The house was still when Alden returned that night — too still, as if the walls themselves were holding their breath. He moved through the dark like a man who knew the exact creak of every floorboard; the hallway light cut a pale stripe across the carpet. In the living room, Mira slept on the couch, blanket curled around her. Her face was softer in sleep, the small lines of worry smoothed out, but even from across the room, he could see the faint bruise of fear under her skin.
He went to the study because he always did — the safe was the one thing he never left unchecked. When he opened, the metal exhaled, and a whisper of perfume rose, unmistakably Mira's. For a second, the world narrowed: the scent, the diary, the ring. Fury uncoiled in him like a living thing. He slammed the safe shut, his knuckles white. He took a breath, told himself to be calm — then crossed the room and shook her.
"Mira. Wake up."His voice was low at first, but it grew urgent.
She murmured, heavy with sleep. "I think I have a fever…"
"It's your birthday. Wake up. I want to show you something. Please — just for a bit." His tone tried for gentle and landed somewhere harder.
She opened her eyes, still groggy, and a small smile spread like sunlight finding a window. "Really?"
"Really." He offered a crooked smile back; something in him still wanted the ordinary. "Get ready. Dress nicely."
She moved with a childlike energy, rubbing sleep from her eyes. He handed her a small package — the kind wrapped without fuss. She laughed when she saw how perfect it looked and unwrapped it with the curiosity of someone being led to a surprise.
Inside lay the battered phone she had left behind days ago — the one used to record, the one she had hoped would catch whoever had taken Cüneyt. Her heart stuttered; the edges of her vision sharpened and then blurred. Alden took her hand and led her out onto the lawn.
"Tadaaa!" he announced, theatrically.
Light threw over the grass, and there — tied to a chair, gaunt and hollowed by neglect — sat Cüneyt. He looked up at them as if the world were a blur he was just beginning to recognise. "Hello, sunshine," he croaked, and something in Mira folded in on itself.
Panic rose like bile. "Alden—" she started, hand instinctively moving toward the phone.
"How could you ever think I wouldn't find out?" Alden's laugh was a blade. "I'm not as gullible as you, darling." He was pained, enraged, and theatrical all at once. He wanted her to see the perfection of the trap he'd spun.
She threw the dented phone across the grass like a thrown confession. "Please," she begged. "Please, Alden. I didn't— I didn't mean to— I just wanted the truth. Don't—"
"How many times have I stopped you?" he snapped. "How many times have I tried to protect—" His voice broke into a howl of something that felt like grief. He paced, pacing away the calm he couldn't keep. "But you never listen!" He shoved a chair to face Cüneyt and sat her opposite him, like a judge setting the stage.
He ran a hand through his hair until his fingers clutched a fistful of Cüneyt's hair. "This little brat had to come and remind you." The cruelty of it shocked the air around them.
Mira staggered back. Her knees threatened to give out. "Alden—no—please."
He released Cüneyt's hair, then steadied himself as if he were choosing his next words like weapons. "Fine. You want the truth? Then have it."
Mira's chest constricted as his confession tumbled out, each syllable a stone.
"I... am Iskandar," he said. The name landed like a thing that shouldn't fit — like a second face on a mirror. "I'm Alden Iskandar. I did all of it."
The sentence ripped the floor from under her. Her mouth opened and closed; no sound came. Her blood ran cold. "How?" she whispered, a child's question.
He sat down on the grass, drew her to him with hands that trembled, and looked up at her with a misplaced, heartbreaking humility — like a boy asking forgiveness for a thing he already knew was monstrous. Tears streaked his cheeks.
"I didn't mean for Ozan to die." The admission was a physical thing. "After that last entry… I gave you the same dose as always. I took you with me. I left you where I always did. I thought you were fine." He covered his mouth, as if to keep the vomiting of memory in. "But I came back, and Ozan was there. He took you to his cabin. He… he placed his ring on your finger in the old way." The words came out ragged, horrible.
"He hugged you, and you… You snapped." Alden's voice was a thin thing. "You fought. You killed him with the same scissors. I didn't want that— I never wanted that. When I found you later… in the asylum… unable to speak or defend… I couldn't live with myself. I tried to fix it. I wanted to give you what he wanted for you — shelter, warmth, home. I made you into Mira — into my Mira — to erase the darkness."
Mira's knees buckled. Memory peeled itself back like a blister: flashes of hands, a sharp metallic taste, the smell of blood, blurred hands pulling away. She felt the ground tilt; the night spun.
