Part 20
The hospital smelled of antiseptic and rain.
Monitors blinked softly, a metronome for a life paused.
Adrian lay pale beneath the thin sheet, breaths shallow and steady. He hadn't opened his eyes since they pulled him from the wreck — the doctors called it shock and concussion; his manager called it a miracle he'd lived.
Only the rumor mill called it anything else.
He was unconscious — the world's golden idol reduced to a quiet room with glass and humming machines. There was no grand speech, no triumphant return. Just the steady beep of the monitor and the city's lights pulsing beyond the window.
Outside, someone watched.
The sunflowers had continued even after the crash — not stopped by sirens, by headlines, or by hospital security. They arrived at the front desk, slipped under the hospital door, left taped to the windshield of his car. Always yellow, always immaculate. Always unsigned.
But now the sunflowers were not only tokens — they were instructions.
Ethan's victory had soured into something else entirely: a hollow panic masked by practiced calm. He kept his phone face-down, avoided interviews, and smiled through pressers while his managers spun statements about "support" and "wishing Adrian well." That thin veneer cracked when the first anonymous dossier hit a dozen inboxes.
It landed at midnight: a compressed file sent to investigative journalists, fan forums, and two rival PR agencies. No sender name. No signature. Just a folder labeled "Stage Files — For Those Who Read Between Lines."
Inside:
— time-stamped photos of a stage technician tampering with a rig the week of the festival (angles, glove prints, a cable snipped and reattached).
— metadata showing edits to footage — subtle cuts, the exact seconds Ethan's team had had access to for a "promotional reel."
— bank transfer records (obscure, small, and routed through dummy accounts) that linked a short chain to an external contractor who'd recently been hired by Ethan's crew.
— and a final, small file: an audio clip of a hushed voice saying, "Make him look tired — then he'll lose more than he sings."
No one could prove everything at first glance. But the pattern was devastating. The internet began to stitch it into a story that fit the worst suspicions.
Along with the files, each recipient received a photo: a single sunflower laid on a table, the same elegant card facing up with three words in careful script:
We remember everything.
The leaks moved faster than spin doctors. Sponsors that had been cautiously patient withdrew statements within hours. A late-night host that had scheduled Ethan for a friendly interview replaced him with a pre-recorded segment. Social feeds that once buzzed with his energy filled instead with screenshotted documents and threads that dissected the new evidence.
Ethan tried to fight back — denial, fury, vows of legal action — but every rebuttal posted was answered by another anonymous upload, another timestamp, another whisper of connection. The public's attention fractured; some insisted on his innocence, others wanted him burned for what he'd tried to do. The media's appetite for drama did the rest: speculation pushed fact to the margins, and the narrative slid toward what people wanted to see — justice, served cold.
Inside the studio where Ethan had once felt invincible, his phone buzzed with a torrent of new emails. One subject line read simply: "Questions." Another: "We're closing your accounts." His manager's voice, usually steady, sounded small when he finally answered.
"It's not enough to deny it," the manager said. "People want proof. They think you're behind this. We need to control the message."
Ethan laughed then — a short, hopeless sound. "Control the message?" he said. "I didn't do this."
No one believed him the way they had before. Not now.
Meanwhile, Adrian did not know.
He slept behind clear glass, a bandage at his temple, a card folded in his jacket inside a drawer. His world had been reduced to soft faces — doctors, managers, a steady stream of devoted fans who left flowers in the corridor and video messages that played on the loop at his bedside. In the small dim hours, his phone would vibrate with headlines and pleas; his team filtered them away so his rest could continue uninterrupted.
Outside, the anonymous hand that had dismantled Ethan watched from a distance neither public nor known. It didn't need applause. It needed balance.
They did not break Ethan with violence. They broke his platform: leaked the paper trail that made "accident" look less like fate and more like consequence, pushed sponsors and shows to rethink, and gave the public a simple, convincing story — that someone in Ethan's orbit had crossed the line.
At dawn, a file appeared on an independent news site. The headline was neutral, clinical. The first line, however, hit like frost:
New documents link personnel associated with Ethan Vale to stage-tampering ahead of the festival — sources say investigation opened.
Across the city, in a suite that once hummed with confidence, Ethan watched his world narrow. He checked his phone again and found a single image waiting: a sunflower, face-up on a black table, the three-word card — We remember everything.
He swallowed hard.
The storm passed in time, as storms do. Reporters moved to new angles; fans debated until they were exhausted. But the seed had been planted. Ethan's career that had been climbing through spectacle and rumor now crawled under the weight of harder questions. Contracts were delayed. Apologies rehearsed and then shelved. The music press wrote cautious pieces about accountability and the industry's dark corners.
And somewhere — always somewhere — the anonymous watcher left one more at a quiet corner of Adrian's hospital window, tapping the glass with a single yellow petal as if to say, with measured tenderness and terrible intent:
We protect what we love — even when you are not awake to see it.
Adrian slept on. The monitors kept time. The city moved. The watcher receded into shadow, no signature, no claim, only sunflowers left like punctuation marks on a sentence that had not finished.