The cemetery.
Every answer she had given me.
My mother blamed her for how quickly everything had escalated.
Mara took it.
That surprised me.
No argument.
No defense.
She stood against the counter with one cheek red and her arms folded tightly around herself.
I turned to my mother.
“You remember.”
She closed her eyes.
There it was.
Another lie collapsing.
Not everything.
But far more than she’d admitted.
My mother remembered the resets.
Not equally.
Some mornings she woke with two childhoods in her head. Some memories disappeared for years and returned without warning. She had learned not to trust them.
So she created records.
Paper.
Boxes.
Things hidden in places I wouldn’t look.
Things Mara didn’t know existed.
She took us upstairs.
Into her bedroom.
There was a loose panel in the back of the closet.
Behind it sat six plastic storage boxes.
Each labeled with a number.
One through six.
My skin prickled.
Mara looked stunned.
“You said you destroyed them.”
My mother didn’t look at her.
“I lied.”
For once, somebody else’s betrayal felt satisfying.
Then I hated myself for enjoying Mara’s face.
My mother opened Box One.
Inside were photographs.
Letters.
Receipts.
Hospital bracelets.
Newspaper clippings.
My death certificate.
I touched it carefully.
My name.
My birthday.
Cause of death: drowning.
A photograph from the funeral sat underneath.
Mara beside my mother.
Trey much younger.
Julian in the background.
I stared.
He had attended my funeral.
Box Two contained a different death certificate.
My name.
Same birthday.
Different death.
Motor vehicle accident.
Age twenty.
Box Three.
Fire.
Age eighteen.
Box Four.
No death certificate.
Only a missing-person report.
Box Five.
An obituary with a photograph of me I’d never seen.
Box Six contained nothing documenting my death.
Instead, there was Mara’s.
I stopped breathing.
Her photograph filled the obituary.
Mara stepped closer.
She looked as if someone had punched her.
My mother sat on the bed.
“In this one, you died first.”
Mara picked up the paper.
Her hands shook.
Date of death.
Nineteen years old.
Aneurysm.
Mara stared at it.
“I don’t remember this.”
“I do.”
My mother’s voice softened for the first time.
“You were gone for almost two years.”
I looked between them.
That wasn’t possible.
Apparently, during that version, Mara died suddenly.
I lived.
No resets.
No changing photographs.
No bleeding teeth.
No overlapping realities.
Nothing strange happened for twenty-one months.
Then I died in a car accident.
Nine days later, I came back.
And Mara was alive again too.
Not resurrected.
She simply existed in the new version.
My mother had never told her.
Mara sat heavily on the floor.
Her obituary remained in her hands.
For years, she had believed my death was the center of everything.
It wasn’t.
Maybe death wasn’t the center at all.
Something connected the two of us.
When one disappeared, the world stabilized.
When both existed—
it eventually broke.
That possibility hung in the room.
Mara looked at me.
I looked at her.
Neither of us said what we were both thinking.
Maybe there was only supposed to be one of us.
My mother opened the bottom of Box Six.
There was an envelope taped beneath the cardboard insert.
My handwriting covered the front.
FOR MOM — DO NOT LET MARA READ THIS.
Mara saw it.
So did I.
The room changed.
My mother picked up the envelope.
Mara stood.
“Give it to her.”
My mother hesitated.
“Give it to her.”
For the first time, Mara sounded angry.
Not scared.
Not pleading.
Furious.
My mother handed it to me.
Inside was one sheet of paper.
I recognized my handwriting immediately.
The letter was short.
Only six lines.
The first five were instructions.
The sixth made me sit down.
If Mara remembers loving me, keep us apart.
⸻
Chapter Nineteen
I read the letter seventeen times.
The words didn’t improve.
Mara didn’t ask to see it.
That somehow made the whole thing worse.
She sat downstairs while I stayed in my mother’s bedroom with the boxes surrounding me like evidence from six murders.
Maybe they were.
I read everything.
Hours passed.
My mother brought food once.
I didn’t touch it.
The boxes held fragments rather than stories. Receipts without explanations. Photographs with people whose names I didn’t know. Birthday cards. Notes. Hospital paperwork.
But patterns emerged.
Mara and I were close in almost every version.
Sometimes sisters.
Sometimes childhood friends.
Once cousins by marriage.
Once neighbors.
In one version, our parents had actually married when we were fourteen.
That was where stepsister came from.
My current life had inherited the relationship without inheriting the marriage.
The word had survived when the history didn’t.
That realization disturbed me more than it should have.
Reality was sloppy.
It left leftovers.
The famous sister.
The photographs.
Trey calling Mara by a relationship that technically didn’t exist.
Small pieces from lives that no longer belonged together.
I searched for the white dress.
Box Four.
A photograph.
