SILAS' POV
Guilt is a funny thing.
It clings to you like smoke, slipping into your lungs, filling every crevice of your body until it becomes part of who you are. You breathe it in. You live in it. And eventually, you start to believe you deserve it. I have spent years suffocating under the weight of my own guilt.
Because I knew, deep down, that if it weren’t for me—if Ava hadn’t tried to save me—none of this would have happened.
Chris would have had his sister.
Ava’s mother wouldn’t have shattered into pieces and abandoned her own son and husband.
Chris wouldn’t have been sent away to a cold, unfamiliar boarding school as a child.
And I wouldn’t have spent my life watching the people I loved slowly fall apart. But even that was not all, there was something I was hiding from everyon
