The weight of randomness

I can't even begin to tell you when it was that my screams faded to nothing. At an undefined point, my hands stopped shaking, my breath steadied, and the panic that clawed at my throat turned into something else. Something unnatural. Something I couldn't explain.

She was dead. I knew that. I screamed for help, yelled until my voice cracked. But my heart- my heart didn't feel it. Not the way it should have. Not the way a normal person would.

The apartment had a shadowy light, that dim bulb in the ceiling humming as if a dying insect were fixed there. The pervading air was thick and stale. I walked slowly, with hesitation, through the cold wooden floor, again putting one foot in front of the other toward her.

"hey girl"

Her body was sprawled across the couch, motionless yet lifelike, her eyes wide open, fixed on the river. It seemed that even in death she longed to push on and drift easily like that water below, forever flowing and ever pursuing it. But something had held her back-had inhibited her movement-from some invisible force, as though frozen in the middle of a thought, caught in the cross section of what was and what could be.

I swallowed. Hard.

There should have been more, but it wasn't. Sadness. Fear. Anger. There was just that hollow, gnawing emptiness within me. Like someone's scooped out my chest. I hated it.

Then came the sirens.

---

"Sir, step back," an officer with uniform pushed away my body. The apartment was filling with cops and paramedics now. Blue and red lights were flashing through the windows, evidently casting odd shadows against the walls.

Detective Rowan crouched next to Layla's corpse. A middle-aged man with graying temples and sharp, calculating eyes. "No signs of struggle, no forced entry..." he muttered. "Interesting."

"She was fine," I blurted out. "Just earlier today. She was fine."

"And you were the first to find her?" Rowan's gaze shifted to me. "What were you doing before you saw the body?"

I hesitated. "I was out... running some errands. When I came back, she was already—"

"Dead." He finished for me, nodding. "No blood. No bruises. Yet, here she is."

Silence stretched between us. Then a voice from behind.

"Detective, we have the preliminary report from the coroner."

I turned as another officer handed Rowan a clipboard. His eyes scanned the document. Then something flickered across his expression. Something dark. His grip tightened.

"Air embolism," he muttered under his breath.

My stomach twisted. "What?"

"Whoever killed her knew exactly what they were doing," Rowan said, standing up. "An injection of air directly into a vein-lethal and subtle. No trace. A slow-burning death." He paused, his eyes scanning the body. "But I still have one objection. Why didn't she try to go to the hospital? It's as if she knew she was dying but did nothing-and she died standing." 

I stared at her body. The pieces of the puzzle rearranged in my mind, but they did not fit. 

"Who would do this?" I whispered. 

"This is what we are here to discover," Rowan said, gazing carefully at me. "And if you want to help, tell me everything you know. Every detail, however small."

I nodded. Yet, deep down, I felt that I was already too deep into this.

---

It has been hours since the first question even entered my mind. My alibi checked out, but that didn't put me out of suspicion. After all, the murderer must be someone close to Krivya-someone she would trust, someone who could get near her without raising alarm. The strange thing was, I only knew her name after cops told me.

And as much as I wanted to believe otherwise, that meant me.

Whispers began after that.

The officers, the neighbors, everyone heard, even the barista at the café I usually visited-everyone suddenly looked at me differently. Like they knew something that I did not.

"Poor girl," I heard Mrs. Caldwell from 4B whisper to another tenant. "And to think it was him who found her."

"They always say it's someone you know," the other replied. "Someone close."

I clenched my fists. The walls seemed to close in. The apartment felt smaller. Tighter. Suffocating. The very place I called home was becoming my prison.

And then they started.

They were first very subtle. Anonymous texts.

"You don't remember, do you?"

"It was always meant to happen"

"You're not as innocent as you think"

Then came the calls. A voice distorted by static. "She trusted you." Click.

Panic clawed at my throat, but even then, the hollowness remained. My emotions felt disconnected, like they belonged to someone else. Was it shock? Trauma? Or something far, far worse?

I started questioning everything. My memories. My mind.

Had I really found her body?

Had I really been screaming for help... or just imagining it?

---

"I'm looking for answers," I told Rowan the next day. "Something isn't quite right. Someone's trying to mess with me."

He stared at me for a moment, before sliding something across the table. A photograph.

A security camera still, taken from a building near my apartment.

The time stamp? The precise moment of Krivya's murder.

The image?

Me.

Standing next to her on the bridge.

watching, waiting, and smiling.