Mara and me beneath string lights.
Same picture.
Same dress.
On the back, my handwriting:
Her wedding.
I almost dropped it.
Mara had been married.
Not to me.
The thought was so ridiculous that I laughed despite everything.
Then I found the next photograph.
Mara in a wedding dress.
A man beside her.
Julian.
The laugh died.
I stared at the picture.
Mara and Julian.
Married.
I flipped it over.
Date.
Three years ago.
Another reality.
Another relationship.
I found more.
Julian kissing her forehead.
Mara holding his hand.
Me between them making an ugly face at the camera.
The three of us happy.
Family.
My stomach twisted.
Julian had never mentioned that.
Of course he hadn’t.
Nobody ever gave me the whole truth.
I took the photographs downstairs.
Mara saw them.
Her face emptied.
I placed them on the table.
She sat slowly.
Apparently she remembered pieces.
Not the wedding.
A kitchen.
His laugh.
A fight about laundry.
His side of a bed.
Tiny domestic memories without names attached.
She touched the photograph of them together.
For the first time, I saw grief arrive for a life she hadn’t known she’d lost.
Julian had remembered.
He’d sat across from me in the recreation center and said we’d all lived together once.
He had conveniently left out the part where Mara had been his wife.
I called him.
No answer.
Again.
Nothing.
Mara told me not to go after him.
That guaranteed I would.
Before I could leave, my mother stopped me.
There was more.
Of course.
I had become numb to those words.
She gave me another envelope.
This one addressed to myself.
Different handwriting.
Still mine.
Shakier.
Written during Box Six.
The version where Mara died.
I opened it.
The letter explained the instruction upstairs.
Not because Mara was dangerous.
Not because I hated her.
Because I had discovered something.
The resets didn’t begin when Mara found me.
They began when we remembered loving each other.
Not memory generally.
Not recognition.
Attachment.
In Box Six, Mara was dead and I lived nearly two years without instability.
After my own death, both of us returned.
But for several months, I didn’t know Mara.
Nothing happened.
Then we met.
Not because either remembered.
By accident.
A café.
Two strangers.
We became friends.
Again.
Slowly.
Naturally.
And the first night I told Mara I loved her—
my teeth began bleeding.
I stopped reading.
No.
I looked toward Mara.
She was watching me.
Something from Chapter Two returned so clearly it hurt.
The stage.
Her voice.
Our arms around each other.
The sudden certainty.
I love you.
I hadn’t said it.
But I had thought it.
Her smile had disappeared immediately.
She knew.
Somehow, she had felt it.
The timing.
That was why everything accelerated.
It wasn’t remembering her that mattered.
It was loving her.
My mother whispered that they had tried keeping us apart.
Every version, somehow, we found each other.
And every version, somehow, we loved each other again.
Sisters.
Friends.
Whatever relationship reality invented.
The bond survived the rewrite.
Something about it refused to disappear.
It would have been beautiful if it weren’t killing us.
I finished the letter.
At the bottom, previous-me had written one final line.
One of us does not have to die. We only have to stop choosing each other.
Mara stood up.
“No.”
Her reaction was immediate.
Almost violent.
I stared.
She shook her head as if the sentence itself had attacked her.
“No.”
I hadn’t proposed anything.
Hadn’t made a decision.
But Mara already understood.
A life where we both survived might exist.
We simply couldn’t be sisters in it.
Maybe couldn’t be anything.
My throat tightened.
For the first time since meeting her, I wished I had never wanted a sister.
The thought hurt so badly I almost took it back.
Then somebody knocked at the front door.
Three times.
Nobody moved.
Three more.
My mother went pale.
Mara stepped in front of me without thinking.
That instinct.
Always that instinct.
Protect.
Choose.
Love.
Three knocks.
Then a voice through the door.
My voice.
“Please let me in.”
⸻
Chapter Twenty
Nobody opened the door.
The woman outside kept knocking.
My voice kept asking.
Not screaming.
Not threatening.
Just asking to be let inside.
I stood in the hallway with my mother behind me and Mara directly in front, blocking the door as though her body could protect me from myself.
Trey came down the stairs.
He heard the voice.
His face changed.
So he remembered this too.
I asked whether it had happened before.
He whispered yes.
Mara turned toward him sharply.
Apparently she hadn’t known.
Another secret.
Another person carrying pieces.
Trey remembered another me appearing during one of the resets.
Only once.
She lasted less than a day.
Then disappeared.
I looked at the door.
The woman outside knocked again.
“I know you’re in there.”
My skin crawled.
Same cadence.
Same little drop in pitch at the end.
Me.
Mara told everyone to move away.
I didn’t.
I stepped around her.
She grabbed my wrist.
I pulled free.
That tiny act hurt her.
Good.
Necessary.
I looked through the peephole.
