Ten Years Ago.
Three minutes.
Three wretched, endless minutes.
That's all it takes for laughter to choke on blood. For a family to become wet meat and broken bone. For a twenty-three-year-old woman to watch the only people she ever let herself love burn alive while she lives—because the universe decided her punishment would be memory, not mercy.
The truck came out of nowhere.
One moment they were driving—Seiryū laughing so hard his shoulders shook, Mei-Lin swatting his arm playfully, Phei in the back seat squealing with delight at Melissa's exaggerated monster faces in the rearview mirror.
Something stupid.
Something perfect.
Something her brain had already begun to murder: slicing the memory clean away, cauterizing it so she could never again know what joy tasted like before it was ripped out by the roots.
