The Forgotten Echo

Chapter 9 – The Truth in Blood

I sat frozen in front of the mirror.

Eva no longer reflected back. But I saw more clearly than ever: the man in the glass was a killer.

Images flooded my mind like a tidal wave:

Eva and me. The first winter. We lived in this house. Happy. Paintings everywhere. Eva cooked terribly but always tried her best. She smiled, and I loved her madly.

Then everything changed.

I started losing control. The headaches. The memory gaps. Waking up some mornings with blood on my sleeves, or my brushes stained with mud.

Eva was afraid.

She said sometimes I wasn’t myself anymore.

Then one night… she wanted to leave. She packed her things, crying, promising to come back if I got help.

I didn’t let her go.

Not me — but the other part of me.

Blind rage. Screaming. The sound of things smashing.

I killed her.

With my own hands.

I buried her beneath the tree behind the house. Then the next morning I woke up… as if nothing had happened. My brain—or the brain of another part inside me—had buried the memory with the body.

I believed she had left.

Until Eva began to return. Not in flesh, but in paintings, in videos, in the diary… in broken memories, in truths clawing their way back to life.

I understood then.

I had built this entire game—the house, the paintings, the diary, the videos—to force myself to remember.

But every time I got close to the truth, I ran away. Painted another death for her, started over, like a sinner addicted to denial, afraid to face the punishment.

How many times had it been? I didn’t know.

But Eva remembered.

She remembered everything.