My own face stared back.
I stumbled away.
She was wearing the white dress.
The one from the photograph.
Blood streaked down the front.
Her mouth was closed.
She smiled.
I screamed.
Mara grabbed me.
The woman outside laughed.
My laugh.
Then she said something that made Mara go completely still.
“Ask her who she saved at the pool.”
Mara stopped breathing.
I turned toward her.
No.
Not another one.
Not now.
My mother looked confused.
Trey didn’t.
That told me everything.
I asked Mara.
She shook her head.
I asked again.
Her eyes filled.
The woman outside answered for her.
“Not you.”
The hallway tilted.
Mara’s memory of the first drowning.
Julian’s memory.
Both wrong.
Or incomplete.
Mara had entered the pool.
Two people were underwater.
Me.
And another girl.
Her biological sister.
The famous one.
Younger then.
Not famous yet.
Mara could reach only one quickly.
She chose her sister.
Not me.
I drowned.
The words landed strangely.
I had expected betrayal to feel dramatic.
Instead I felt empty.
Of course she had chosen her.
Her actual sister.
The one she’d grown up with.
The person she’d known all her life.
Why wouldn’t she?
Mara was crying now.
She remembered.
Not all of it.
Enough.
She saved her sister.
Julian pulled me out later.
Too late.
I died.
The grave was real.
The funeral was real.
Everything after that was the impossible part.
Mara had gone to my grave six days later.
Alone.
She had stayed there until dark.
She had screamed at me.
Called me selfish for dying.
Called herself worse things for choosing someone else.
Begged me to come back.
And then she said something.
Not a ritual.
Not magic words.
A stupid grieving promise.
She would choose me next time.
If she ever got another chance, she would choose me.
The next morning, I was alive.
My stomach turned.
All these years.
All these versions.
Mara had kept doing exactly what she’d promised.
Choosing me.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Reality changed relationships but the choice remained.
She found me.
Protected me.
Refused to let me go.
Killed me when I asked and then searched until she found me again.
Every version, Mara chose me.
And every version, the world eventually demanded the choice be undone.
The woman outside knocked again.
“You know what happens now.”
I looked through the peephole.
She had opened her mouth.
Four teeth.
Only four.
Blood covered her gums.
I stepped back.
She smiled wider.
Then she held something up to the peephole.
A curved strip of material.
Teeth attached to it.
Almost an entire mouth.
My stomach rolled.
The final image from my nightmares.
Except they weren’t nightmares.
Memories.
Future memories.
Past memories.
I no longer knew.
The woman outside began laughing.
My own broken laugh.
Mara moved toward the lock.
My mother grabbed her.
“Don’t.”
Mara shook her off.
I caught her arm.
“What are you doing?”
“She needs help.”
I stared at her.
There it was.
The problem.
Even now.
Even when the person outside might not be me.
Even when opening the door might destroy everything.
Mara wanted to save her.
Because she looked like me.
Because Mara would always choose me.
The other me whispered through the door.
“She still doesn’t get it.”
My teeth began aching.
Every tooth.
At once.
I doubled over.
Mara caught me.
Blood hit the floor.
Not a little.
A stream.
My mouth filled with metal.
My mother screamed for towels.
Trey ran.
I couldn’t close my jaw.
The thing was back.
Larger.
Harder.
Locked behind my teeth.
I reached inside.
Mara grabbed my hand.
No.
I fought her.
The pressure pulled downward.
One tooth shifted.
Then another.
Then an entire row.
Panic erased everything else.
I shoved Mara away.
My fingers found the edge.
The same edge I’d felt before.
The woman outside started pounding on the door now.
Not three polite knocks.
Fists.
Hard.
My mother’s hands were on my shoulders.
Trey came back with towels.
Mara was screaming.
I pulled.
Pain tore through my skull.
Something came loose.
Not all the way.
Enough.
Blood poured over my wrist.
A memory exploded through me.
Not one.
Hundreds.
Mara at thirteen.
Mara at sixteen.
Mara in a wedding dress beside Julian.
Mara dead in a coffin.
Mara holding my hand while pills made me sleepy.
Mara finding me in a café where I didn’t know her.
Mara at my grave.
Mara underwater.
Her hand reaching toward me.
Then turning away.
Another hand grabbing mine.
Not Julian.
Mine.
My own hand.
I saw myself beneath the water.
Two of me.
One drowning.
One already dead.
One reaching through something that wasn’t water.
I screamed.
The memory broke.
The dental piece slipped partly from my mouth.
Several teeth hung from it.
Real teeth.
Mine.
Mara stared.
The pounding at the door stopped.
Silence.
I looked toward it.
Then at the thing in my bloody hand.
Seven teeth.
Not all.
Not yet.
The other woman spoke softly through the door.
