And please feel free to leave me any suggestions or feedback, this is all new to me and I would appreciate any help!

Best,

Aveline <3

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The café around her is full. Every table taken, every chair at least half-claimed, mugs sweating rings onto wooden surfaces, laptops open like waiting mouths. Outside, the city glows with the reflected neon of a Friday night, cabs and bikes and impatient pedestrians.

Inside, everyone is frozen.

Not just still—frozen. Mid-sip, mid-word, mid-scroll. A barista holds a milk jug in a perpetual graceful arc over a cup, white foam suspended in midair like a soft sculpture. A couple in the corner are tilted toward each other, mouths parted as if caught on the same breath. A child by the door has one hand outstretched toward a cookie sample, eyes bright and unblinking.

The only sound is the hum of the refrigerator and the faint buzz of the lights.

“Hello?” Ava says, because it’s what you’re supposed to say when the world stops.

No one answers.

She stands slowly, her chair scraping a loud scar across the concrete floor. No one flinches. Her pulse climbs into her throat.

The barista’s eyes are wide, lashes casting faint shadows on his cheeks. She waves a hand in front of his face. Nothing. His chest doesn’t move. She can’t even see the tiny flutter of breath at his nostrils.

“Okay,” she whispers to herself. “Okay.”

A phone on the nearest table is frozen mid-notification, the screen stuck between one frame and the next, a ghost of a message visible and unreadable. The second hand on the clock above the counter points at the three and does not tick forward.

It’s 8:13 PM forever.

She pushes open the café door. The bell above it gives a half-hearted jingle and then cuts off, sound sheared in half.

Outside, the city has become a photograph.

Cars sit at odd angles in the intersection, headlights burning steady, drivers slumped over steering wheels or straight-backed in their seats, gazes fixed on the middle distance. A bicyclist hangs in the air, wheels inches off the ground, body pitched forward as if about to fall—and never finishing.

The air itself feels thick, like stepping into a room full of steam that never quite touches her skin.

“Hello?” she tries again, louder. “Is this a—prank? Am I on some kind of—”

The only answer is the steady, indifferent glow of the traffic lights. They are all green.

She walks.

Her footsteps sound too loud on the pavement, each impact a punctuation mark in a sentence no one else is reading. Pigeons dot the sidewalks like punctuation marks of their own, wings spread mid-flap, frozen inches off the ground. One hangs in front of her face, a gray blur suspended in the air, its eye a dark marble.

“Sorry,” she mutters, ducking under it. “Excuse me.”

Somewhere between the second and third block, where the streetlights thin and the storefronts become more shuttered than open, she starts to think about dreams.

You’ve had this one before, she tells herself, half-desperate. The dream where you’re the only one left. The empty city, the humming sky. Any second now you’re going to wake up in bed, heart pounding, and you’ll laugh about how real it felt.

She reaches up and pinches the soft flesh inside her elbow until tears spring to her eyes.

Nothing changes.

The world stays pinned.

At the corner of Seventh and Lark, a bus has stopped mid-turn, wheels locked in a slow, impossible climb over the curb. Through the window, a dozen faces sit in perfect tableau. A woman with earbuds dangling from one ear, head tilted toward the window. A teenage boy halfway through rolling his eyes, mouth twisted. A man with his forehead pressed to the glass, eyes closed.

A birthday cake rests on the bus driver’s lap.

It’s absurdly domestic—a round thing in a flimsy plastic container, white icing swirled into peaks, candles standing at attention, wicks unburned. Someone has piped “HAPPY 40TH DAD!” in shaky blue letters that tilt downhill.

The driver’s hands rest on either side of it like parentheses. He’s smiling slightly, as if he can already hear someone singing.

Ava presses her hand to the glass. It’s cool against her palm.

“Did you get to blow out your candles?” she asks softly. “I hope… I hope it was good. When it happens.”

She takes a breath.

The air smells faintly of exhaust and sugar.

