Chapter 18: (

It begins not with a sentence.

But with the absence of one.

And then:

He was never real, was he?

The voice doesn’t come from a character.

There are no characters left.

It comes from us.

The ones who watched.

The ones who read.

The ones who needed someone to carry all the sadness we couldn’t explain.

He was good.

He was kind.

He didn’t deserve what happened.

But he wasn’t strong.

He wasn’t chosen.

He wasn’t saved.

Because there was no saving written into his story.

He was made to suffer.

From the first page.

From the first rumor.

From the first friend who said,

I didn’t see what happened — but it was probably his fault.

We made him up.

We made up his pain.

We gave him memories we knew we’d take away.

We gave him warmth so we could enjoy watching it disappear.

He stood in the rain, alone — because we asked him to.

He searched for her, again and again — because we never let him find her.

We never gave him a voice loud enough to be heard.

We only gave him a whisper.

We gave him rumors instead of truth.

We gave him silence instead of love.

And when he started to disappear…

We let him.

Because that’s what he was made for.

To fade.

To forget.

To become less and less.

Until even the story no longer needed to remember his name.

He was a placeholder for pain.

And now even the pain is tired.

Even the suffering has lost its shape.

There is no revenge.

No justice.

No salvation.

There is only the quiet truth.

He didn’t make it.

He was not the hero.

He was not special.

He was just a boy.

And we let him vanish.

We never even said goodbye.