“You’re running out of time.”
I couldn’t answer.
She continued.
“You think Mara brought you back.”
A pause.
Then:
“She didn’t.”
My mother went completely still.
The woman outside laughed once.
“She wished.”
My bloody fingers tightened around the teeth.
“But you’re the one who answered.”
The lights went out.
For three seconds, the entire house disappeared.
When they returned, the front door stood open.
Nobody was outside.
Only the white dress remained on the porch.
Folded neatly.
A brown phone rested on top.
My phone was still in my pocket.
Mara didn’t move.
Neither did I.
Trey slowly walked toward the porch and picked up the second phone.
The screen lit beneath his hand.
No passcode.
No wallpaper.
One video.
He handed it to me.
I pressed play.
Another version of me appeared.
Older.
Healthy.
All her teeth.
She looked directly into the camera.
Behind her stood Mara.
And Julian.
And my mother.
All three were crying.
Video-me wasn’t.
She looked peaceful.
“I finally figured out how to stop it.”
The screen flickered.
Then she smiled.
“But if you’re seeing this, I changed my mind.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The second phone stayed on the kitchen table all night.
Nobody touched it after the video ended.
Not because we were afraid of the device itself. By then, fear had become too crowded to organize properly. There were too many versions of it competing for space. Fear of my teeth. Fear of Mara. Fear for Mara. Fear of Julian. Fear of the woman in the white dress. Fear of myself.
Mostly, though, I was afraid of what that other version of me had meant.
I finally figured out how to stop it.
But if you’re seeing this, I changed my mind.
There was something deeply unsettling about receiving instructions from yourself and immediately knowing you couldn’t trust the sender.
I slept on the couch with the second phone beneath a folded towel on the coffee table, as if covering it made it less capable of knowing me.
Mara sat nearby.
She didn’t sleep.
Neither did Trey.
My mother disappeared upstairs sometime before dawn, leaving the three of us in a silence that felt less like exhaustion and more like mutual suspicion.
The white dress remained outside.
Nobody wanted to bring it in.
Every time I looked through the window, it was still folded on the porch exactly as the other me had left it.
Not moving.
Not changing.
Waiting.
At some point near sunrise, Trey got up and went into the kitchen.
I watched him go.
Something about the way he moved made me sit up.
Not nervous.
Purposeful.
He opened one drawer.
Then another.
Reached beneath the sink.
Straightened.
Nothing strange.
Except he looked toward the hallway before leaving the room.
Checking.
Just like Mara always did.
My stomach tightened.
I followed him.
He heard me and stopped before reaching the stairs.
For a second we stood in the hallway looking at one another.
He didn’t look scared.
That was the first thing I noticed.
He looked tired.
Older than I had been allowing him to look.
I asked what he had taken from the kitchen.
He told me nothing.
A lie.
Small.
Immediate.
Familiar.
I held out my hand.
Trey stared at it.
Then at me.
Something hardened in his face.
It disappeared quickly, but not quickly enough.
For the first time, I understood that my little brother wasn’t merely hiding things because someone had told him to.
He was choosing to.
I asked again.
His shoulders dropped.
Then he laughed once under his breath.
Not because anything was funny.
Because apparently we had finally reached something he’d been waiting for.
He walked past me and sat on the bottom step.
I stayed standing.
He looked toward the living room where Mara remained asleep or pretending to be.
Then he told me something I had never expected to hear from him.
“You really don’t remember what you did to me.”
The hallway changed.
Not literally.
But the world seemed to narrow until only that sentence remained.
I sat down two steps above him.
For once, I didn’t interrupt.
Trey picked at the skin beside his thumbnail while he spoke.
His memories had never disappeared the way everyone assumed.
Not completely.
There were holes.
Contradictions.
Entire years that seemed to belong to different families.
But beneath all of that, something remained.
Me.
Always me.
Not Mara.
Not Julian.
Me.
He remembered a house I didn’t.
A basement.
A mattress on the floor.
A camera pointed toward a chair.
He remembered being eleven.
Maybe twelve.
He wasn’t certain anymore because age changed between versions.
But he remembered crying.
He remembered me bleeding.
And he remembered wanting to go home.
My skin went cold.
A memory stirred.
Concrete floor.
A bare bulb.
My own hands shaking around a roll of tape.
Then nothing.
Trey looked at me.
I didn’t ask whether I had hurt him.
I was suddenly afraid of the answer.
He gave it anyway.
Not physically.
That made it no better.
Apparently I had discovered something before anyone else did.
Not the whole pattern.
Enough.
I had realized emotion survived.
Not ordinary emotion.
Not memories attached to routine.
Strong things.
Love.
Grief.
Fear.
The kinds of feelings that became part of the body.
Mara kept finding me because love survived.
