when part of the east wing collapsed.”
“And the unofficial story?”
His eyes met mine.
“I never believed she could leave me to burn.”
The confession was quiet enough to be mistaken for breath.
“Then why did you accept it?”
“Because accepting betrayal is easier than accepting that you don’t understand your own life.”
I had no answer for that.
I thought of Ethan—no, not Ethan. That was another life, another story. I thought of the people in this hospital who had made me accept their version of me because fighting it every day was exhausting. I thought of how easy it was to live inside a lie when truth demanded rebuilding everything.
“Maybe the video is a chance,” I said.
“For what?”
“To understand.”
He looked back toward the rain. “Understanding doesn’t undo scars.”
“No,” I said. “But sometimes it tells you where they really came from.”
That evening, when Vincent slept, Caleb found me near the vending machines.
He stood staring at the rows of chips and candy as though they had personally insulted him.
“You look lost,” I said.
“I hate machines that demand exact change.”
“It takes cards.”
“That seems worse.”
I stepped beside him and bought him a granola bar.
He looked at it. “Is this food?”
“Technically.”
He accepted it with reluctance.
We stood by the window at the end of the hall, watching rain blur the city lights.
“He told you about Elena,” Caleb said.
“A little.”
“He doesn’t talk about her.”
“He barely talked.”
“That’s more than most get.”
I leaned against the wall. My feet ached. My wrist still hurt faintly where Vincent had held on.
“Did you believe she set the fire?”
Caleb unwrapped the granola bar slowly.
“No.”
I looked at him.
“But I believed the evidence,” he said.
“What evidence?”
“Security footage. Burn patterns. Missing files. Her fingerprints on the sedative bottle.”
“That sounds convincing.”
“It was.” He stared through the glass. “Too convincing, maybe.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“To who? The police? Half were afraid of Vincent. The other half wanted him gone. His enemies were celebrating. His allies were trying to keep him from falling apart.” Caleb’s voice lowered. “And Vincent woke up from that fire unable to bear another human hand. Whatever doubt I had, pain drowned it.”
I looked toward Vincent’s room. Through the narrow window, I could see his silhouette beneath blankets, still even in sleep.
“Why did the touch start after the fire?”
Caleb did not answer immediately.
“When they found him, he was clawing at a locked interior door. The skin on his hands was burned from trying to force it open.” His face tightened. “He kept saying Elena had touched his face right before everything went dark. After that, touch and fire became the same memory.”