"Please," Alden said, voice turning to a whimper. "Forgive me. If I could fix it— if I could bring him back— I would. We'll get him out of our way and start again." There was a monstrous tenderness in his words, the kind that belonged in fairy tales and nightmares.
His hand moved before her brain could register the motion. A syringe — small, practised. Mira's protest lodged in her throat as he plunged the needle into her arm. His eyes were frantic, feverish; his protectiveness a roving, dangerous animal.
"Don't—" she tried to pull away, but his arms were iron.
He stood and looked down at Cüneyt with a hungry, desperate intent. "We remove him, and nothing will stop us," he murmured, voice lit from within by a conviction that had long ago lost its morality.
Mira felt numb. She stumbled toward Cüneyt, a puppet of half-sobbed conscience. "Sunshine," Cüneyt breathed, seeing her for what she was. "You can fight this. Please don't—" His eyes were pleading — a child asking a parent not to surrender.
Alden moved to command the scene into a finality. The world seemed to hold its breath — and then the front door exploded inward.
Police poured in like light slicing velvet. Orders barked, boots thudded, and a warning shot cracked the night sky. In an instant, the choreography Alden had practised collapsed. He lunged for Mira, trying to shield her, trying to wrest control back out of fate, but the scene had already been broken.
A bullet tore into Alden's shoulder. He went down with her on top of him, blood seeping warm and terrible through the grass. He cradled her as if both were small children caught in something too large; his face contorted in pain and relief.
"I never thought I'd be this happy to see my uncle," Cüneyt breathed, each word strange and soft and like a benediction. The police swarmed, cuffs and flashlights and voices, and then firm hands lifted Cüneyt free of the chair.
Alden's whispers crawled into Mira's ear as medics and officers took over — a loop of assurances that were no longer anchored in truth. "We'll be fine. We'll be fine. You're safe. It's okay. I'll fix it." The same few words over and over, a mantra that meant only that he could not accept what he had done.
The aftermath was a slow-motion shutter: Alden was escorted away with a gash of red across his shirt, his eyes still finding Mira's. The officers spoke in clipped tones; a report would be written, statements given, and a courtroom would hum in days to come. But in that suspended moment, everything that mattered was tiny and sharp and human: the taste of metal in Mira's mouth, the damp grass under her palms, the way her fingers trembled around the edge of the ring in her pocket.
Cüneyt was reunited with his uncle; the old wounds between them began a hesitant stitch. Alden was taken, not to prison at first but to an institution where bodies with dangerous minds are kept for treatment, observation, containment. In the days that followed, headlines would call it tragedy and obsession and fractured love. Mira would call it memory.
She moved through the house that had once been theirs with hands that felt borrowed. The sunlight through the study window was clean and cruel. Mira sat at Alden's desk and wrote with an urgency that finally had the sanction of goodbye.
Dear Ozan,
If we had never crossed the line, if I'd never been broken into pieces, I would have said yes. I would have accepted the life you offered, the ring, the small ordinary happiness you dreamed of for me. The days that led to this were ruined by things I cannot undo — by a man I thought I loved and by my own hands. I will make sure Alden spends the time he needs for what he's done; his license was revoked, and perhaps workaholism is its own sentence. You said once, "As long as we learn from our mistakes, it's okay." I will carry you with me always, Ozan. I will annoy the hell out of him from the other side of the window, I promise. But I will never forget you. You will live inside me as long as I breathe.
Yours truly,
— Mira (Seyran)
She folded the letter and sealed it like a prayer. The first hints of dawn were pale on the horizon when she walked to the study window. The sky bled soft gold and bruised blue; the house exhaled the last of its night. With hands that finally felt heavy with decision rather than dread, she slid Ozan's plain little ring — the one she had found folded into the diary — onto her finger.
It slid on like a promise and a wound both. The metal was cool and ordinary and real.
She stood at the window while the sun rose, and for the first time in a long while, she let herself feel everything at once: the sorrow for the life she would never have, the relief that Cüneyt was safe, the horror at Alden's confession, the terrible, complicated tenderness that still threaded through her memory of him. She thought of Ozan's protection, his quiet, fierce love. She whispered to the empty street below, to the diary sealed now in the safe, to the man who had saved and destroyed: "Goodbye, Ozan. I will carry you." Then she closed the window, the light pooling across the floor like absolution, and sat down to let the house — and herself — begin to mend.
_The End