Chapter 27
Chapter 27: The Walkaway The silence in the hospital room was a physical presence, thick with the dust of shattered histories. The machines beeped, a monotonous counterpoint to the end of a world. Dream looked from the broken old man in the bed to the shattered man leaning against the wall. Tom’s face was a study in cataclysmic shock, his eyes fixed on some middle distance where the architecture of his life was collapsing in slow motion. He didn’t see her. He was lost in the inferno of his own past. There were no words. Nothing she could say would bridge the chasm that had just opened at his feet, a chasm he had spent a lifetime digging with his own two hands, believing it was a moat to protect him. To offer comfort felt like an insult. To demand an apology was pointless. The guilt in h
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