Cassian
Thursday arrived too fast and not fast enough.
I'd spent the two days between doing everything I could to prepare. I'd read Wren's file until the pages blurred. I'd reviewed the conflicting psychological reports, the crime scene photos, the interview transcripts. I'd listened to Dr. Webb's raw session recordings late into the night, hearing Wren's soft voice answer questions about his childhood with that same gentle hesitation.
Nothing prepared me.
At 9:47 AM, I stood outside Interview Room 3, watching through the small reinforced window.
He was already inside.
Seated at the bolted-down table, hands resting loosely in front of him. Uncuffed. He'd earned that privilege after two years of perfect behavior—no incidents, no outbursts, no violations of any kind. The model patient. The one the nurses loved and the guards protected and the other patients left alone.
He looked smaller than I remembered.
The hospital-issued clothes swallowed him—a gray sweater with sleeves pulled over his hands, loose pants that pooled around thin ankles. His dark hair was slightly damp, like he'd just washed it, and it fell across his forehead in soft waves. His pale silver eyes were fixed on the door.
Waiting.
Waiting for me.
The idea settled in my chest like a stone. Heavy. Warm. Wrong.
I'd stood outside interview rooms hundreds of times. I'd watched murderers, rapists, men who'd done unspeakable things. I'd felt nothing but clinical detachment. They were case files. Puzzles to solve. Data points.
This was different.
This felt like standing on the edge of something I couldn't see. Like looking into water that was deeper than it appeared.
I opened the door.
He looked up.
Those enormous eyes went wide, and his lips parted slightly—that same expression from the yard. The one that made him look so young, so vulnerable, so hopeful. Like a child who'd been left alone too long and couldn't quite believe someone had finally come.
"Dr. Thorne," he breathed.
His voice was soft. Younger than twenty-four. It wrapped around my name like something precious, something he'd been saving.
I sat across from him. Placed the file on the table. Didn't open it.
"You know who I am."
He nodded. A piece of dark hair fell into his eyes. He didn't push it away. "I went to one of your lectures. Five years ago. At the university."
My pen stilled. I'd read this in the file—his claim that he remembered a lecture—but hearing it in that soft, intimate voice was different. It wasn't a fact being recited. It was a memory being offered. A gift.
"You remember a lecture from five years ago."
"I remember everything about that day." His voice dropped lower. Intimate. Like we were sharing a secret in a crowded room. "You talked about why people do terrible things. About how sometimes the monster isn't a monster—just someone who was broken and never got fixed."
His eyes met mine. Held them.
"I think about that a lot. In here."
I should redirect. Should stay clinical. Should open the file and start with standard intake questions, the ones I'd asked a thousand times before.
Instead I heard myself ask, "Do you think you're broken, Wren?"
The question hung between us.
He tilted his head—a gesture so childlike it made my chest ache. "I think," he said softly, "I've been waiting for someone to look close enough to find out."
The words landed somewhere deep. Somewhere I'd locked away years ago, after my mother's body was found and the police told me they might never find who did it. After I'd stood in that empty house, surrounded by her things, and realized I was completely alone. After I'd built walls so high and so thick that nothing could get in.
I've been waiting for someone to look close enough.
I opened the file. Needed to look at something besides those silver eyes.
"Tell me about the night of the third murder."
His expression didn't change. Didn't flicker. "I don't remember it."
"You don't remember delivering food to his apartment?"
"I remember delivering food." His voice stayed soft, patient. "I remember knocking. I remember him opening the door. He was wearing a blue sweater. He had a small dog, a terrier, that barked at me from the other room. He apologized for the dog. He tipped me five dollars and said to keep the change."
I wrote nothing. Just listened.
"I don't remember anything after that until I woke up the next morning."
"That happens often? Losing time?"
He looked down at his hands. They were slender, pale, the bones visible under the skin. I noticed fresh scratches on his knuckles—thin red lines that hadn't been there in the yard.
"Sometimes," he said. "When I'm stressed. When things are too much."
"And what was stressful about that night?"
A long pause. When he looked up again, his eyes were wet. Not crying—not yet—but shimmering, like tears were waiting just beneath the surface.
"I'd had a bad week," he whispered. "I was thinking about my mother. About how she died. About how no one ever..." He stopped. Swallowed. "No one ever came for me."
The tears spilled over. Just two, sliding silently down his cheeks. He didn't wipe them away. Didn't seem to notice they were there.
My hand moved before I could stop it.
Reaching across the table. Fingers extended. Toward that wet cheek.
I caught myself an inch away.
Felt the heat of his skin. The proximity. The impossible intimacy of it.
I pulled back. Grabbed my pen like a lifeline.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm not trying to... I know you're supposed to evaluate me. I know you have to decide if I'm lying. I know you have to be objective." He looked up, and those wet silver eyes were devastating. "I just... I'm glad it's you. Even if you decide I'm guilty. Even if you send me away. I'm glad I got to see you again."
My heart was beating too fast. I could feel it in my throat, my temples, the tips of my fingers. The room felt too small. The air felt too thin.
Three psychiatrists couldn't agree, I reminded myself. He's either deeply traumatized or deeply dangerous. Either way, he's not yours. Either way, you can't—
"You mentioned losing time in your interviews with Dr. Webb," I said, forcing my voice back to professional. "When did that start?"
