Chapter 7
As he processed the reality, his thoughts grew darker and darker.
What if something happened to her?
What if someone did something to her?
She should've been back by now.
His mind kept repeating the same thoughts again and again. His fear had taken a firm hold of him, his legs trembling, his breath shaking. The weight in his chest kept growing bigger and bigger, pressing down until it felt like something physical, something with real mass sitting on top of his ribs.
"What should I do?" he said to himself, his voice barely above a whisper in the empty kitchen.
He ran out of the house and toward the neighbours house. The night was unusually cold that evening, colder than it had any right to be for the season. The breeze touched his skin, sharp enough to sting, but he was too distracted to feel the cold. His whole body was running on something other than comfort now. He knocked aggressively and rang the bell fast, once, twice, a third time before anyone could even reach the door.
A man in his mid-thirties came out and looked at the boy standing in front of him. His eyes widened a little in confusion at the state of him — hair messed, breath ragged, eyes too wide.
"What are you doing here at this hour?" he said, his voice firm but gentle, the voice of a man who'd known this boy long enough to worry first and question second.
"Mr. Walter, have you seen Grandma go somewhere, or did she come here? Please tell me quickly." His voice was filled with worry, the words tumbling out faster than he could properly shape them.
Walter's eyes narrowed, confusion and concern both rising at the sight of Ashen's behaviour.
"No. She didn't come here, and I haven't seen her anywhere either." he said, stepping half out of the doorway now.
"What happened? She isn't at home? Did she go somewhere?" he asked, worry creeping into his own voice.
"No — the note left in the kitchen said she was out for groceries, but she should have been back by now. It's way later than her usual routine." Ashen replied, sweat visible on his face despite the cold air outside, his hands still gripping the doorframe like it was the only steady thing left in the world.
Now even Walter was starting to worry. He looked back inside the house and called for his wife.
"Nora! Did you see Mother Edith go somewhere?"
"No, I haven't!" she replied immediately, her voice carrying from somewhere further inside.
A moment later she appeared in the hallway, wiping her hands on a dish towel. "Did something happen?" she asked, but Walter didn't know what to say to her either, his mouth opening and closing once before he found any words at all.
He looked back at Ashen. "I think we should call the police. They'll know how to handle this." He reached out, meaning to guide Ashen inside. "Come in, stay here with us, we'll —"
But Ashen's mind was somewhere else entirely. He didn't hear the rest of the sentence. He turned and ran.
No — this is bad. I have to go, as fast as I possibly can.
Walter shouted for him to stop, his voice cracking with alarm, but Ashen's figure had already disappeared into the darkness of the street. Walter immediately turned and shouted for his wife to call the police. Nora, now visibly afraid, fumbled her phone out of her apron pocket and started dialing with shaking fingers.
Meanwhile Ashen kept running through the streets, taking the usual route he and his grandmother always walked together — past the bakery with its shutters down for the night, past the bench where she liked to sit and catch her breath halfway to the market, past the streetlamp that had been flickering for months and that she always joked was "waiting to finally give up."
Where should I look first?
He kept running, his legs burning, his breath heavy, his body begging him to stop, but his will said otherwise. He searched through every street, every corner, every alley along the route, the streetlights growing more visible as he got closer to the market. He knew it was close now. He pushed himself faster, harder, past what his legs wanted to give. He found nothing about her the whole way, and his hope now rested entirely on this last spot.
"I'm almost there," he said aloud, though his body was already succumbing to fatigue, his vision starting to blur at the edges.
"No — not now, please." He begged his own body for a little more strength, just a few more steps toward the answer he was searching for. Tears began rolling down his face. The determination he'd been carrying to find her was slowly twisting into something closer to desperation, and there was nothing he could do to stop that shift.
He dragged himself forward with everything he had left, but when he finally got close enough to see clearly, the market was already closed. Shutters down. Lights off. Nothing.
His eyes went wide and emotionless, filled with tears born of pure helplessness. His knees gave out beneath him. His mind, which had been screaming with negative thoughts only moments before, went utterly silent, and that silence became the only thing left standing in those empty streets.
"Where is Grandma?" he asked, his voice soft and desperate, barely reaching past his own lips.
His will to move kept decreasing. Ten minutes passed. His sobs could be heard from quite a distance, echoing faintly off the shuttered storefronts. Eventually he stood back up, slowly, his clothes a little dirty from the pavement, his eyes red from crying. Something in him — some last stubborn thread — pulled his resolve back together.
"I have to keep trying to find her," he said, and his eyes were now filled with rage rather than despair. A rage built to tear through anything standing between him and the person he cared for and cherished most in the world.
