The Caged Smile — Part 9

The hospital lights were too white. Too clean. Too forgiving.

She sat beside his bed, the gunshot wound wrapped in thick gauze. The scent of disinfectant hung heavy in the air. Beeping monitors filled the silence between her thoughts. Thoughts she wasn’t sure belonged to her anymore.

He lay there, asleep—or sedated. But he wasn’t peaceful. His brow furrowed as if even his dreams were restless. As if somewhere in that broken mind, the nightmare continued.

She should’ve left. Should’ve walked out the moment the paramedics arrived. But her legs didn’t move. Her fingers clenched the armrest of the chair. And her eyes... they stayed glued to him.

He looked small. Weak. Mortal.

A boy. Just a boy.

And yet the bruises on her body still sang his name.

Detective Thakur entered the room hours later. She hadn’t noticed how long she’d been there.

“You don’t have to watch him,” he said gently. “He’s under guard. He’s not getting near you again.”

She didn’t answer.

He sat beside her, not as a cop, but as a human being. Tired. Angry. Sympathetic.

“Why did you shoot to wound?” he asked after a pause.

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Maybe... I wanted him to hurt.”

Thakur nodded. “He’s going away for a long time. You won’t have to see him again.”

She blinked. “I don’t know who I am without him.”

Thakur flinched. “Don’t say that. He broke you. He doesn’t define you.”

“But he was... always watching. Always there. Even in my dreams.” She looked at the bandages. "When someone becomes your cage... you forget how to walk in the open."

The trial came three months later.

Courtroom filled with whispers, journalists, cameras.

He stood in a prisoner’s box, cleaned up, hair combed, wrists cuffed. He didn’t look at her once. Not until she took the stand.

Then, his eyes found hers—and he smiled.

The smile that once made her feel special. Seen. Now it felt like poison.

She trembled.

The prosecutor walked her through the days, the beatings, the chains, the starvation, the cold.

She told them everything.

But when they asked, "Did he ever say he loved you?"—her throat closed.

“Yes,” she said, barely audible. “But it wasn’t love.”

His lawyer tried to argue trauma. Delusions. A disturbed boy who was abandoned, unloved. A foster care system that spat him out with no empathy.

She almost believed it.

Almost.

Until they showed the photos.

The shrine.

The chains.

The journal entries.

"She smiled at me. I belong to her. And she to me. They’ll never take her away. I’ll make sure of it."

No plea for sanity could erase what he did.

The judge sentenced him to life.

She moved cities after that.

Changed her name.

Found a small bookstore job in a town where no one knew her past. No one whispered her name like a ghost story.

But the nightmares stayed.

So did the drinking.

So did the guilt.

Every time she met someone kind, her chest tightened. What if her kindness had been the poison? What if her smile was the beginning of the end?

One night, she walked into the ocean, waves lapping at her knees. Salt and moonlight against her skin. She let the water pull her deeper, up to her chest, shoulders, throat—

Then stopped.

His voice echoed in her mind: "Stay with me."

She whispered back, "No. Not anymore."

She turned around and walked out.

She started therapy again.

Real therapy. Not the kind where she nodded and lied.

She told her new therapist about the chains. The knife. The blood. The paradox of being afraid to die but too broken to live.

“You survived,” her therapist said.

She laughed. “Did I?”

“Yes. And now... you have to live.”

Meanwhile, in prison, he kept a journal.

Pages and pages of her name.

He refused to speak to anyone. Refused to eat some days.

But he never stopped writing.

“She looked at me like I mattered.”

“They told me I was sick. But she was the only cure.”

“They’ll never understand. But we had something real. Didn’t we?”

He waited every day for a letter from her.

It never came.

He began to talk to the walls.

To her ghost.

One day, she received a letter.

Unmarked. No return address.

Inside: a drawing.

Of her. Smiling.

Of him. Kneeling.

A chain between them.

On the back: "Still with me."

She burned it without reading more.

Months turned to years.

She wrote a book. Fiction, but not really.

About a girl with a smile that caged a boy.

About a boy who mistook chains for love.

It became a bestseller.

People called it brilliant.

Brave.

They didn’t know.

But she did.

In the epilogue of her book, she wrote:

“He once said I saved him. But the truth is—I only ever survived him. And that’s enough.”