“You’re dreaming,” she tells herself. “You are absolutely dreaming.”

“You’re not.”

The voice comes from behind her.

She spins so fast she nearly loses her footing.

A man stands in the street a few feet away, hands shoved deep into the pockets of a too-thin jacket. His hair is a dark, tangled halo around his face, a curl falling over one eye. He looks about her age, maybe a little older. Not frozen. Not pinned.

Breathing.

His chest rises and falls faster than he probably wants it to, and she can hear her own breath matching his, two metronomes ticking in sync.

“You’re not dreaming,” he says again, more gently. “I checked.”

A strange laugh escapes her, half hysterical, half relieved.

“What do you mean, you ‘checked’?” she demands. “How do you check something like that?”

He glances up at the sky as if considering.

“I tried all the usual stuff,” he says. “Pinching, slapping myself, jumping off a low wall to see if I’d fall weird. I didn’t. I just bruised my ass.” He shrugs. “Feels pretty real to me.”

She stares at him.

“You’re the first person I’ve seen moving,” she says.

He nods. “You’re the first person I’ve seen, period.”

They look at each other for a moment, two small moving pieces in an enormous, stuck machine.

“I’m Jonas,” he offers, after the silence tightens.

“Ava.” Her voice sounds strange to her own ears, like she’s saying someone else’s name. “So… you, uh. You come here often?”

He huffs out a laugh, quick and bright in the heavy air.

“Only when time collapses and the city falls into a supernatural coma,” he says. “Which, full disclosure, is new.”

Something in her unclenches.

She shouldn’t trust him. She knows that. Being the last two awake doesn’t automatically make someone safe. But the alternative is being alone in this frozen diorama, talking to birthday cakes and pigeons.

“Where were you?” she asks. “When it… started?”

He gestures vaguely uptown. “My apartment. I was in bed.”

“Sleeping?”

He hesitates. His gaze flickers away, toward the dark mouth of an alley, as if there’s something there only he can see.

“Not yet,” he says.

There’s something in the way he says it—a hollow at the core of the words—that makes her want to change the subject.

“Everyone else is like this?” she asks instead. “Everywhere?”

“Everywhere I walked,” he says. “I came from Riverside. It’s the same up there. Dogs, too, by the way. And—uh—birds.” He jerks his chin toward the suspended pigeon. “Seems like we got the two-person upgrade.”

“Lucky us,” she mutters.

They stand in the middle of the intersection as if the rules of traffic no longer apply. They don’t.

“So what do we do?” she asks.

He looks surprised, as if no one has asked him that before. Which, of course, no one has.

“I’ve been… wandering,” he admits. “Trying to see if there’s some kind of pattern. Or a big red button that says RESET.”

“And?”

“And mostly I’ve just learned that people leave a lot of interesting stuff half-finished.”

They start to walk.

They don’t say “let’s stick together,” but they do. It feels inevitable, like stepping into a river and being swept by a current they didn’t know was there.

They pass an open laundromat where shirts hang limp in mid-spin behind foggy glass. An apartment window where an unfinished painting leans against an easel, the outline of a woman’s face sketched in charcoal, the eyes left blank. A street vendor’s cart where a hot dog is caught mid-arc between tongs and bun, a smear of mustard hovering in the air like a tiny yellow comet.

“You were right,” Ava says quietly. “About people leaving things half-finished.”

Jonas snorts. “Told you. Human specialty.”

They find a park where a group of friends is frozen around a picnic blanket, cups raised, someone halfway through smashing a strawberry into someone else’s face. Glitter hangs in the air above them, a burst of gold arrested mid-shimmer.

“Graduation,” Jonas says, nodding at the caps tossed into the air and held there, mid-flight. “That’s brutal.”

He walks among them, careful not to touch. On the picnic blanket, someone’s phone lies facedown. He picks it up and flips it over.

The screen shows a half-sent text.

can’t wait to see u. i think tonight i’ll finally—

The text bar blinks on an invisible cursor and then stops, halfway through the next blink.

