The Fool's Death
(as remembered by Edmund Harrow)
I did not sleep the night after the letter.
I sat at my desk until the candle burned itself into a useless stump, staring at that single word as if it might blink.
REMEMBER.
It was not a threat.
It was not a warning.
It was an accusation.
---
They say memory returns like a river—slow, patient, inevitable.
They are wrong.
Memory returns like a firing squad.
One moment you are standing.
The next, everything is hitting you at once.
I had spent my life believing I was a man of reason. A detective. A judge of facts. Someone who separated truth from noise.
But memory does not care about logic.
It only cares about timing.
And mine chose cruelty.
---
The rooftop came back first.
Not the fall.
The moment before it.
Harold standing at the edge, the city beneath him breathing fog and smoke, the wind tugging at his coat like impatient fingers. His face was not furious. Not triumphant.
It was tired.
"So this is how you remember me," he had said quietly.
"As a criminal."
I had shouted then. I remember that now. I had shouted his name like it was a weapon.
"You lied to me!"
"You played with me!"
"You turned my life into a game!"
He laughed.
Not mockingly.
Brokenly.
"I never played," he said. "I only responded."
---
The memory deepened.
I remembered his eyes—not wild, not mad, but unbearably clear.
"You took everything from me," he said.
"And you don't even remember doing it."
That was when the world tilted.
Because something in me knew he was telling the truth.
---
The river came next.
A woman's scream swallowed by night.
The slip of a shoe on wet stone.
My hands—my hands—trembling, foreign, slick with rain and something darker.
I had been drugged. Yes.
Manipulated. Yes.
But the act—
The act was mine.
I remembered standing over her afterward, horrified, sick, empty. Remembered running. Remembered erasing myself.
Remembered the case file later.
The one I closed.
I remembered choosing silence because it was easier than truth.
And Harold had lived with that silence for a decade.
---
The bakery memory followed.
Two men.
One table apart.
Neither aware the other was breathing the same warm air.
Fate is not poetic.
It is cruel and lazy and repetitive.
---
The final memory did not belong to me.
It belonged to him.
And yet, it poured into me like confession.
---
Elizabeth
Her name arrived without introduction.
Elizabeth.
Not as a face at first—but as warmth.
A laugh carried by flour-dusted air.
Bread wrapped in paper.
A hand brushing another, accidental, electric.
I saw Harold as he was before grief hollowed him.
Young. Gentle. Earnest to a fault.
I saw him propose with trembling hands and eyes full of terror—not of rejection, but of happiness being fragile.
I saw her say yes.
And then—
I saw the river again.
From his side this time.
The waiting.
The wondering.
The slow realization that the world would never return what it took.
I felt his loneliness like frost settling into bone.
---
He did not become the Fool overnight.
The Fool is not madness.
The Fool is endurance.
It is surviving something that should have ended you—and having no place to put the pain.
---
I remembered our conversations in the park.
How he listened more than he spoke.
How he laughed at the wrong moments.
How he looked at people as if measuring how long before they vanished.
I had thought him harmless.
That was my greatest failure.
---
The rooftop memory returned one last time—this time complete.
The police shouts below.
The misfired shot behind us.
The chaos closing in.
Harold turning toward me.
Not running.
Not begging.
"Do you know," he asked softly, "what hurts the most?"
I shook my head.
"That you were never meant to be my enemy."
Then the gun went off.
My gun.
I had not aimed.
I had not chosen.
But the bullet chose him anyway.
---
The Fall
People imagine falling as terror.
I remember it as release.
Harold did not scream.
He did not curse me.
He looked relieved.
As if the weight he had carried for years had finally found somewhere else to rest.
On me.
---
I was cleared.
I was praised.
I was told I had done my duty.
And every word felt like acid.
---
Weeks later, I returned to the rooftop alone.
No officers.
No juniors.
No witnesses.
Just me and the edge.
I stood where he had stood.
I looked down.
The city did not look different.
That was the cruelest part.
I whispered his name.
"Harold."
The wind answered.
---
I understood then what he had been trying to teach me.
The Fool was never him alone.
The Fool was a role.
A consequence.
A shape grief takes when truth is buried.
I had created him long before he ever spoke to me.
---
I do not know if he died that night.
Not truly.
Men like him do not disappear.
They fracture.
They echo.
They become stories whispered in alleys and warnings written in ink.
They live on inside the people who wronged them.
Inside me.
---
I am still a detective.
But I no longer believe in innocence.
Only responsibility.
Only memory.
Only the long, unavoidable reckoning between who we were and who we pretended to be.
Harold James fell from that rooftop.
But the Fool—
The Fool was born long before that night.
And he did not die with him.
He died—
When I finally remembered.
And realized—
I was never hunting a monster.
I was hunting my own reflection.
---
End of the series