Forbidden Echoes

Chapter Nine: The Panic Attack

The study smelled like his father — cedar and old paper and the particular dust of a room that got cleaned around rather than cleaned.

Justin hadn't been inside it more than a handful of times in his life, always at his father's invitation, always for something small and procedural — signing a form, fetching a stapler. Standing in the doorway now, the key still warm in his palm, it felt like trespassing into a country he'd technically always had a passport for and never once actually visited.

"Filing cabinet," Jessica said, already moving toward it, business-brisk in a way that told him she was using purpose to outrun nerves the same way he usually did. "That's where people keep things they don't want found in a hurry."

It was locked too, but the key from his father's ring that opened the study door turned out to open the cabinet as well — a small, lazy security failure that struck Justin as exactly the kind of thing his father would do: build one wall and assume nobody would ever bother checking for a second.

The top drawer was nothing — tax returns, insurance paperwork, the dull sediment of an ordinary adult life. The second drawer was much the same, until Jessica's hand stilled on a manila folder near the back, slightly thicker than the others, tabbed in handwriting that wasn't his father's.

"Justin."

Her voice had changed register, careful now.

"This is your mom's handwriting, isn't it?"

He crossed the room before he'd consciously decided to, and the moment he saw the looping, familiar script on the folder's tab —

For K, if I don't say it out loud

— something in his chest performed a small, decisive collapse, the floor of the room tilting very slightly even though nothing in it had actually moved.

He opened the folder anyway.

He couldn't have explained, later, why he hadn't asked Jessica to do it instead.

Inside were pages in his mother's handwriting — not a letter exactly, more like fragments, the kind of writing a person does when they're working something out rather than delivering it to anyone.

Dates from years back.

A name circled twice:

Elena.

A line underlined hard enough that the pen had nearly torn the paper:

I know what I saw. I just don't know what to do with knowing it.

The room narrowed.

That was the only way Justin could describe it afterward — the walls seeming to draw inward, the air going thin and used up, his own heartbeat suddenly audible in his ears like something trying to break out through his ribs.

His mother's handwriting.

Her actual hand.

Her actual private uncertainty laid bare on a page she'd never meant him to see, in a drawer his father had hidden for reasons Justin couldn't begin to construct without his chest constricting further—

"Justin."

Jessica's voice, closer now, cutting through the static.

"Hey. Look at me."

He realized he was sitting.

He didn't remember sitting.

The floor of the study. His back against the side of the desk. Knees pulled up without his permission. His breath coming in short, useless pulls that weren't actually reaching his lungs no matter how many times he tried.

"I can't—"

The sentence wouldn't finish. It just hung there, incomplete, the way his breathing was incomplete.

"Okay. Okay, I've got you."

Jessica knelt in front of him, not touching yet, giving him the half-second of space he needed before any contact would register as safety instead of further invasion.

"You're having a panic attack. That's all this is. It feels like dying, but it's not. I promise you, it's just your body panicking faster than your brain can keep up with."

Her voice remained calm, unhurried.

"I need you to breathe with me. Can you do that?"

He couldn't answer.

He nodded instead, barely, his vision swimming at the edges, the folder still clutched in one white-knuckled hand as though letting go of it might somehow make the contents stop being true.

"In for four," she said. "With me. One, two, three, four."

He tried.

It came out ragged and short, nowhere near four counts, but she didn't correct him. She just kept going, her own breath audible and deliberate so he had something to match himself against.

"Hold for four. That's it."

Her hand found his — not grabbing, just resting there, present. An anchor he could take or leave.

He took it.

He gripped hard enough that it should have hurt, and she didn't flinch.

"Out for six. Longer than the in-breath. There you go."

They did it again.

And again.

Slowly, in increments too small to notice individually, the room widened back out — the walls returning to their actual distance, the air filling his lungs in full instead of panicked fragments, his heartbeat easing from a hammer to something almost ordinary.

"Good," Jessica said softly when his breathing had steadied enough for the word to land somewhere real. "You're doing good. Tell me five things you can see. Just look around. Don't think about it too hard."

"The desk," he managed, his voice thin and unfamiliar to his own ears. "Your hand. The window. The folder."

He swallowed.

"Your—"

He stopped.

Looked at her properly for the first time since the floor had tilted.

"Your face. I can see your face."

"There you go."

Something softened behind her eyes, relief layered beneath the focus she'd been holding since the moment he'd gone down.

"Four things you can hear."

"The house. Creaking."

A breath.

"Your breathing. Mine."

Another.

"The clock downstairs not ticking."

His mouth twitched weakly.

"I can hear it not ticking. Does that count?"

"It counts."

The corner of her mouth lifted — small, genuine, the kind of thing that felt like permission to keep existing.

"You're doing great. Almost back."

They stayed like that a while longer — him on the floor of his father's study with his back against the desk, her kneeling in front of him still holding his hand, the manila folder now set carefully aside between them like something that needed quarantining before either of them could look at it again.

The panic receded by degrees, leaving behind the particular hollowed-out exhaustion that always followed it. His limbs felt heavy. His thoughts moved slowly, cautiously, like something recently broken and not yet trusted to bear weight.

"Sorry," he said eventually, the word arriving thick with embarrassment. "That was—"

He exhaled.

"I don't usually do that in front of people."

"You don't have to apologize for your body reacting to finding your dead mother's handwriting hidden in a locked drawer."

Jessica's voice was gentle but firm, and, importantly, free of pity.

"If anything, I'm impressed it took this long. I would've lost it days ago."

"Comforting."

"I try."

She squeezed his hand once, then seemed to realize, almost as an afterthought, that she was still holding it.

For a moment neither of them moved to change that.

The contact sat between them as something neither had decided to start and neither seemed in a hurry to end.

It was in that stillness, the adrenaline ebbing and something quieter rising to take its place, that Justin became uncomfortably aware of how close she actually was.

Kneeling in front of him.

Her knees nearly touching his.

Her hand warm and solid in his.

Her face close enough that he could see the faint furrow of concern still sitting between her brows.

The awareness arrived uninvited and unwelcome, layered guiltily over the genuine gratitude he felt for her steadiness, and he hated himself a little for the fact that his body could apparently register both things at once — the relief of being cared for and, beneath it, traitorous and badly timed, something that had nothing to do with care at all.

He pulled his hand back first.

Gentle, but deliberate.

Something flickered across her face. Recognition, maybe. Just as quickly suppressed.

"Thank you," he said, looking anywhere but directly at her. "For that. All of it."

"You'd have done the same."

She said it like a fact rather than a guess, already rising, putting a careful few feet of distance between them with the same instinct he'd just acted on.

As though they'd both silently agreed the moment required it.

"We should look at what's actually in that folder," she said. "When you're ready. Not right now, if you need a minute."

Justin looked at the folder sitting between them on the study floor, his mother's handwriting visible at the edge of the top page, the words circled hard enough to threaten the paper.

I know what I saw.

"No."

He pushed himself up from the floor, legs unsteady but holding.

"I need to know now."

A breath.

"I think I've spent eight months not knowing things, and I'm done with that particular hobby."

Jessica watched him for a moment, something complicated moving behind her eyes — concern, and something else beneath the concern that neither of them had a name for yet. Or maybe had a name for and weren't ready to say aloud.

"Okay," she said, picking the folder back up.

"Then let's find out what she saw.”