“Finally what?” Ava murmurs.

“Confess undying love,” Jonas suggests.

“Or finally tell them it’s over.”

“Oof.” He winces. “Yeah. That too.”

They put the phone back carefully, like replacing a relic in a museum.

On a side street, they pass a tiny ground-floor studio where the door stands ajar. Inside, canvases line the walls, explosions of color and shape. One sits on an easel, a smear of late-afternoon light captured in oils. A paintbrush hangs in the air inches away from the canvas, a droplet of blue about to fall and never landing.

Ava steps in, drawn by the smell of turpentine and stories.

A woman stands in front of the canvas, arm extended, eyes narrowed in concentration, hair pulled back into a messy knot. Paint speckles the back of her hand, her cheek, the collar of her shirt. She looks so alive, so intent, that Ava’s brain keeps trying to animate her.

“What do you think she was trying to fix?” Ava asks, nodding at the canvas.

“The blue,” Jonas says. “We always think we can get the blue right if we just try one more stroke.”

“You sound like you know that firsthand.”

He shrugs. “I write music. Badly. Same thing. Different medium.”

“That’s not how that works,” she says, but she smiles.

He smiles back.

It hits her then: She is walking through other people’s lives with a stranger, piecing together their stories from crumbs and half-sentences and the angle of their frozen hands, and it is both deeply intrusive and oddly sacred.

“We shouldn’t be in here,” she says suddenly, guilty.

“We’re not hurting anything,” he says. “Time’s already… whatever this is.”

He taps the air. It feels like nothing.

“Besides,” he adds, softer, “she’ll never know.”

“Maybe she will,” Ava says. “When she wakes up.”

He doesn’t answer that.

They keep moving.

In a brownstone stoop half a neighborhood away, they find a man asleep with a book open on his chest, glasses sliding down his nose. The title is something dense about astrophysics, the chapter dog-eared in the middle.

“How long do you think he’s been working on that?” Jonas wonders.

“His whole life,” Ava says. “Probably.”

They peer at the margin notes. Tiny, tight writing snakes between printed lines. Some are equations. Some are things like: ask Ellie about this. Some are just question marks.

In a third-floor walk-up above a bodega, they find a child’s birthday party frozen at the moment when someone turned out the lights. The cake glows with candles. A dozen small faces are filled with the same expression: the anticipatory joy of being allowed to make a wish.

“How many people do you think wished for something like this?” Ava asks. “To stop time. To have the world to themselves for a while.”

“More than a few,” Jonas says. “I probably did, at some point. College finals week, at least.”

“And now?” she asks.

He looks up at the child with the cheeks puffed, ready to blow.

“Now it feels like cheating,” he says.

They discover quickly that doors aren’t really doors anymore. Everything yields to them. Locks slide open, or maybe have never been locked. Password screens reset themselves at their touch. The world has become an exhibit curated for exactly two visitors.

Ava feels worse about it than Jonas does, at first. But the more they walk, the more each frozen tableau starts to feel like a kind of invitation. Look. This is what we cared about, before. This is what we were in the middle of.

It doesn’t take that long—the first day? the second? time has become meaningless—for them to start sharing more than observations.

“Tell me a secret,” Jonas says, somewhere around what would have been midnight. They are sitting in the middle of an empty crosswalk, backs against the cool metal of a delivery truck.

“No,” she says automatically.

“We’re literally in a city-wide coma,” he points out. “If there was ever a time.”

She picks at a crack in the yellow paint.

“I was supposed to move to Berlin two years ago,” she says finally. “Job fell through. Or I chickened out. Depends on who you ask.”

“Who do you ask?” he asks.

She thinks about the packed suitcase she never unpacked all the way, her passport tucked into the back of a drawer like a pressed flower.

“Depends on the day,” she admits.

He nods, gaze fixed on some middle distance. “I was supposed to be on tour right now,” he offers. “Small one. Midwest dive bars. Nothing glamorous. I canceled.”

