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Chapter 16 - Chapter 16: "Confrontation"

Time freezes.

My hand is on the cover of the diary.

His eyes are on my hand.

The silence in the room is a living entity.

It's made of shock.

And grief.

And my own, monumental, unforgivable trespass.

The air is thick with the dust of a life I have no right to disturb.

"Elara."

His voice is not a roar.

It's not an accusation.

It's worse.

It's a hollow, broken sound.

The sound of a wound being torn open.

"Get out," he whispers.

My training, my ethics, my own sense of shame—they all scream at me to obey.

To retreat.

To leave him alone in this sacred, secret place.

But I can't.

"Theo, wait," I say, my own voice a stranger to my ears. "I had to. Dr. Harrison… he told me things. He said Sarah didn't…"

I can't finish the sentence.

I can't bring the ugly accusation into this room.

This room that is the last pure piece of her he has left.

"I don't care what he told you," Theo says, his voice dangerously quiet. He takes a step toward me, his eyes never leaving the diary in my hands. "This room. Her things. They are not part of our arrangement. They are not data for your investigation."

He reaches out and takes the diary from me.

His touch is gentle.

Reverent.

He closes the book and holds it to his chest like a shield.

"You're right," I say, standing up slowly. "It was a violation. I know that. But we are being targeted by someone who knows everything about us. About our pasts. I had to understand."

"Understand what?" he asks, his voice raw. "That I loved her? That I miss her? It's all in my case file, Doctor. You wrote it yourself."

The title is a deliberate jab.

A reminder of the line I've crossed.

"This isn't about that," I push, my own desperation making me reckless. "This is about what really happened. The blackmail note, Theo. Harrison's claims. They are trying to rewrite your past."

He flinches.

The mention of the note hits its mark.

He turns away from me, running a hand over his face.

He looks at the unfinished portrait of himself on the easel.

"You think I don't know that?" he says, his back to me. "You think I haven't spent every second of the last three years replaying it all in my head?"

He finally turns back to me, and the carefully constructed walls around him crumble into dust.

The pain in his eyes is so vast, so profound, it's like looking into an abyss.

I brace myself.

The confession is coming.

"This room," he begins, his voice thick with unshed tears. "You think it's a shrine. A monument to some perfect, tragic love story."

He shakes his head, a bitter, self-deprecating laugh escaping his lips.

"It's not a shrine, Elara."

"It's a prison."

"It's the scene of the crime. And I'm the warden, the guard, and the sole inmate."

I just listen.

The contract is broken.

The rule is shattered.

He needs to talk.

And I need to listen.

"Sarah was… she was brilliant," he whispers, his eyes lost in the past. "She was light and color and chaos. When she was happy… God, when she was in a manic phase… she could paint for three days straight. She thought she could touch the sun. She was magnificent."

The clinical term hangs in the air between us.

Manic phase.

"And the lows?" I ask softly, unable to stop myself.

"The lows…" he trails off, a shadow passing over his face. "The lows were dark. Days she couldn't get out of bed. Weeks she couldn't pick up a paintbrush. She'd say the world had lost all its color."

He finally says the words I diagnosed three years ago.

The words that defined his grief.

"She had bipolar I disorder, Elara. Severe. And I was so arrogant. I thought I could fix it."

He begins to pace the small room, a caged, wounded animal.

"I thought my love could be a cure. I thought if I just built her a beautiful enough cage, if I protected her from every stress, every trigger… I could keep her safe. I could manage her."

He stops and looks at me, his eyes pleading for an understanding I am uniquely qualified to give.

"She was right, you know. In her diary. What you read. I was suffocating her. I was trying so hard to save her from her illness that I was erasing the person inside it. I was trying to control it."

"And she was fighting back," I say, the pieces clicking into place. "The new studio. The lawyer. She wasn't just leaving you. She was trying to save herself."

"Yes," he agrees, a single tear tracing a path down his cheek. "She was. And I was too busy playing God to see it."

He walks over to the unmade bed and sits down, right where I was sitting moments ago.

He picks up a small, silver picture frame from the nightstand.

It's the same photo I saw downstairs. The two of them on a beach, incandescently happy.

"She hated the medication," he says, his voice barely audible. "The lithium. She said it made her feel like a ghost. Like it stole her colors. She couldn't paint when she was on it."

He looks up at me, his face a portrait of agony.

"It was a constant battle. Me, begging her to take it. Her, begging me to let her feel again."

He takes a shaky breath, preparing himself for the final, devastating confession.

"About a month before she died… she seemed better. Happier. More stable than she'd been in years. The creativity came back. She started the portrait…" He gestures to the easel. "I thought… I thought we'd finally found a balance. I thought she was okay."

He closes his eyes.

"But she wasn't."

"After she died… when I was cleaning out her things… I found them."

"The pills."

"She hadn't been taking them for weeks. She'd been hiding them. Pretending. She was in the middle of a full-blown manic episode and was hiding it from me."

The hook lands.

The final piece of the puzzle.

Her plan to leave.

Her frantic energy.

It wasn't just a bid for freedom.

It was a symptom of an untreated illness.

"So the things Harrison said…" I begin.

"He saw a woman in a manic phase planning to blow up her life," Theo finishes for me. "And he probably thought it was my fault. That I was the monster she was running from. He didn't know he was watching her illness take over."

The weight of his guilt is a physical presence in the room.

It's suffocating.

"I should have seen it," he whispers, his voice breaking. "It was my job to protect her. But I was so focused on controlling her, I didn't even see her slipping away."

In this moment, all the lines are gone.

Therapist. Patient.

Husband. Wife.

We are just two people in a room full of ghosts.

And the silence is filled with a shared, fragile understanding.

A moment of pure, unguarded, human connection.

It is the most dangerous moment yet.

And then it shatters.

A loud, aggressive banging echoes through the house.

BANG. BANG. BANG.

It's not a knock.

It's a fist.

On the front door.

Theo's head snaps up, his grief instantly replaced by sharp alarm.

My heart leaps into my throat.

The banging comes again, harder this time.

More insistent.

A voice, amplified and angry, bellows from outside.

"LAPD! OPEN THE DOOR!"

The police.

Here?

We lock eyes, a shared, silent panic passing between us.

"Someone must have heard us fighting," Theo whispers, his face pale.

The private, devastating truth of this room.

The raw, emotional confession.

It's all about to become a public spectacle.

A crime scene.

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