Chapter 16: The Scorched Earth
The world had lost its sound. For Tim, the morning after Justin’s arrest was a silent film projected onto a screen of gray felt. The hallway noises—the slamming lockers, the shrieks of laughter, the mindless chatter—were all muted, distant, as if he were watching his life from the bottom of a deep, still lake. He was a ghost haunting the corridors of his own ruin. Every strategy, every logical pathway he’d so carefully constructed, had led to the echoing cl