“Why?”

“Stage fright. And… other stuff.”

“Other stuff,” she echoes. “Vague. Suspicious.”

He laughs, but there’s no humor in it.

A silence pools between them, not uncomfortable, exactly. Heavy.

“What about you?” she asks. “Tell me something you didn’t do.”

He pushes his hair back, sighing.

“I didn’t answer my brother’s last text,” he says. “He wanted to meet up. I put it off. You know how it is, you think you’ve got time. That was… a while ago.” He shrugs. “We haven’t talked since.”

She doesn’t say she does know. That she has a similar text from an ex-friend sitting unanswered in her own phone, the words “we should catch up” incriminating and simple and terrifying.

Instead, she bumps her shoulder against his.

“Time’s weird now,” she says. “Maybe that means you still could. When… this stops.”

“If it stops,” he says.

They don’t talk about that part much.

Because between the bus with the birthday cake and the frozen graduation, between the half-sent texts and the unfinished paintings, another pattern has begun to emerge.

The dream.

It starts the first time they fall asleep.

They don’t mean to. They’ve been walking for what feels like days, adrenaline carried them for a while, but eventually their bodies insist. Exhaustion drags them down onto the plush carpet of a luxury hotel lobby, heads pillowed on their arms like kids on a field trip.

The city around them is as still as ever. The chandelier above their heads dangles a thousand crystals in perfect stillness.

The moment Ava’s eyes close, she is somewhere else.

The dream is always the same.

A river. Or something like one. A wide, shimmering expanse that isn’t water but behaves like it, surface rippling with colors she doesn’t have names for. There is no sky, or maybe the river is the sky, stretching out in all directions.

Across from her, always, is Jonas.

He stands on a shore that isn’t quite a shore, because there is no land here, only points of light like stars hung low enough to touch. He looks different in every dream—older, younger, wearing clothes she doesn’t recognize—but his eyes are the same.

“Hey,” he says, like they’ve just bumped into each other at the corner store. His voice carries without echo, straight into her chest.

“Hey,” she says back.

The river hums beneath their feet. On its surface, scenes flicker by like reflections in a warped mirror: a woman closing a book, a child dropping an ice cream cone, a man stepping onto a train. Lives, small and huge and ordinary.

She reaches out, once, curious, and her hand passes through the surface up to the wrist. It’s not wet. It feels like falling through warm fog.

When she pulls back, her fingers glow faintly, then fade.

“What is this?” she asks.

“Don’t you remember?” he says.

She frowns. “Remember what?”

He opens his mouth, pauses, shakes his head.

“Never mind,” he says. “Want to see something cool?”

He stamps his heel gently. The river ripples. The reflections shift. For a moment, she sees herself in the water, standing at her bedroom window at age fourteen, forehead pressed to the glass. Then she sees Jonas, sitting on a rooftop she’s never been to, guitar in his lap, moonlight on his face.

“I think this is… everything,” he says quietly. “All the choices. All the days.”

“Okay,” she says. “That’s not terrifying at all.”

They laugh, even though it is.

When she wakes, back on the hotel carpet, Jonas is already awake, staring at the ceiling.

“Did you—” she starts.

“The river?” he asks.

She nods.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve been having that one for… a while.” He sits up, rubbing his face. “Except this time, you were there.”

She swallows.

“Same,” she says.

They look at each other, pale morning light filtering through the hotel’s glass doors.

“You said you checked you weren’t dreaming,” she says slowly. “Did you mean that one? The river?”

He nods. “I’ve had that dream for years. It always felt more real than anything else. I thought it was just… anxiety. Or some deeply pretentious metaphor my brain cooked up.”

“And now?”

“Now I think we’ve been… meeting there. For a long time. Without knowing.”

She thinks of all the nights she woke with the taste of river on her tongue and no words for it. All the mornings she wrote down fragments in a notebook—water that isn’t water, stars that aren’t stars—then crossed them out. All the times she felt a strange sense of loss for something she couldn’t name.

