Chapter 115.

I watched on nervously from the side praying for her safety. I always feared the psychotic version of her in the past, but now that I was watching her die for the second time, I found it exceeded that fear by far. 

Why did this happen? Did I do it? I saw myself push her off. How was that even possible? It’s my fault? I did it? I did this to her? When I entered her room I didn’t notice anyone else there and the door was also locked. If we excluded the open balcony, it would be an impossible locked-room murder mystery.

Unless my mind was playing games with me and what I saw both before and after I entered her room was not reflective of reality; this should otherwise be an impossible crime. What if it was a ghost disguised as me though? What am I thinking? A ghost? Enough of that rubbish! There must be some sort of explanation for all of this. The only logical explanation I could think of was that I was the crazy one who’d misremembered the entire sequence of events from beginning to end.

I must have never been standing in the balcony in my unit at the start as I initially thought. I was likely in her room with her the entire time, and now I’m deluding myself from the truth by constructing these false memories in my head. Perhaps I was in the balcony with her, pushed her off, then jumped over to my balcony creating the appearance of a locked room murder. From that point, I must have created false memories of me witnessing everything play out as a third party observer from my balcony.

But none of this made any sense, I never wished for her to die. I only ever wished the best for her.

“Mr. Genovese! Mr. Genovese! Get a hold of yourself!”

Slap!

A strong force assaulted my face and I was forcibly brought back to reality.

Where was I?

With a lost expression, I refocused my vision between my two palms which were glued to my face. I finally registered my surroundings.

A hospital?

When did I get here?

“Val? Why... are you here?  Where... are we?”

“We’re at the hospital obviously. What the hell happened! I came over to your place to help with the presentation and found a bunch of ambulances around while you were being escorted by paramedics pushing a stretcher with Adele on it. You were completely out of it the entire time. I tagged along by claiming I was your girlfriend, but everybody was too busy to explain what was going on. You just blankly held onto Adele’s hand the entire time in the ambulance. What the hell happened to her!”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I don’t understand. I can’t understand. Nothing makes sense anymore. This world is twisted. It’s wrong. It’s impossible. Incomprehensible. It doesn’t add up. What do I do? I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me. I swear. I had no desire to see her dead. I didn’t kill her. Why is this happening to me, Val? What did I do in life to deserve this? It’s too unfair.”

“Snap out of it! Stop panicking, she isn’t dead, and you didn’t kill her! She was in critical condition, but her condition has miraculously stabilized now with the timely emergency aid she was given. For now, she’s in the clear, and out of murky waters.”

“She’s alive? She’s really still... alive?”

“Yes. The paramedics were also rather surprised by her condition. She was in critical condition, but she didn’t look like someone who’d fallen from such a height at all. Aside from some bleeding, there weren’t any broken bones, and all of her internal organs were still perfectly intact. Are you sure that she really fell from her balcony?”

“What are you talking about? I saw it happen. No, actually... I don’t know if I can trust what I saw after all. I might be completely wrong. I’m so confused I can hardly understand what’s happening anymore.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know...”

“How can you not know?”

“I don’t know whether what I saw was a hallucination or not. I don’t know where it would have begun or where it would have ended. I have no way to differentiate or determine whether my memories are fake, real, or somehow altered by my own will. Everything happened too fast and I didn’t have any time to prepare any sort of countermeasure for anything.”

“Relax, nobody died. With the way things are, the police would likely think this was a case of a failed suicide. She had amnesia, and in her unstable state of not knowing who she was, she decided to end her life. It’s that simple. Two days ago when we met her she told me all about her uncertainties and her strange dreams when we went out to eat.”

“Strange dreams? I’ve wanted to ask her about them for a while, what were they about?”

“She had dreams about you. More specifically, from what I gathered, they didn’t seem to simply be delusions, but rather, they felt closer to being her actual memories of the times the two of you spent together. I don’t have any way to confirm with one hundred percent certainty whether they were legitimate memories though. Only you would be able to affirm whether they were real or something she made up in her head after she met you as strangers.”

My chest felt heavy, I didn’t know how to interpret it. Was it a good thing or a bad thing if she remembered me? If she did remember everything about me, wouldn’t her psycho switch be flipped back on again?

“Does it really make you that anxious? Her remembering you?”

“It does.”

“Did you maybe want her dead to prevent that?”

“What are you talking about! Of course not! Why would I try to save her if that was the case?”

“A guilty conscience? Or maybe to throw off the cops?”

“Do you... really think I did it?” Even I wasn’t confident anymore.

“Not really. I’m just speculating how others might contrive conspiracy theories about it. Unless there was irrefutable evidence like a recording of the scene where she jumped off the balcony of her own accord, there are bound to be people who come up with theories like that.”

“Are there any security cameras in the area, Mr. Genovese?”

“I don’t know. I just moved there.”

I’d definitely love to see the footage of myself pushing her off while simultaneously being on my balcony. At least then I could verify whether I was just a lunatic or not.

“I’ll make a few calls then. It will be troublesome if I can’t utilize you for that presentation.”

“You still expect me to go in these circumstances?”

“I told you, didn’t I? I’ll be your angel outside of business, but when it’s related to business, I will always be the devil.”

What the hell, why did she sound kind of cool when she said that? … I seriously felt like a tool for thinking it sounded cool.

After that, she turned to the side, crossed her arms, and started a private call with the audio playing through her wireless earpiece. 

Somehow, I found it a bit hard to avert my eyes from her when I realized she was wearing the same clothes I’d loaned her from before. Did she like them? But why would she wear them when she planned to visit my place right after work? Her hair was also slightly damp for some reason; whether it was sweat or water, I couldn’t really tell. 

These little observations really had nothing to do with anything. I just found her appearance right now to somehow put me at ease. Maybe it was because the clothes belonged to my second ex and she was someone who’d picked up the pieces after things went awry with Adele in the past. Perhaps it was a sort of nostalgia. Val couldn’t really be her, at least, I didn’t want to believe that.