They told Edmund Harrow later that he screamed.
He would not remember it that way.
Memory is a careful liar. It edits. It softens. It removes the parts that would split a man in two.
What Edmund remembered was the sound of his own gunshot echoing against stone, the impossible stillness that followed, and the sight of a body slipping backward into open air—as if the world itself had decided it was done holding him.
Harold fell.
Not dramatically. Not with a curse. Not reaching out.
He fell the way exhausted things fall—quietly, finally.
Edmund ran forward despite the hands grabbing his coat, despite the officers shouting his name. He reached the edge just in time to see nothing but fog and distance and the thin silver thread of the river below.
Gone.
The word lodged itself in his throat and refused to move.
---
They restrained him after that.
Not because he fought. Not because he resisted.
Because he did nothing at all.
He stood there, staring into the empty air, lips moving soundlessly as if repeating a sentence that had arrived too late.
I didn't mean to.
I didn't know.
I didn't remember.
The police assumed shock. They always do.
They led him down stairwells that smelled of damp iron and old paperwork. Someone placed a coat around his shoulders. Someone else pressed a glass of water into his hands.
He did not drink it.
Two days earlier, he had been a detective following a hunch.
Now he was a man standing in the ruins of a life he could not fully remember—but somehow knew he had destroyed.
---
The city spoke about it for weeks.
A mysterious confrontation. A fugitive's dramatic end. A troubled man driven to madness.
Newspapers printed speculation with greedy enthusiasm.
> UNKNOWN CRIMINAL PLUNGES TO DEATH — DETECTIVE HARROW CLEARED OF WRONGDOING
Cleared.
The word made Edmund ill.
Because clearance implied certainty.
And certainty was the one thing he no longer possessed.
---
He dreamed.
Not at night—never then. Nightmares require sleep, and sleep abandoned him entirely.
He dreamed while awake.
Faces appeared in reflections that weren't his. A woman crying in a language he almost understood. Hands soaked in blood that wasn't there when he looked down.
And always—
A rooftop. A voice. A fall.
Sometimes Harold's face twisted into accusation.
Other times, it softened into something worse.
Forgiveness.
---
The juniors—his juniors—hovered around him like anxious ghosts. They brought reports, spoke carefully, avoided his eyes. They did not know what to say to a man who had chased a shadow and come back empty-handed.
One evening, after the station finally quieted, Edmund sat alone at his desk.
He pulled open the bottom drawer.
There it was.
The old file.
The one he never opened anymore.
A woman's name. A river. A decade-old case closed too neatly.
He stared at it for a long time.
Then—slowly—he opened it.
---
Something shifted.
Not memory.
Not exactly.
Understanding.
Details that once seemed irrelevant now screamed for attention. Timelines that didn't align. Testimonies that felt rehearsed. A confession extracted too quickly.
A truth buried under procedure.
His hands began to shake.
"No," he whispered.
But the file did not argue.
It only waited.
---
That night, Edmund walked the streets until dawn.
He found the bakery.
Closed.
Dark.
Ordinary.
He stood across the street and watched it like a crime scene, like it might suddenly confess.
Two men. Two lives. Two paths that should never have crossed.
And yet—
They had stood behind one another, unknowingly, drinking tea in the same place.
As if fate had laughed quietly to itself.
---
Far below the city, the river moved on.
It always does.
They never found a body.
Officially, Harold James was declared dead by fall and presumed drowned.
Unofficially—
Edmund felt watched.
Not haunted.
Judged.
As if something had been placed back into the world unfinished.
---
Three nights later, Edmund woke to a knock.
Not loud. Not urgent.
Polite.
Measured.
Impossible.
He stood frozen in his hallway, staring at the door as if it might open itself.
The knock came again.
Slow.
Deliberate.
He did not answer.
The knocking stopped.
When he finally opened the door, there was no one there.
Only a letter.
Plain paper. No seal.
One word written in careful ink:
REMEMBER.
Edmund closed the door with shaking hands.
For the first time since the rooftop, he understood something with absolute clarity.
The fall had not been the end.
It had been a punctuation mark.
And somewhere—whether in the river, in the past, or in the spaces between memory and guilt—
The Fool was not finished.