“You never saw me?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “I saw… someone. Sometimes. A shape. But no face. Like my brain censored it.”

“Same,” she says.

They sit in the lobby of a hotel neither of them has ever stayed in, beneath a chandelier that will never sway again unless the world starts up, and they admit that they have been dreaming of each other for years.

Softly. Like a confession.

It changes things.

Not all at once. At first, they still walk the city like anthropologists, cataloguing frozen lives. They still eat from abandoned bakery cases, drink from water fountains that pour for no one. They still sleep in different places each “night” and meet at the river, where they experiment with what the water will show them if they ask nicely.

But now, their orbit tightens.

His shoulder brushes hers more often. Her hand finds his automatically when they cross streets that no longer have moving cars. Their jokes become in-jokes. When he hums a melody under his breath, she recognizes the shape of it from the river, where she once heard it carried on the current.

They learn the secret fears behind each other’s bravado.

She learns that Jonas canceled his tour not just because of stage fright, but because he had a panic attack three minutes into his first set, years ago, and never forgave himself. He learns that Ava never moved to Berlin because her mother cried on the phone and said, “I just never thought you’d be the kind of daughter to leave.”

“Which is ridiculous,” Ava says, half-laughing, half-crying, standing in front of a frozen mailbox stuffed with unsent letters. “Of course I should be able to… go. Live.”

“You still can,” Jonas says.

She looks around at the motionless world. “Can I?”

It’s a question that hangs above them, even when they don’t look at it directly.

Because the more they wander, the more the city begins to… fade.

It’s subtle at first. Colors draining from signs. The red of the stoplights fading to rust. The greens in the park grass blurring into a softer gray.

Then whole corners blur at the edges. A block they walked through yesterday is suddenly… thinner, like a photograph left in the sun too long. The people are still there, but they’re less distinct, features smearing.

“It’s like a copy degrading,” Jonas says quietly, standing at the edge of a street that now disappears into white fog halfway down the block.

“Or like it’s being… erased,” Ava says.

They test it. They walk toward the fog. It feels like pushing through curtains made of cold breath. On the other side, the city continues, but it’s… different. Familiar streets rearranged. A coffee shop where there used to be a bookstore. A mural on a wall that was blank before.

“This wasn’t like this yesterday,” she says.

“How do you know?” he counters. “Time’s weird, remember?”

She glares at him. “Because I remember.”

He nods, conceding the point.

“Maybe this is… all our maybes,” he says. “All the ways the city could be. The dream version’s bleeding into the real one.”

“The real one stopped,” she says. “So which one is this?”

He doesn’t have an answer.

That night—or what they decide will be night—they stand at the river’s edge, the hum of the water louder than usual.

“You feel it too,” she says, watching the surface flicker.

He nods. “Like we’re… out of time. Literally.”

They stand in silence for a while, watching scenes drift by. A woman in a hospital bed, laughing with a nurse. A teenager on a stage, eyes wide in the spotlight. A man in a small kitchen, cooking eggs for someone just out of frame.

“I think we’re in the crack,” Jonas says softly.

“In what crack?”

“Between the world sleeping and the world waking up again. Like… a buffer zone. A loading screen.”

She snorts. “That’s a very unromantic way to describe a cosmic limbo.”

“I contain multitudes,” he says, dry. Then, more serious: “The question is… do we leave it?”

She looks up sharply.

“What?”

He meets her eyes across the shimmering expanse.

“I think we’re being asked,” he says. “Stay here, where it’s just you and me and all the possibilities. Or… let it go. Step back into the moment everything stopped.” He gestures at the river. “Hit ‘play.’”

“Why us?” she asks, throat tight.

“Because we’re awake,” he says simply. “Because we matched. Because we’ve already been coming here in our sleep for years. I don’t know.” He laughs once, helpless. “Because the universe has a messed up sense of humor.”

