I felt myself fracture.

He pushed open the doors. He didn’t turn around.

I tried to reach him as the doors swung shut, but I found that I couldn’t even stand. “Jude!” I screamed. Strong hands held me up, held me back, but it didn’t matter. Because no matter how I looked then, broken and wild on the floor, for the first time since that night at the asylum, my biggest problem wasn’t that I was losing my mind. Or even that I was a murderer.

It was that Jude was still alive.