He started running again, taking paths different from the original route but close enough to still make sense, still searching, still hoping. Then he saw something. Something that looked utterly human, lying still where nothing should have been lying still. His mind rushed back to the same grim thoughts, but now far worse, clouded by the sheer weight of what he was thinking. His heart turned into something like a raging engine in his chest.
He stepped closer, and closer, and as the distance shrank he already knew what he was about to see — the sense of realization that felt sickeningly familiar, though he didn't want to admit it. Then he saw it clearly. Blood pooling around the body. He recognized the clothes before he let himself recognize the face. The ground seemed to slip out from under his feet. He started to cry, to scream.
"Grandmaa!!" he screamed from the very top of his lungs, the sound tearing out of him like it belonged to someone else.
He cried and cried. His tears didn't stop for a single second. His nose began to bleed from the sheer pressure his own heart was putting on his body — it was a miracle it didn't burst right there in his chest.
He kept screaming, shouting for anyone — anyone who could help, anyone who could extend a hand to a teenager who had just lost the last of his family, the one person even fate itself seemed to have looked past, the one the world was watching with cold, indifferent eyes.
Grandma, who had cared for Ashen so he wouldn't become a victim of the cruel city they lived in, had become a victim herself. The care she gave him, the unconditional love she'd provided him his whole life, all of it was vanishing right in front of his eyes. The last string holding him together was starting to break.
But his screams didn't go unanswered. A woman further down the street heard the screaming and thought about checking it out. At first she hesitated, standing frozen for what felt like a long time, but the screams eventually forced her into action. She gathered her courage and started moving closer, and as the distance closed, she saw the grim reality laid out on the pavement. Ashen noticed her too, but she only stood there, eyes wide, caught somewhere between the horror in front of her and her own instinct to run. Ashen screamed at her.
"What are you doing standing there — call the ambulance! NOW!" His voice was filled with despair and fury in equal measure.
After what felt like an eternity, the ambulance arrived. They carried Edith into the vehicle and rushed her toward the hospital. Everyone in the car knew the truth already, but no one wanted to be the one to say it out loud. Ashen sat beside her, holding her hand, sobbing. The woman from earlier had already left.
"I'm sorry — I don't want to get dragged into this. I did what I could. I'll pray for your grandmother," she'd said, before disappearing back into the dark.
Ashen sat in the ambulance, his tears slowing now, the helplessness inside him shifting into something colder. Anger. Anger for everything. Anger for the world that had taken everything from him — his parents, his grandmother, his peaceful life. His rage dragged him slowly into the dark depths of his own mind, slowly and slowly, but before it could settle on anything, the vehicle came to a halt.
They had reached the hospital. Staff rushed her inside immediately, doctors converging around the stretcher, voices overlapping.
"ICU! Quick!" one of them shouted.
A few minutes passed. Then the doctor came back out. Ashen stood up from his seat, his eyes filled with a desperate hope, though somewhere underneath he already knew the answer.
"I'm sorry," the doctor said.
Ashen went completely still. His mind went blank. His thoughts slowed to nothing. His heartbeat, strangely, became steady, calm even. And before he could say a single word, he fainted.
A few hours passed. It was morning. He slowly opened his eyes, the exhaustion and swelling from all that crying still visible on his face.
"Where am I? This isn't my room," he said, slowly rising from the bed. But the moment his feet touched the floor, a sharp pain shot through them — the consequence of all that running finally catching up with him.
"Grandma!!" he shouted despite the pain, rushing outside. The surroundings felt unfamiliar and familiar at once, like a place he'd been in before but never really looked at closely.
"Mr. Walter?" he asked, looking at the man standing in front of him.
He was in the neighbours' house. Walter looked at him, then turned his face toward the floor, unsure of what to say.
"Mr. Walter, Grandma — she—" Before the sentence could finish, Walter cut in, gently.
"I know."
"I know everything that happened."
"I'm sorry, Ashen. It's already too late."
Ashen let the reality sink in and sat down right there on the floor, his eyes fixed on nothing in particular, remembering all the moments he'd lived with her — the only family he had left — and how it had all been taken in a single night, like a chapter that had been forced to end before it was ready.
"How?" he said, still staring at the floor, his eyes empty.
"How did she die? And how do you know?"
Walter looked at him, tear marks still visible on his own face, though Ashen didn't seem to notice them. He slowly moved to sit down on the floor beside him.
"I'll explain everything," he said.
"As soon as you ran off, I asked Nora to call the police. I followed you, but I lost track of you in the dark — I couldn't see well enough to keep up."