He blinked. The shift was visible—him pulling himself back together, tucking the emotion away.
"I don't know. A long time ago. When I was little."
"Can you remember the first time?"
A longer pause this time. His eyes went distant, focusing on something I couldn't see.
"The closet," he said finally. His voice was very small.
"The closet?"
"First foster home. The man... he put me in the closet when I was bad. Which was a lot. I didn't understand the rules. I never understood the rules." He wrapped his arms around himself, a protective gesture that looked involuntary. "It was dark. So dark. And cold. And I was so scared. I thought something was going to get me. Something in the dark."
I waited.
"Then one time... something did get me. But it wasn't scary. It was..." He frowned, searching for the word. "Warm. Like being wrapped in a blanket. And I wasn't alone anymore. There was someone with me. Someone who wasn't scared."
"Who was it?"
He shook his head. "I don't know. I never saw them. I just... felt them. And after that, the closet wasn't so bad. I could go there—to that place inside my head—and the time would pass, and when I came back, it was morning."
Dissociation. Classic trauma response. A child learns to escape the only way they can.
"And now? When you lose time now—do you go to that same place?"
He shook his head. "I don't go anywhere. I just... wake up. And hours are gone. And sometimes things are different."
"What kind of things?"
"My hands hurt." He looked down at the scratches, as if seeing them for the first time. "Or there's water in the sink, like someone washed them. Or my journal is open to a page I don't remember writing."
My pen moved across the page, documenting, but my mind was racing.
"Has that happened recently?"
A pause. Too long.
"Wren?"
"I wrote something last week," he whispered. "I don't remember writing it. The handwriting was mine, but the words... they weren't mine."
"What did it say?"
He shook his head. "I tore it out. Flushed it. I didn't want to see it."
"Wren." I kept my voice gentle. "What did it say?"
A long, long pause. When he looked up, his eyes were wet again.
"It said, 'Don't touch him. He's not yours.'"
The words hit me like a physical blow.
Don't touch him. He's not yours.
Who wrote that? Who was talking about?
Me.
It had to be me.
"Wren," I said carefully, "do you think someone else writes those words? Someone who isn't you?"
His face crumpled. The tears came faster now, silent and endless. "I don't know. I don't know anything anymore. I feel like I'm going crazy. Like maybe I really did those things and I just... can't remember. Like maybe there's someone inside me who does things I don't know about."
The words hung in the air between us.
Someone inside me.
I thought about Dr. Webb's recording. Sometimes it feels like someone's watching out for me.
I thought about the scratches on his hands. The lost time. The journal entries he didn't remember.
I thought about three murdered men and a photograph frame turned facedown.
And I thought about Wren's silver eyes, wet with tears, looking at me like I was the only thing keeping him from drowning.
"We're going to figure this out," I heard myself say. The words came from somewhere deeper than professionalism, somewhere I didn't know I still had. "Together. I'm not going anywhere."
He stared at me. Those tears kept falling.
"Promise?" he whispered.
And I—who never made promises, who never let anyone close enough to ask, who'd spent thirteen years building walls so high that nothing could breach them—said:
"Promise."
The word hung in the air. Sacred. Terrifying. Irrevocable.
He smiled. That same small, hopeful smile from the yard. But this time, there was something else beneath it. Something that looked almost like peace.
"I knew you'd come," he said softly. "I've known since the lecture. I didn't know when. I didn't know how. But I knew."
I should have corrected him. Should have reminded him that I was his doctor, not his savior. Should have rebuilt the walls that were crumbling by the second.
I didn't.
Instead I sat there, watching him smile, feeling something crack open in my chest that I didn't know how to close.
The session went on for another forty minutes. We talked about foster homes and group homes and the years he spent running. We talked about his mother and the night she died and the things he didn't remember. We talked about the emptiness he'd carried his whole life, the one he'd tried to fill with stealing and running and eventually just... waiting.
Waiting for something. Someone. A reason.
When the hour ended, I walked him back to the unit. It wasn't protocol. I wasn't supposed to leave the interview room. But I couldn't let him go back alone. Not after everything.
At the door to D-block, he turned to face me.
"Thank you," he said. "For listening. For not treating me like a monster."
"You're not a monster, Wren."
Something flickered in his eyes. Too fast to read.
"Maybe," he said quietly. "Maybe not."
He walked through the door. Didn't look back.
I stood there for a long time after he disappeared, staring at nothing.
You're not a monster.
The words echoed in my head.
I wanted to believe them.
I needed to believe them.
But as I walked back to my office, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd just made a promise I couldn't keep. To him. To myself. To whatever was watching from behind those silver eyes.
And somewhere, in the deepest part of me, a voice whispered:
Monsters don't know they're monsters.
That's what makes them dangerous.
I closed my office door. Sat at my desk. Stared at the file.
And for the first time in thirteen years, I prayed.
Not to God—I'd stopped believing in God the day they found my mother's body. But to something. Someone. Whatever was listening.
Let him be innocent.
Let me be strong enough to help him.
Let this not destroy us both.
The silence that followed was my only answer.