No one notices the moment a mind begins to die. There's no blood, no sound, no eulogy. It doesn't scream. It whispers. Softly. Persistently. Until the person you were is buried beneath a version of yourself that smiles without reason and forgets what silence used to feel like.

Dr. Elara Voss had studied the mechanics of thought, the architecture of trauma. She understood the clinical language of collapse?dissociation, cognitive distortion, psychotic break. But none of that prepared her for this. Not the books. Not the therapy. Not the careful control she wielded over other people's unraveling.