"So I kept searching, and after some time, Nora called and told me she'd gotten a call from the police. They said a new patient had been admitted to the hospital — an old woman, and a teenage boy with her."
"I knew immediately it had to be you. But what had happened to your grandmother — that, I didn't know yet."
"Your aunt and I rushed to the hospital as fast as we could, and when we got the news that she was gone, we were devastated."
"I didn't know what to think. Nora broke down right there in the hallway. She loved your grandmother like her own mother. The news broke something in both of us."
"But I forced myself to stand and asked the doctor what had happened, how she'd died."
"He told me she had been stabbed, multiple times. Her death was from the blood loss."
"He said that by the time she reached the hospital, she'd already been gone for some time. There was nothing they could have done."
"We filed a police report right there, and asked about you. They told us you'd fainted and had been carried to a resting area to recover."
"When I saw you lying there, I felt nothing but pity. It was like I'd lost something precious too, Ashen. Something I didn't know how much I'd miss until it was gone."
"So I carried you home myself. Your condition wasn't good enough to leave you there."
Ashen, after listening to all of it, felt strangely empty. The tears didn't come. The anger didn't come. Every emotion seemed to have simply vanished, like his body had run out of room to feel anything at all.
Time passed, slowly, painfully slowly. The funeral was held for her. Ashen, Walter, his wife, Ashen's friends, and a handful of relatives all came to pay their respects. But the weight of it sat heaviest on Ashen's shoulders — the one who had lost everything, the one who was now truly alone.
His friends stayed by his side the entire time, never leaving him for even a moment.
"Thank you, all of you," he said quietly to his friends, his voice thin.
Charlie looked at him, placing a hand on his shoulder.
"I'm sorry for your loss. But don't you dare feel alone. We're always with you — think of us as family, and nothing less," he said.
Everyone nodded in agreement. Ashen looked at them, thanked them again, and started to sob. His friends' own eyes grew teary at the sight of him. One by one, they closed in, wrapping their arms around him until it became one long, tight embrace.
"We're all just one big family, so never feel alone, bro," Jimmy said, his voice cracking, tears almost spilling over before he forced them back down.
Jamson, standing just behind the others, added quietly, "Even if the whole world forgets you exist, we won't. Ever."
Arnold, usually the one cracking a joke to fill silence, said nothing at all — just tightened his grip around Ashen's shoulder, which somehow said more than words could have.
The funeral ended soon after. Everyone paid their final respects and slowly made their way home. Ashen's friends left too, one by one, until only Walter and Nora remained. They approached him quietly and sat down on either side of him.
"How are you feeling?" Nora asked gently.
"I don't know what to feel anymore," he replied, his voice hollow.
"I don't know what I'll do, or where I'll go," he added, staring at nothing.
"What do you mean, where you'll go? You'll live with us," Walter said immediately, without a single second of hesitation.
Ashen looked at him, confusion flickering across his tired face.
"What?" he asked, eyes fixed on Walter now.
"You can — no. You will live with us. You're like our own son, Ashen." Walter said it plainly, like a fact that had already been decided long before he said it out loud.
Ashen, a little embarrassed, found he had nothing to say in return.
"We're just as devastated as you are over losing Edith," Nora said softly, reaching over to rest a hand on his arm.
"She was like a mother to us too."
"And we've decided — we're going to take care of you until you're standing on your own two feet."
"And don't you dare think about paying us back, or feeling like some kind of burden. This is simply what parents do for their children."
"I know we aren't blood, Ashen. But we can still be good parents to you, if you'll let us. You just have to trust us. Will you stay with us?" she asked, her eyes searching his face for an answer.
Ashen looked between the two of them, sinking into his own thoughts for a long moment before finally speaking.
"I will. Thank you — for everything."
"Don't even mention it," Walter said, forcing a small, warm smile onto his face. "Now get ready, because I'm going to teach you everything I know about fishing. I'll irritate you so much you'll want to strangle me before the season's over."
Despite everything, Ashen let out a small, genuine chuckle.
"Alright — we should get going, we've got some paperwork to sort out for the arrangements," Walter said, standing and offering Nora a hand up. "If you want to come with us, you're welcome to. If you'd rather stay a while, meet us at the outer gate of the church later."
Ashen nodded, and the two of them left, their footsteps fading down the path. He was alone again with his thoughts, his mind circling back to everything Walter had told him — that she'd been murdered, that someone had chosen, with their own hands, to take her from him. His thoughts grew darker and darker, until the sheer weight of them made his whole body tremble with something close to absolute rage.
"I'll find the murderer," he said quietly, to no one but himself, "and I'll kill them with my own hands."