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Maybe you and I do deserve to suffer for our wrongdoing. If that’s so, then it means that when things get painful, when things get difficult, we don’t have the luxury of quitting. We don’t get to end our lives to escape what we did. Whatever form the pain takes, we bear it, we endure it, we welcome it, all while we try to make this world a place where people like us, like how we used to be, have no place, and the people who would be hurt can instead live in peace. The next time you encounter an obstacle you cannot overcome, when you just want to curl up into a ball and quit on the world, remind yourself that you don’t deserve the peace of surrender. You have to keep working, to keep fighting, to keep suffering, until the day when you’ve fully repented.

I left her there, naked and bleeding, and the next time I saw her, she was at the base of the west tower, having jumped to her death. Galvin told me not to concern myself with her, that she was simply a broken toy, and that I would find another. But I knew different. She wasn’t a broken toy, and though she made her choice, it wasn’t suicide; it was murder. I killed her. I hurt her, I violated her, and made her life so painful that I might as well have pushed her off that tower myself. I knew it, but I didn’t want to accept it.

“He—” I croaked, my throat dry and scratchy, a foreign, slightly bitter taste on my tongue. “Help!” My voice was so weak and thready, there was no way anyone would hear me, not through what I was now recognizing as sound-proof padding on the walls. What had happened to me? I couldn't remember. I didn't know where I was, had no idea why I was here.