In a crisis, in a hospital hallway at one in the morning with my sister dying behind a set of doors, my mind reached for the oldest, most familiar interpretation it had, the one it had rehearsed at seventeen, because familiar pain is easier to brace against than unknown pain.

It was easier, in that moment, to believe Gabriel was a villain I had always half-suspected than to face a truth I could not yet see the shape of.

The mind does that.

It defaults, under stress, to its oldest wounds, because at least they are known.

I mention it not to excuse myself but because I think it is a common and forgivable human failing, this reaching for the familiar dark, and because the whole point of what came next is that the familiar dark was wrong, that the truth was the opposite of the thing my frightened mind had grabbed for.

I braced for a villain.