Julian remembered fragments because whatever existed between us had once been strong enough to leave marks.
And Trey had been young enough that I could test a theory.
I felt sick.
He said I made him watch videos.
Dozens.
Recordings of previous versions.
Deaths.
Hospital rooms.
Mara screaming.
My mother crying.
Me speaking directly into the camera.
I showed him things no child should have seen.
Then I told him they were real.
He didn’t believe me.
So I proved it.
I predicted things.
Dates.
Names.
An accident.
A blackout.
A woman who would show up at the house three days later wearing a green coat.
Everything happened.
By the time Trey understood that I wasn’t lying, he was terrified of forgetting.
That was what I needed.
Not his cooperation.
His fear.
My throat closed.
Trey stared at the floor while he described the rest.
I told him that the next version might erase me.
That he might wake in a world where I was dead.
Or never born.
Or alive but different.
I told him he had to remember.
He cried.
He begged me not to make him do anything.
I kept going.
Because I needed a witness.
That was the word I used.
Witness.
Someone who could carry the truth across.
I had realized that memories attached to trauma didn’t disappear cleanly.
So I made him afraid enough to survive the reset.
I stood abruptly.
The movement made Trey flinch.
That hurt worse than anything he’d said.
I stepped back.
He noticed.
We both did.
He looked away.
I whispered that I was sorry.
The apology sounded pathetic.
Trey’s expression didn’t change.
Then he reached into his hoodie pocket and removed a folded piece of paper.
The thing he’d taken from the kitchen.
He handed it to me.
My handwriting.
I recognized it before opening it.
The page had been folded so many times the creases were soft.
I unfolded it.
There were instructions.
Short.
Practical.
Cold.
If I start asking about Mara, distract me.
If I find old photographs, remove them when you can.
If I write down Julian’s name, erase it.
If I remember the water, tell Mom.
If my teeth bleed, leave.
My stomach dropped.
The notebook.
The missing sentence.
The blank pages.
Trey.
Not reality.
At least not all of it.
I looked at him.
He nodded.
He had taken the notebook while I slept.
Removed pages.
Scrubbed ink.
Hidden photographs.
Moved things.
Sometimes because my previous self had told him to.
Sometimes because he was scared.
Sometimes because he hated me for putting him in the middle of all of this and wanted to make me feel confused.
That last part hit hardest because it was honest.
The supernatural had been real.
So had the manipulation.
And some of it was mine.
I kept reading.
At the bottom of the page, the writing changed.
Messier.
Pressed so hard the pen had nearly torn through.
Trey, if I ask you why you remember, lie to me.
If I get angry, let me.
If I accuse you, let me.
Do not tell Mara what I did.
She will forgive me.
She always does.
You don’t have to.
I stopped.
Something inside me broke quietly.
Not in a dramatic rush.
No tears yet.
Just shame.
Trey watched me.
He looked less like my little brother and more like a person I had wronged.
That distinction mattered.
I folded the paper again.
Carefully.
Then I gave it back.
I told him he didn’t owe me forgiveness.
His mouth tightened.
For a second, I thought he might cry.
Instead, he looked toward the living room.
Mara stood in the doorway.
She had heard everything.
Her face was wet.
Of course it was.
I almost laughed.
Not because it was funny.
Because every version of us seemed destined to stand in rooms learning terrible things about one another and then deciding whether love could survive the truth.
Mara looked at Trey.
Then at me.
No one spoke.
She crossed the hallway and sat beside him.
Not me.
Trey stiffened.
Then slowly, after several seconds, let her touch his shoulder.
I watched them.
And for the first time since this started, I understood that I wasn’t the only person at the center of this story.
Maybe I never had been.
⸻
Chapter Twenty-Two
Julian arrived before noon.
Nobody invited him.
That felt appropriate.
He appeared at the back door as though houses had simply stopped requiring permission for entry.
Trey found him first.
By the time I came downstairs, Mara had already moved between Julian and the rest of us.
The old instinct.
Protect.
Even after learning that protection itself might be part of the problem.
Julian looked exhausted.
There was blood dried beneath one nostril.
A cut along his jaw.
He looked toward the second phone.
Then toward the white dress still outside.
His face changed.
He knew.
Apparently the other me had appeared before.
Not always physically.
Sometimes mirrors.
Sometimes photographs.
Once, a voice recording on a phone that hadn’t been manufactured yet.
But only one other time had she appeared as a person.
That was the time Trey remembered.
Julian had seen her too.
She had lasted eleven hours.
Then both versions of me began bleeding.
One disappeared.
The other died three days later.
Nobody knew which one had been original.
That phrase had started meaning less and less.
Original.
Real.
Current.
Every word depended on which version survived long enough to name the others.
Julian wanted to destroy the second phone.
I refused.
Mara agreed with him.
