Gabriel's mother knocks at the door and asks if he knows about the class visit to the hospital. But she hears no response from inside the room. She slowly treads back downstairs, thinking she'll bring this up during dinner time.

In reality, Gabriel hears every word through his earbuds. He pats the bed for his phone, but he struggles in the pitch dark room. Soon, the screen lights up, and Gabriel skims through the class chat.

When he sees the homeroom teacher confirm that Jonan has woken up, and the guilt that plagued him for the last week rises from his shoulders with his exhaling breath.

Jonan was fine.

Fine?

Is "fine" enough? he thinks. When he could have prevented, everything?

This thought, the thought that he could have, should have done something, needed to have done something, anything, throws himself into desolation.

A tear splatters onto the screen when Gabriel reads bad luck in the group chat.

It wasn't bad luck. It was Gabriel's cowardice that stopped him. It was Gabriel's actions. It was--

Gabriel leaves his blanket, rummaging under the bed, and he finds it effortlessly as if it were waiting.

--The notebook.

The black cover stares expectantly as it's held in his shaking hands.

Gabriel stands there for a moment. The phone turns off, and he is plunged back in the dark. His fingers trace the strange cover, pale against the soul tearing blackness. He kneels on the carpet and clenches onto the notebook, not sure if he wants to throw it across the room or shred it in half.

When he flips to the first page and feels the ink on the page, words of apology push past his lips.

"I'm sorry..." he mutters above a bubbling cry. "I'm sorry," he can only say. But who are these apologies for? Jonan? Jonan's family? Himself?

The guilt settles upon him once more as the book is set on the floor.

He hears his mother call him down for dinner, and he quickly wipes his face.

"In a minute," he yells, hoping that his mother cannot hear his voice shaking.

Entering the washroom, Gabriel breaks in a small panic.

The flushed eyes and nose won't do. He can already see his father, who is setting the table and waiting for his son to come downstairs to eat, glaring at Gabriel, mouth sewn shut, but whose expression says all. His silence scares Gabriel, but what he will say scare him even more.

When Gabriel finally musters the courage to go to the dinner table, he tries to keep his face low, staring at the gray-blue ceramic plates in front of his seat. His father and mother laugh about something they saw online, and silverware begins to clatter as they start to eat. Shortly, Gabriel feels it, a look coming from across the table. His brown eyes meet with his father's, and he sees him sigh into his hand, shaking his head ever so slightly.

Water drips from the faucet in the kitchen, clattering against pots stashed in the sink, louder than the tick of the minimalist clock, which points to 7. The sun sets in the horizon behind the open window, and murders of crows take off, black feathers glinting silver.

His mother is the first one to speak. "Gabriel, your class is organizing a visit to see Jonan in the hospital. Are you going to go?"

Gabriel's fork stops. "I..."

"Of course he's going." His father answers for him.

"Actually I—" He sees his father glare at him, and he stops talking.

"You're what?" his father asks, almost taunting. "Your classmate is in the hospital, and you don't have the time to go?"

"I do," Gabriel tries to explain. "But it's just that..."

"That you'd rather stay at home and play your...Video games?"

Gabriel kept his mouth shut. There was no way to answer instead of lying.

"That's not the kind of person I raised you to be."