Insight of a Kenyan Girl

The silence after his words didn’t linger. It shattered.

Tilly looked down at the manuscript—at her name etched into the madness of it all, wrapped in fiction, folded into lies masquerading as fate.

The pages were beautiful. Twisted. Poetic.

But they weren’t hers.

Not really.

Tilly turned away from Nathaniel, walked toward the center of the room, and placed the manuscript on the marble table beneath the golden light. Her fingers lingered on the cover for only a moment.

Then she reached into her coat pocket.

The matchbook.

The one from her first night at Mystique. The logo embossed in gold foil. She didn’t know why she’d kept it—why she hadn’t thrown it out like everything else from that night.

Now she knew.

Her hand trembled only once as she struck the match.

Nathaniel stepped forward. “Tilly—”

She didn’t look at him.

She dropped the flame to the corner of the manuscript.

It caught instantly. The fire curled upward like a whisper, consuming ink and paper and prophecy in hungry, orange swirls.

Nathaniel didn’t try to stop her. He just watched, eyes reflecting the glow.

As the last page blackened into ash, Tilly finally turned back to him.

“I don’t want your ending,” she said. “I’ll write my own.”

Nathaniel gave a small, resigned nod. “Then go. Before they change their minds.”

Tilly didn’t ask who they were. She didn’t care.

She walked out of the Red Room, smoke trailing behind her like a final sentence.

Through the corridor.

Past the music.

Out the front doors of Mystique.

The night air hit her face like absolution. She walked into it without looking back.

For the first time in weeks, maybe months, the silence felt clean.