Years later, Alex would remember that night as the one when the room itself seemed to exhale.

They lay tangled in the half-dark, the city a faint murmur beyond the windows, Nate’s heartbeat steady under her ear. She was quiet so long he thought she’d fallen asleep.

Then she spoke, barely above a whisper.

“I just realized… I can’t find her anymore.”

He didn’t ask who. He already knew.

“The girl who used to sit on the toilet and cry because she was terrified of what her own body might do. The one who flinched when anyone said the word ‘rectal.’ The one who kept a bottle of lube hidden like contraband and hated herself for needing it. She’s… gone.”

A tear slid from the corner of her eye, rolled across the bridge of her nose, and dropped onto his chest.

“I looked for her tonight (while you were inside me, while I watched myself take everything I was once forced to take), and there was just… me. Just Alex. Whole. Not fixed. Not cured. Just… arrived.”

Nate’s arms tightened around her, almost imperceptibly.

“I mourned her for a second,” she went on, voice trembling. “That scared little girl deserved someone to mourn her. And then I let her go. Because she doesn’t have to hide anymore. She got us here.”

He pressed his lips to her forehead and held them there, breathing her in.

Outside, a siren rose and faded.

Inside, the last ghost slipped quietly out the door and did not come back.

Alex fell asleep smiling, small and fierce and entirely her own.

And somewhere in the dark, twenty-five centimeters of polished steel lay wrapped in a drawer, retired, no longer needed as proof of anything.

It had done its job.

She was free.