The idea lodges behind her ribs and will not dislodge.

Stay here.

Just us. Walking endless empty streets, peeking into frozen lives, sleeping under chandeliers, meeting at a river where they can dip their hands into everyone else’s moments and occasionally their own. No expectations. No mothers calling with weaponized guilt. No brothers waiting for texts. No tours to cancel, jobs to quit, flights to take.

Stay here, where the only person who can disappoint her is herself. Or Jonas.

Her stomach flips.

“And if we leave?” she asks.

He looks down at the river.

“Then everyone wakes up,” he says. “The milk jug falls. The candles get blown out. The texts get sent. The tour happens or it doesn’t. The kid still drops her ice cream. The man on the bus still…” He gestures vaguely. “Goes wherever he was going. Time catches up.”

“And us?” she presses. “What happens to us?”

He’s quiet for a long time.

“I don’t know,” he says finally. “Maybe we forget all this. Maybe we just… go back to being two strangers in a city of millions. Passing each other in the street. Sharing dreams we don’t remember.”

“You think this is a test,” she says.

“I think it’s a choice,” he says.

The river swirls between them, silent and vast.

She feels a rush of anger that is too big for her small body.

“It’s not fair,” she says. “We just found—this. You. Me. Whatever this is. And now we have to choose between keeping it and… saving the world?”

“Very messy of the universe,” Jonas agrees.

“There should be a third option,” she says. “A whatever-happens-we-get-to-keep-each-other option.”

He smiles, small and pained.

“In my experience,” he says, “that one’s always the most expensive.”

She wants to say, Then I’ll pay it. She wants to say, Let them sleep. Let the cake never be cut, the text never be sent, the tour never be finished, if it means I get to keep walking through empty streets with you.

The fact that the thought even occurs to her scares her more than anything else that has happened.

On some level, she knows it’s not really about Jonas. Not entirely.

It’s about the way the silence has wrapped around her like a blanket. The way responsibility fell away when the world stopped. The way she hasn’t had to answer anyone’s expectations but her own.

The way it would be so easy to stay here. So easy to say: I opt out.

Jonas must see something of that war on her face, because he takes a step closer, the river between them rippling but not widening.

“Ava,” he says quietly. “Look.”

He nods toward the water.

Scenes flicker past faster now, like someone has pressed fast-forward.

An old woman sitting at a kitchen table, staring at the clock. A baby taking its first unsteady step, arms outflung. A boy on a bike, pedaling furiously down a hill. A woman in an airport, clutching a boarding pass like a lifeline. A man standing outside a door, bouquet in hand, taking a deep breath before knocking.

These aren’t their lives. They aren’t people they know. But they are… everyone.

“They all get a say too,” he says. “We can’t hear it, but… they do.”

She presses her lips together to keep them from trembling.

“What do you want?” she asks him. “Really.”

He looks at her.

She can see the battle behind his eyes. Fear vs. longing. The siren call of safety vs. the messy, exhausting, beautiful cacophony of a world where people can hurt you and leave you and ask things of you you don’t want to give.

“Before this,” he says slowly, “I think I wanted everything to stop. Just for a bit. To breathe. To not have to… be anything to anyone.” He laughs, self-conscious. “Careful what you wish for, right?”

“Right,” she echoes.

He scratches the back of his neck, gaze flicking down, then up again, as if he’s afraid of what he’ll see in her face.

“Now,” he says, “I want to play that stupid tour. I want to answer my brother’s text. I want to be nervous on stage and mess up and know that the world keeps going anyway.”

He takes a breath.

“And I want to meet you. For real this time. Standing in line at the coffee shop. On the subway. Wherever. Without the river. Without the silence. I want to see what we are when we don’t have the whole world paused around us. When we have jobs and families and obligations and… exits.”

“It might not be as magical,” she says softly.

He grins, quick and crooked. “Yeah. That’s kind of the point.”

