Haytham Woods believed he had stitched his life back together with careful, invisible seams. A marble kitchen. A wife whose silence felt almost sacred. Winter light falling across polished stone. The small white tablets lined beside the sink like a daily act of devotion. It had taken years to make the past look orderly.

Then, one winter afternoon, snow drifted through an open window and settled over the marble floor.

By evening, the marble was stained with blood.

He tells himself the old paranoia has returned. That grief has simply found a familiar language. That the things watching him belong to memory alone. But memory does not leave footprints. It does not linger in abandoned libraries or the cold halls of forgotten galleries. It does not wear the face of a woman who should have remained in the past.

Some obsessions survive the people who create them. Some love stories never stop bleeding. And there are addictions that no prescription can cure. Haytham spent years believing paranoia was the illness.

Only much later did he realize it was the addiction.