That irritated me enough to make me keep it out of principle.
The device contained more videos.
We found them after plugging it into a charger.
Seven files appeared.
Then eight.
Then nine.
The number changed every time the screen refreshed.
We stopped counting.
Most wouldn’t open.
One did.
Another version of me sat in a car.
No blood.
No missing teeth.
She looked younger.
She explained that the resets had never been random.
They were decisions.
Not conscious ones.
Something deeper.
Each time I died, there was a moment between one life and the next where I could let go.
Apparently I never did.
I reached.
For people.
For places.
For unfinished versions of myself.
And the next world formed around whatever I refused to lose.
Mara.
Trey.
Julian.
Mom.
Pieces.
But nothing returned exactly.
That was why relationships shifted.
Why histories contradicted.
Why someone could be a stepsister in one life, stranger in another, best friend in another.
I wasn’t traveling between completed realities.
I was dragging pieces into a new one.
The room became very quiet.
Mara turned toward me.
Her expression was impossible to read.
I looked at Trey.
Then Julian.
Then my mother.
All of them.
What if they existed this way because of me?
Not their whole lives.
Not their souls.
I didn’t know enough to think that far.
But these particular arrangements.
This family.
These versions.
Maybe I had kept rebuilding them.
Poorly.
Repeatedly.
Because I couldn’t accept losing people.
The video continued.
The woman in the car said there was one rule she had finally understood.
You could pull something back.
But something else had to be left behind.
I paused the video.
Nobody moved.
Julian asked me to continue.
I did.
The next line explained the graves.
The bodies.
The duplicate phones.
The second versions.
Nothing disappeared cleanly.
Every time I refused to die, I left something behind.
Sometimes a corpse.
Sometimes an object.
Sometimes a memory.
Sometimes a person.
My stomach turned.
The other me outside.
Not another timeline invading ours.
A leftover.
A version that had been left behind when another me moved forward.
I thought of the woman in the white dress.
Her four teeth.
Her blood.
Her anger.
She wasn’t trying to hurt me.
Maybe she was trying to catch up.
The video ended with a warning.
The more often I came back, the less room there was between versions.
Eventually they would collapse into one another completely.
One world filled with every contradictory thing I had dragged across.
The march.
The graves.
The deaths.
The relationships.
The duplicates.
Everything.
I looked toward the window.
The sky had changed.
Not dramatically.
Something worse.
There were two suns.
One pale.
One bright.
For three seconds.
Then one vanished.
Mara started crying.
Julian laughed.
Trey swore.
My mother sat down.
None of us needed an explanation.
We were running out of room.
⸻
Chapter Twenty-Three
By evening, the city had begun changing again.
A building disappeared two streets over.
Not exploded.
Not collapsed.
Gone.
People stood around the empty lot insisting it had never existed.
A woman screamed at them until police removed her.
The news showed a bridge that had somehow shifted half a mile east.
Then stopped reporting entirely.
Phones lost service.
Electricity flickered.
For forty-seven minutes, every clock in the house displayed a different time.
Mine ran backward.
Mara’s stopped.
Trey’s showed 3:17 no matter how many times he restarted it.
Julian’s phone had no numbers at all.
Only a blinking colon.
The second phone worked perfectly.
That frightened me most.
Another video unlocked.
We gathered around the table.
This version of me looked old.
Not elderly.
Older than I had ever been allowed to become.
Forties maybe.
That alone made everyone silent.
I had never seen proof that I could live that long.
She smiled into the camera.
All her teeth.
Fine lines around her eyes.
Gray beginning near one temple.
I stared at her with an ache I couldn’t explain.
A future.
She had had one.
Then she started speaking.
She had stopped the cycle once.
Not by dying.
Not by killing Mara.
Not by separating from everyone.
By letting go.
The difference mattered.
Trying not to love Mara still meant Mara occupied the center of every decision.
Hating someone tied you to them too.
Running tied you.
Fear tied you.
Grief tied you.
The only way out was to reach the moment between lives and choose nothing.
No person.
No memory.
No unfinished business.
No promise.
Just death.
Accept it.
Then there would be no next version.
The room became impossibly still.
It sounded simple.
That made it terrifying.
Julian asked how the woman in the video could be alive if she had figured it out.
She answered before any of us could wonder longer.
Because she hadn’t done it.
She had reached the moment.
Had the chance.
Then heard Trey’s voice.
I looked at him.
He looked away.
She came back for him.
Not Mara.
Not Julian.
Trey.
The child she had traumatized into remembering her.
The guilt survived even death.
She returned because she couldn’t leave him carrying what she’d done alone.
That was the version who had grown older.
Apparently after returning, she avoided Mara for seventeen years.
Avoided Julian.
Stayed away from every anchor except Trey.
The world remained stable.
