They separated us soon after that.
Not far. Just enough. One of the responders guided Lucian toward a different ambulance while another stayed close to me. I didn't fight it. I think they were worried we'd start again.
The truth was, neither of us had anything left to start with.
The sky had gone fully dark by the time they finished at the crash site. Night had come in the quiet way it does after something terrible — without permission, without announcement, just suddenly there. The emergency lights became the only color left in the world. Red and white, spinning slow, painting everything in pulses.
I kept looking across the road toward where Lucian stood.
He hadn't moved much.
Arms folded. Head down. Like a person trying to make himself smaller.
The stretchers were already gone.
I still couldn't process how fast that had happened. How something that had been your whole world could just be carried away on a hill road while the trees stood still and the lights kept spinning and the world kept moving like nothing had changed at all.
A police officer crouched down in front of me after a while. Young, careful eyes. The kind of face that had practiced being calm.
"Adrian?"
I nodded.
"I know this is really hard," he said gently. "I just need to ask you a few simple things."
"Okay."
"Can you walk me through what happened before the accident? Anything you remember."
I told him everything. The kitten. Lucian under the car. The race to the gate. The sound of the brakes. The car going over the edge. I said it all slowly, in the right order, the way you do when your brain is still trying to convince itself that the story isn't real.
The officer nodded, made notes, let me talk at my own pace.
Then he asked the question.
"When your brother was under the car — did you notice him touching anything? Any part of the car itself?"
I hesitated.
"He was getting the cat out."
"Right. But did you see what his hands were doing? Specifically."
I thought back.
Lucian reaching into the shadows. The cat hissing. Lucian's voice going soft.
"I wasn't really watching his hands," I said honestly. "I was watching the cat."
The officer nodded like that was the answer he expected.
But something in the way he closed his notebook made the air feel different.
Heavier.
Across the road, Lucian was talking to another officer now. I watched them from a distance. At first, Lucian seemed steady. But then I saw his posture shift — shoulders pulling back, chin lifting slightly. His voice rose just enough that I could hear the shape of it without the words.
The officer said something.
Lucian shook his head.
The officer said something else.
Lucian went very still.
Then he looked straight across the road at me.
And the expression on his face made my stomach drop completely.
It wasn't anger.
It was something I had never seen on Lucian's face before.
Like someone had just handed him a piece of a puzzle and he didn't want it to fit — but it did. And he was standing there holding it, hating that it fit.
I crossed the road without asking permission.
Lucian watched me come. He didn't say anything when I reached him. Just looked at me with that same expression — careful, searching, like he was trying to find something in my face that would make the puzzle stop making sense.
"What did they tell you?" I asked quietly.
He didn't answer right away.
The sirens had all stopped now. Everything was quiet except for the low murmur of radio voices and the soft creak of cooling metal somewhere down the slope.
"They said the brake line was cut," Lucian said.
He didn't say it dramatically. Didn't throw it at me the way he'd thrown words earlier. He said it the way you say something when you're still deciding whether to believe it yourself — flat, careful, like testing weight on ice.
Cut.
The word landed in my chest and just sat there.
"That doesn't make sense," I said.
"I know."
"It probably snapped in the crash—"
"They said it was cut before the crash." He held eye contact now. Steady. "Clean edge. Not a tear."
The night air felt colder suddenly.
I tried to think through it. To find the explanation that made it not true. But every version I reached for had something wrong with it.
Lucian was quiet for a long time.
When he spoke again, his voice was low. Almost gentle. Which somehow made it worse.
"I was under that car, Adrian."
"I know."
"You were the only one watching."
"I know."
"So if someone did this—" He stopped. Let that hang in the air between us.
He didn't finish it.
He didn't need to.
Because the sentence finished itself.
And we both heard it.
The emergency lights kept spinning.
The trees stood still.
And the space between us — the space that had always been warm and certain and ours — went cold for the first time in our lives.