The key found the lock as if it had remembered him first.
He didn't think; he pressed the brass into the seam that wasn't a seam, the door that wasn't a door until the metal turned with a tired click. The world paused—as if a breath were being held on every page at once—and then let him through.
It was not a corridor on the other side. It was a house.
Not a replica, not a dream's collage—his house, reconstructed with such fidelity it made his ribs ache: the crooked picture frame over the couch, the chipped tile near the stove, the smudge on the hallway wall where a small hand had steadied itself for years. There was a cake-sweet smell baked into the paint. The lights hummed. Nothing was wrong.
Except the cellar door gaped open like a mouth.
He moved toward it without meaning to.
His parents were there, turned slightly away, bodies patient and ordinary. For a heartbeat he believed they were going to tell him a story, or ask him to help carry the winter boxes, or say, we missed you. Then he saw the shape on the floor between them. A boy. Still.
Him.
Memory didn't ease into him; it rose like flooded water. The arms that had held him down. The whispered it has to be done said with a conviction that had no place in a kitchen. The way they didn't look at each other when the first shovel came down.
He wanted to shout himself awake, to rewrite the scene by stepping into it, but this wasn't a choice and never had been. They lowered him, and the first weight of earth fell across his chest with a hush so soft it made the world louder.
He remembered the cold.
He remembered the dark.
He remembered trying to bargain with air.
And in the very last second before the blackness sealed him, he remembered one of them bending close enough that the warmth of breath touched his face and saying his name like a bedtime word.
That hurt more than the dirt.
The scene didn't end with mercy. It ended, like most truths, only because it had finished.
He stumbled from the cellar door into a different light, the house dissolving around him as if ashamed of what it had shown.
He stood in a corridor again, the key heavy in his palm and hot as if it had been in someone else's hand a moment before.
He didn't drop it.
He didn't forgive anyone.
He just kept walking.