She built a life.
A quiet one.
Work.
An apartment.
Friends who had nothing to do with any previous version.
She aged.
Then one day, Mara found her.
Not intentionally.
A grocery store.
Two carts turning the same corner.
They looked at each other.
And knew.
The video-woman smiled sadly.
“I loved her before she said hello.”
Mara covered her face.
The video continued.
Three months later, the first tooth loosened.
That version ended shortly afterward.
There was no escape through distance.
No safe version where they simply stayed strangers.
They would choose each other.
Unless one of them changed what choosing meant.
I understood before the video explained.
We had been treating love like possession.
Return.
Rescue.
Refusal.
Find me.
Save me.
Come back.
Don’t leave.
Every promise had been a demand disguised as devotion.
Mara’s promise at my grave.
My experiments with Trey.
Julian chasing answers across lives.
My mother preserving evidence.
All of us gripping one another hard enough to tear reality.
Maybe love wasn’t the thing breaking the world.
Maybe refusal was.
The video ended.
Nobody spoke for a long time.
Then Trey asked the question no one else wanted to.
“What happens now?”
I looked at him.
At Mara.
At Julian.
At my mother.
The house flickered.
For half a second, the kitchen became another kitchen.
Different counters.
Different walls.
Mara stood beside me wearing a wedding ring.
Julian kissed her cheek.
Trey was nowhere.
Then our kitchen returned.
Everyone had seen it.
Mara stared at her empty hand.
Julian looked away.
Another flicker.
Hospital room.
My mother older.
Trey sitting beside my bed.
Me absent.
Then home again.
The overlaps were accelerating.
We had hours.
Maybe less.
I knew what I had to do.
Not because another version told me.
Because for the first time, I understood why every version failed.
We kept trying to decide who should survive.
Who should remember.
Who should be chosen.
I wasn’t going to decide for anyone else again.
That part was over.
I looked at Trey first.
I apologized.
Not to get forgiveness.
Not to repair anything before the end.
Just because he deserved the words.
Then my mother.
Then Julian.
Mara last.
Of course Mara last.
She knew what I was going to say.
Her face broke before I said anything.
I told her I loved her.
Out loud this time.
The lights flickered.
Somewhere upstairs, glass shattered.
Mara shook her head violently.
No.
Already trying to hold.
Already trying to choose.
I took both her hands.
I told her loving me didn’t mean bringing me back.
It didn’t mean finding me.
It didn’t mean following me into every version.
She cried harder.
I asked her to let me go if the moment came.
Not kill me.
Not abandon me.
Let me go.
Mara pressed her forehead to mine.
For several seconds we stayed like that.
Then she whispered that she didn’t know how.
I smiled.
Neither did I.
That was almost comforting.
At least this time, neither of us was pretending.
Behind us, Trey made a strange sound.
We turned.
He was staring at the second phone.
The screen had changed.
No videos.
No files.
Only one word.
A name.
MARIAH.
I froze.
Something moved through me.
Not memory.
Recognition deeper than memory.
Mariah.
My name.
Of course.
I had known it.
Had heard people say it.
Had filled out forms.
Answered calls.
Signed documents.
But somehow the story inside my own head had never used it.
Not once.
Like some part of me had been afraid to name myself.
The phone chimed.
A final message appeared.
Now remember who you are.
⸻
Chapter Twenty-Four
My name is Mariah.
The sentence followed me upstairs.
My name is Mariah.
I repeated it silently while the house changed around me.
Walls flickered.
Rooms stretched.
Family photographs appeared and vanished.
One moment I saw my childhood hallway.
The next, a hospital corridor.
Then a hotel.
Then the cemetery.
Then the club.
Then the pool.
All of it folding together.
My name is Mariah.
I reached my bedroom.
Or one version of it.
The yellow dress hung from the closet.
The white dress lay across the bed.
Two lives occupying the same room.
My brown phone sat on the nightstand.
The other brown phone beside it.
I looked in the mirror.
For the first time, my reflection didn’t match me.
She was missing teeth.
Four left.
Blood down her chin.
The woman from the porch.
She looked exhausted.
Not monstrous.
Not angry anymore.
Just tired.
I touched the mirror.
She did too.
Her hand met mine through glass that suddenly felt warm.
A memory opened.
Not one scene.
All of them.
I drowned.
I didn’t.
Mara saved me.
Mara chose someone else.
Julian pulled me out.
Nobody did.
I died at seventeen.
Eighteen.
Twenty.
Not at all.
Trey cried in a basement.
I made him watch.
I begged Mara to kill me.
I blamed her for doing it.
I found her.
She found me.
We chose each other.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Every contradiction existed.
That was the point.
There had never been one perfect original version waiting underneath the others.
There was only the first loss.
Then everything I had done trying to undo it.
