My confession did not fix anything. It broke the world.
For a long, silent moment, Sina didn't react. She just stared at me, her mind a battlefield where a beautiful, impossible truth was waging war against the entire foundation of her reality. Her eyes, wide and swimming with tears, were a whirlwind of conflicting emotions—shock, fear, disbelief, and underneath it all, a terrifying, magnetic glimmer of recognition.
"No," she whispered, the word a reflexive defense, a shield against an idea too monumental to process. She took a step back, pulling away from my hand as if burned. "No. That's... that's not possible. The kiss... when? How? My notebook... it says we just became friends. It says you rescued a cat..."
Her voice trailed off as the carefully constructed lies began to crumble, turning to dust in the face of my confession. The cat. The taiyaki. The "familiar feeling." She was seeing the threads of the puppet show, and it was horrifying her.
From the edge of the park, I saw Sora start to walk towards us, her face pale with alarm. The situation was escalating beyond anyone's control.
"Sina, listen to me," I pleaded, keeping my voice as gentle as I could, even though my own world was imploding. "Sora can tell you. It's complicated, but it's the truth."
"Tell me what?" Sina demanded, her voice rising with a frantic, desperate energy. She rounded on Sora, who had just reached us. "What is he talking about? You said it was a weird brain-day! You said it was okay! What is going on?"
Sora looked from Sina's terrified face to mine, and in her eyes, I saw the end of the line. The time for lies, for containment, for carefully managed narratives, was over. There was only the brutal, catastrophic truth left.
"He's telling the truth, Sina," Sora said, her voice heavy with a grief that mirrored my own. "It's all true."
That was the final blow. The confirmation from her most trusted pillar of reality.
Sina let out a sound—not a cry, not a scream, but a small, choked gasp of someone who has just had the ground ripped out from under them. She staggered back, her hand flying to her head as if to physically hold it together.
"So... all of it?" she whispered, looking between us, her eyes wild with panic and betrayal. "The notes... the stories... It was all a lie?"
"It was a lie to protect you!" I insisted, taking a step towards her. "To explain the feelings you were having!"
"The feelings you gave me!" she shot back, a new, sharp anger cutting through her fear. "You did this! Both of you! You've been... what? Experimenting on me? Playing with me?"
"No!" Sora and I said in unison.
"That's what it feels like!" Sina cried, tears streaming down her face now. "My whole life is a puzzle I have to solve every single morning, and you... you added a thousand extra pieces that don't fit! You made me feel crazy, and then you pretended to be the answer to a problem that you created!"
She was right. From her perspective, that's exactly what we had done. Our intentions, however noble, were irrelevant in the face of the outcome. We had manipulated her reality, her trust.
"Sina, please," I begged, my heart shattering with every word she spoke. "It wasn't like that. I met you, and I... I couldn't let you go. Every day, I just tried to make you happy. That's all. And when we saw how much the echoes were hurting you, we tried to build a story that would make them stop."
"By lying to me?" she sobbed, wrapping her arms around herself. "How much have you lied about? Is any of it real? Is Zeke real? Is Kaito, Maya...? Is our entire friendship just... a 'controlled narrative'?"
She was spiraling, her trust in everything, in everyone, disintegrating in real-time. This was Sora's greatest fear realized. This wasn't a crack in the dam; this was the dam bursting, and all of us were being swept away by the flood.
"I can't... I can't do this," she said, shaking her head frantically. She turned and ran. Not a slow walk away, but a full, desperate, panicked sprint. Away from the bridge. Away from Sora. Away from me. Away from the truth that was too massive to bear.
"Sina!" Sora screamed, starting after her.
"Let her go," I said, my voice dead. My legs felt like lead, my body hollowed out and filled with ice. "We can't... she needs to run. We're the monsters in her story right now."
Sora stopped, turning back to me, her face a mess of tears and fury and despair. "What have we done, Kelin?" she whispered. "We were supposed to build a bridge. We just... we blew it up."
I stood there, watching the empty path where Sina had disappeared, the echoes of her accusation ringing in my ears. You made me feel crazy.
The confession wasn't a romantic climax. It was a detonation. It had freed me from the burden of my secret, but it had handed her a world of chaos.
The air grew cold. The sun began to set on the ruins of our beautiful, fragile, fabricated world. I had finally told her I loved her. And in doing so, I had lost her completely. The silence she left behind was the loudest, most devastating sound I had ever heard. It was the sound of everything, absolutely everything, shattering.