She looks down at the river. At the lives streaming by. At her own reflection, rippling between them. For a moment, she sees herself catching a flight with an overstuffed backpack, cheeks flushed. She sees Jonas on a small stage, voice cracking on the second verse and smiling through it.

She sees herself walking past him on a crowded street, eyes on her phone, not noticing.

Fear claws at her.

“What if we don’t find each other?” she asks.

“We already did,” he says simply. “Over and over. For years. In our sleep. Tonight. I don’t think the universe brings two people together in a dream river and an empty city just to… misplace them.”

“That’s not very scientific,” she mutters.

“Don’t tell the man on the astrophysics book,” he says.

She laughs, broken and real.

He reaches out, hand hovering above the water.

“We can stay,” he says. “We can walk this ghost city until it fades into static. I won’t pretend I don’t want that, a little.”

He looks at her, eyes dark and earnest.

“But every time I think about it, I see that kid in front of the birthday cake. The candles never melting. The wish never made. The breath stuck in his chest forever.” He shakes his head. “I can’t… do that to him. To all of them. Just because I’m scared.”

She thinks of her mother, hand hovering over the phone. Her brother. Her almost-life in Berlin. Her unwritten songs, stories, apologies. The text she hasn’t sent. The tour he canceled. The people on the bus. The painter with the blank-eyed portrait.

It is, in the end, a selfish choice that somehow isn’t.

She steps closer to the water until the strange not-wet licks at the soles of her feet.

“Okay,” she says, voice shaking. “Okay. We hit play.”

Relief and sorrow wash through Jonas’s face in equal measure.

He holds out his hand.

“Together?” he asks.

She stares at it.

Then she takes it.

Their fingers interlace.

They step forward.

The river rises around them, up to their ankles, their knees, their waists. It doesn’t feel like drowning. It feels like standing under a waterfall of radio stations, every life playing at once, every moment overlapping. It’s too much and not enough. It’s terrifying and familiar.

She closes her eyes.

The last thing she hears before everything dissolves is Jonas’s voice, close to her ear.

“See you soon,” he says.

Then the world—

—starts.

The café is loud.

Noise crashes over Ava like a wave—espresso machines hissing, chairs scraping, someone laughing too hard at a joke, music humming from tinny speakers. Her heart slams against her ribs. Her hands grip the edge of a small round table so hard her knuckles whiten.

“Are you okay?” a voice asks.

She looks up.

The barista is watching her, milk jug in hand, eyebrows drawn together.

“You kind of… spaced out for a second,” he says. “Do you need water? Or a chair that doesn’t appear to be trying to throw you?”

Ava blinks. The weight of two years of unslept dreams sits behind her eyes and then, slowly, dissolves like sugar in coffee.

“I’m—” She swallows. “I’m okay. Just… weird day.”

“Aren’t they all,” he says wryly.

Outside, cars move through the intersection. A bus rolls past, the driver focused ahead. A child reaches for a cookie sample and actually grabs it. Above the counter, the second hand on the clock jumps from thirteen to fourteen.

Her phone buzzes.

A text from an unsaved number appears on the screen.

you free to talk sometime this week? i miss you. — L.

Ava’s breath catches.

She looks at the message for one long, suspended heartbeat.

Then she types back:

yeah. i miss you too. how about tuesday?

Her thumb hits send before she can overthink it.

The café door opens.

A man steps in, shaking rain off his hair. He is carrying a guitar case and a tiredness that seems to go all the way to his bones. He looks around, scanning for empty seats.

For a moment, her vision doubles.

She sees him as he is now—stranger, damp, a little lost—and as he was at the river, standing on the shore with his hands in his pockets, asking if she remembered.

“Hey,” the barista calls. “We’re a little full, but you can grab that stool if you want.” He gestures to the empty seat next to Ava’s table.

The man hesitates. Their eyes meet.

There’s a flicker. Something like recognition, like when you hear the first note of a song you love but can’t place.

“Is this seat taken?” he asks.

His voice is warm, with a lilt she doesn’t have a name for, but feels like coming home.