The woman in the mirror smiled.
Four teeth.
I knew her now.
Not another Mariah.
Not exactly.
She was everything I kept leaving behind.
Grief.
Death.
Versions I had abandoned.
Promises I couldn’t keep.
The parts of me I refused to carry but refused to release.
She had been chasing me because she belonged to me.
I whispered that I was sorry.
Her mouth moved.
No sound.
I understood anyway.
Stop running.
Behind me, Mara entered the room.
I saw her reflection.
Then five versions of her.
Thirteen.
Sixteen.
Twenty.
Dead.
Married.
Crying at my grave.
Holding my hand while I died.
Singing onstage.
My sister.
My not-sister.
My friend.
A stranger.
Mara.
She stood in the doorway and said my name.
“Mariah.”
Hearing it from her hurt.
I turned.
The room flickered again.
This time we were underwater.
Not physically.
Maybe.
Water surrounded us.
Hair floating.
Light trembling above.
Mara reached for me.
The first choice.
The original promise.
I saw another girl beside us.
Her biological sister.
Mara looked between us.
The moment she had spent lifetimes trying to rewrite.
I understood.
This wasn’t happening again.
It had never stopped happening.
Mara reached toward me.
I shook my head.
Not because I didn’t want her.
Because she didn’t have to choose.
Her face crumpled.
I smiled underwater.
Then I pushed her hand toward her sister.
Mara resisted.
I pushed again.
Go.
For once, I wasn’t asking her to save me.
For once, loving me didn’t require choosing me over someone else.
Something changed.
The water brightened.
Mara disappeared.
The pool disappeared.
I fell.
Not through water.
Through everything.
Birthdays.
Hospitals.
The club.
The cemetery.
Trey asleep in the car.
My mother braiding my hair.
Julian laughing.
Mara singing.
Mara crying.
Mara telling me this wasn’t a dream.
My teeth began coming loose.
One.
Two.
Then all at once.
There was no pain.
Only pressure releasing.
I opened my mouth.
The strange little holder slid free into my hand.
Teeth attached in a bloody row.
I counted what remained.
Four.
I laughed.
Of course.
Somewhere, impossibly, I remembered asking ChatGPT what to do.
And an equally impossible response floated through my mind.
Yeah, I’d leave you only four teeth too.
I laughed harder.
Actual hysterical laughter.
Because apparently even while reality collapsed, some part of my brain remained stupid.
Then Trey appeared.
Not physically.
A memory.
Eleven years old.
Crying.
I knelt in front of him.
This time I didn’t show him anything.
Didn’t ask him to remember.
Didn’t give instructions.
I opened my hand.
The folded letter rested there.
I tore it in half.
Then again.
Again.
Until the pieces disappeared.
Trey looked at me.
Older now.
Current.
He asked whether I was leaving.
I didn’t know.
So I told him the truth.
Maybe.
He nodded.
That hurt.
Then he hugged me.
Not forgiveness.
Not yet.
Just goodbye.
My mother came next.
Julian.
Then Mara.
Always Mara.
She stood in front of me wearing nothing I recognized.
No version.
Just herself.
I wanted to tell her we’d find each other again.
The old promise rose automatically.
I swallowed it.
No.
That was how this started.
Instead I told her I hoped she had a beautiful life.
Even if I wasn’t in it.
Mara sobbed.
Then laughed through it.
She told me I was annoying.
That felt right.
I told her she loved me.
She said she did.
I told her that was enough.
The world went white.
No tunnel.
No voices.
No grand answer.
Just silence.
For the first time in what might have been seven lives or seventy, nobody was asking me to stay.
Nobody was asking me to come back.
Nobody was telling me who I had to be.
I thought of my name.
Mariah.
I thought of my sister.
Mara.
I thought of Trey.
My mother.
Julian.
Then I let every name go.
For one second, there was nothing.
And I was not afraid.
Then—
I woke up.
My jaw hurt.
My teeth were clenched so tightly that I had to force myself to relax them.
Dark room.
Blanket twisted around my legs.
Phone beside my pillow.
My heart pounded.
I lay there staring at the ceiling.
Dream.
A dream.
A horrible, vivid, ridiculous dream.
I laughed quietly.
Then touched my teeth.
All there.
Thank God.
I reached for my phone.
6:14 a.m.
Seventeen notifications.
Nothing unusual.
Messages.
Email.
A missed call.
I unlocked it.
Brown case.
Normal wallpaper.
I sat up.
Something was under my hand.
Paper.
I frowned.
There shouldn’t have been paper in my bed.
I picked it up.
A photograph.
Two girls beneath string lights.
One wearing white.
The other holding her hand.
My breathing stopped.
I turned it over.
Three words.
Found you, Mariah.
Three soft knocks came from my bedroom door.