Arjun picked up the pen. His hand still trembled—but this time, he wrote.

“Your manager, your mother, your roommate,” Dr. Shalini said. “They’re not angry because you’re cruel. They’re angry because the system you used to stabilize is shifting. You’ve stopped absorbing their tremors. Now they feel their own shaking for the first time. And they’re pointing at you and calling it an earthquake.”

Arjun stared at the open page. “So the guilt… the feeling that I’ve done something wrong…”