[The Next Day]
The fluorescent hum of the hospital corridor was a sound Kyson had come to loathe. It was the sound of stagnant time, of antiseptic failure, and of a silence he had helped build, brick by brick, for the last ten years. He sat in the hard plastic chair outside Room 412, his elbows on his knees and his head hanging low. For the first time in his life, the arrogant, golden-boy facade of Kyson Combs was not just cracked- it was shattered.
He couldn't get the footage out of his head. As the son of a high-ranking hospital official and a prominent local figure, he'd pulled favors to see the grainy, jittery security tape from the school parking lot. He had gone into that security office expecting to see Annie being clumsy- perhaps walking into the path of a slow-moving vehicle because she was "distracted" or "melodramatic," as his mother often whispered.
Instead, he had watched a nightmare. He saw the silver SUV accelerate. He saw the cold, calculated precision of the impact. He saw the way Annie- his sister, the girl he had treated like an infectious disease, was crushed against the metal of Riley's car.
She hadn't even had time to scream. She had just… crumpled.
It was the finality of it that broke the dam of his denial. For weeks, he had tried to tell himself she was faking it. Even when the doctors talked about traumatic brain injury and ventilation, a dark, poisoned part of his mind- the part nurtured by Margaret, thought Annie was just playing for the ultimate sympathy prize. But the camera didn't lie. The camera showed a girl being hunted.
Kyson closed his eyes, and the memories began to play, unbidden and stinging. He thought of the way he'd mocked her paintings, calling them "creepy" and "attention-seeking." He thought of the way he'd intentionally spilled juice on her poetry journals when they were twelve, laughing as the ink bled across the pages like bruises.
He thought of the countless times he'd walked past her in the halls of their home, purposely shouldering her into the wall, only to sneer when she looked at him with those wide, wounded blue eyes.
"Why are you even here?" he had hissed at her just a week before the accident. "No one wants you. Dad just feels obligated. You're a ghost, Annie. Go back to being dead."
The memory of his own words made him feel physically ill. He felt a surge of bile in his throat. He had spent years trying to extinguish a light that was already flickering, all because he was terrified of being left in the dark.
His thoughts shifted, turning like a jagged blade toward his mother.
For years, Margaret had been his sole North Star. For the first eight years of his life, it was just the two of them- the struggling single mother and her loyal son. When Dylan came into the picture, Kyson had been ecstatic. He wanted a father more than he wanted air. But Margaret had never let him feel secure in that new reality.
He could hear her voice now, a soft, honeyed poison at the dinner table or behind closed doors. "You have to work twice as hard, Kyson. You aren't his blood. Annie is. He'll always choose her. Look at how he looks at her- he sees her mother. He'll never see himself in you."
She had planted the seeds of insecurity and watered them with Annie's tears. She had weaponized his fear of abandonment, turning him into a soldier in a war Annie didn't even know she was fighting. Margaret had made him believe that for him to have a father, Annie had to lose one. She had put Annie in the crossfire intentionally, using Kyson as the weapon because she was too "graceful" to do the dirty work herself.
And he had fallen for it. He had been so greedy for Dylan's approval, so desperate to be the preferred child, that he had become a monster to a girl who had never done anything but try to be kind to him.
He remembered a time, shortly after she moved back, when he had forgotten his lunch money. Annie had slipped a ten-dollar bill into his locker with a note that simply said, 'Have a good day, Kyson.' He had ripped the note up in front of her and thrown the money in the trash, calling her a "pathetic suck-up."
She hadn't even fought back. She had just looked down at her shoes, her black hair veiling her face, and walked away.
That was the kind and sweet soul he had tried to smother. She was the girl who loved classic rock- what kyson would call "old man music," and sugary lollipops, the girl who painted the world in shades of indigo because the real world was too bright and loud for her. She would have shared everything with him- she would have been the sister he actually needed, if he hadn't spent a decade trying to drive her away.
He looked at the closed door of Room 412. Somewhere in there, his father was sitting by her bed, probably holding her hand and praying. For the first time, Kyson didn't feel jealous. He felt a crushing weight of justice. Dylan should be there. Dylan should love her more, because Annie was worth it, and Kyson... Kyson felt like he wasn't worth the chair he was sitting in.
He didn't know about Ethan's investigation, but he knew his mother had secrets. He knew she was different when Dylan wasn't around. He started to realize that the "security" she promised him was a lie. She didn't care about his relationship with Dylan, she cared about her own status. She had used him to destabilize the house so she could reign over the ruins.
"I'm sorry, Annie," he whispered to the empty, sterile hallway. The words felt small and useless against the backdrop of the ventilator's hiss. "I'm so sorry."
He realized then that he didn't just want her to wake up for her sake. He wanted her to wake up so he could tell her she was right- that he was a coward, and that she was the only one in that house who was actually brave. He wanted to find whoever hit her and tear them apart, not because he was a "big brother," but because he owed her a debt that a thousand lifetimes couldn't repay.
As the shadow of a nurse passed by, Kyson stood up. He couldn't sit still anymore. The guilt was a living thing, clawing at his insides.
He needed to do something. He needed to be more than the boy who stayed silent while his sister was hunted. He looked at the visitor log on the desk as he walked past, his eyes catching the names of the girls who had visited.
Vanessa. Peggy.
A spark of his old temper flared, but this time, it wasn't directed at Annie. It was directed at the "friends" who had whispered in his ear about how "weird" and "damaged" Annie was.
"I'm going to find out," he muttered, his jaw tightening, the same stubborn resolve Ethan possessed finally manifesting in him for the right reasons. "I'm going to find out who did this to you, Annie. Even if the trail leads right back to my own front door."
He walked away from the room, his footsteps heavy, no longer the arrogant king of the school, but a boy beginning to see the blood on his own hands.