Patient File No. 7
I didn't go home to pack. I didn't tell anyone. I simply, that very night, walked toward Golestan Alley, knowing I might never return.
The street, when I arrived, was different. Not in appearance — the same bakery, the same park, the same brick houses — but in the feeling that radiated from it. The air was heavier, like the moment before a storm that hadn't yet arrived.
I stood at the mouth of the street, and for the first time, with no fear holding me back, I stepped forward and went in.
Each step seemed to take years and yet no time at all. The bakery passed beside me, its smell this time not fresh but stale and cold. The park, with its swings now completely motionless, as if even the invisible wind no longer dared to move them.
At the end of the street, beneath the same streetlight I had seen in my first dream, a man stood — not Mr. Monday, but a real human being, hunched, his clothes worn and torn, his hair now completely white.
Patient No. 7.
When I drew closer, he turned. His eyes, when they saw me, filled with something that wavered between hope and terror.
"You shouldn't have come," he said, his voice weak, hoarse, as if he hadn't spoken in days.
"I know what you did," I said, without preamble. "I know about your childhood, that night, telling him to keep going."
His face broke — not an angry collapse, but something quieter, sadder, like someone who, after years of running, finally allows the weight of what he's always carried to fall to the ground.
"I was a child," he said, his voice trembling. "I was only ten years old. I didn't know... I didn't know what was happening. I thought it was a magic trick. I thought I was watching something wonderful, not a catastrophe."
"I know," I said, and this time, strangely, in my voice there was neither judgment nor anger, only a kind of bitter understanding. "Children sometimes say things without knowing what they mean."
"But I couldn't forget it," he said, tears streaming down his face. "For twenty-two years, I've carried this secret. I couldn't tell anyone — not the psychiatrists, not anyone. I could only tell the story without this piece, hoping someone would eventually understand without me having to say it out loud."
"Why now?" I asked. "Why come back here?"
He turned his gaze from me, toward the darkness at the end of the street, where something — or someone — was waiting.
"Because I realized the only way I can be free is to let the story end completely," he said. "Not just his story. Mine too."
At that exact moment, the air trembled, and from within that darkness, Mr. Monday emerged — this time not as a shadow or a blurred smudge, but something clearer than ever before, almost human, with a face still slightly indistinct but on which, for the first time, sorrow could be seen.
"You're both here," he said, his voice this time without any game, without any threat — just tired, just heavy with the weight of years.
Patient No. 7 — or perhaps I should say, the man who had once been a ten-year-old boy — took a step toward Mr. Monday.
"I'm sorry," he said, his voice breaking. "I'm sorry I told you to keep going. I'm sorry I thought it was a game. I'm sorry I never had the courage to come and forgive you — or to ask for forgiveness from myself."
Mr. Monday, for the first time, had something like tears — or perhaps something beyond tears, a light seeping from his eyes — sliding down his face.
"You were just a child," he said, his voice unsteady. "I... I was the adult. Or at least, I should have been. I shouldn't have let a child be responsible for my decisions."
A silence settled, a silence in which, for the first time, I felt something shifting — not a terrifying change, but something like a crack of light in the darkness.
"But the story isn't finished yet," Mr. Monday said, turning his gaze toward me. "Because there's one more thing, Doctor — something even he doesn't know."
My heart sank.
"What?" I asked.
His gaze, this time, filled with a new pain — a pain I knew was about to change my life forever.
"The Sadeghi family," he said, quietly, "didn't completely disappear, as I said. A piece of them, one version, still exists. Somewhere, in one of those infinite repeated moments."
"Where?" I asked, my voice trembling.
Mr. Monday, slowly, raised his hand and pointed toward the bakery.
"Right where they always were," he said. "Waiting for someone who finally dares to go in and see them."
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To be continued in Chapter Nineteen...