Ava’s heart does the weird thing again.

She smiles.

“Not yet,” she says. “But it could be.”

He laughs, surprised. He sets the guitar case down carefully and sits, leaving a polite gap between them. Up close, she can see the faint ink stain on his thumb.

“I’m Jonas,” he says, offering his hand.

She takes it.

“Ava,” she says.

Outside, the city rushes on, fully awake. Somewhere, a child blows out candles. A painter adds one last stroke of blue. A man presses send on a text. A tour email gets typed, not deleted.

In a place beyond names, a river runs on, carrying reflections of everything that was, and is, and might yet be. For a brief moment, two faces appear side by side in its surface, laughing over coffee in a crowded café.

Then the water ripples, and they’re gone, folded back into the endless, waking world.

The End

Author’s Note:

This story grew out of that quietly terrifying fantasy of “what if the world stopped and it was just us?”—and how tempting it would be to stay in that safe, suspended moment. I wanted Ava and Jonas to feel the full pull of that soft apocalypse and still choose the mess of ordinary life, trusting that if they were meant to find each other in the quiet, they’d find each other in the noise too.

— Aveline

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Mara doesn’t see it slip under the door. There’s no rustle, no shadow, no interruption in the soft blue glow of her laptop at 3:17 AM. One second the floor is bare, the next there is a single folded sheet of cream stationery lying on the cheap hallway rug, like it has always been there.

She finds it when she gets up for water, knuckles pressed sleepily against one eye. The apartment is quiet in the way that only old buildings can be—pipes sighing, radiator ticking, the thin cough of someone’s TV two floors down. She steps over the letter the first time without really seeing it.

On the way back, glass half empty, she almost kicks it.

It’s her name on the front.

Not “Current Resident.” Not “M. Alvarez” like the bills. Just: Mara. Written in a looping script she doesn’t recognize.

She hesitates.

There is no return address, no envelope. The paper is folded twice and smells faintly of something that isn’t her life: dust, old paper, a whisper of cologne that makes the back of her throat ache with a memory she can’t place.

She unfolds it.

Mara,

You’re still biting your left thumbnail when you’re trying not to cry.

You always pretend it’s a nervous habit, but I know you started doing it because you once saw a girl you envied do it in high school. You thought it made you look composed, even when you weren’t.

You still hate the scar on your shin, even though you tell everyone you got it “playing soccer.” You never played. You were eleven, and the kitchen chair broke under your weight, and your mother said, “If you didn’t eat so much—”

You’ve been lying about that scar for fourteen years.

I remember.

—Sebastian

She reads the letter twice, then a third time, the last line burning at the edges of her vision.

Sebastian.

She doesn’t know any Sebastian.

The scar on her shin tingles, as if the skin remembers being watched. Automatically, her hand drifts to her mouth, thumb nail catching between her teeth. She drops it, heart tripping.

There are rational explanations, she tells herself. A prank. Someone from work who somehow knows too much. Her cousin with a cruel sense of humor. A neighbor stalking her social media. That story about the scar—she’s told it so many times she can’t remember who she mentioned it to first.

Still.

She doesn’t sleep.

The clock on her nightstand changes from 3:26 to 3:27 to 3:28 while she lies awake, the letter on her chest like a confession she didn’t write.

By morning, the ink has not smudged. The paper still smells like not-her.

She takes it to the kitchen table, sets her coffee down on the far edge, afraid of ruining it. Of proving it was real.

“Okay,” she tells the empty apartment. “Very funny.”

Nothing answers but the radiator’s thin hiss.

She folds the letter back up and tucks it into a notebook on her shelf, between an unpaid bill and a grocery list she never finished. By evening, she has almost convinced herself to forget it.

She nearly does.

Until Wednesday night, when the second letter appears.

It is waiting for her on the floor when she turns the deadbolt, arms full of takeout and fatigue. This time she notices right away.

Same paper. Same looping script.

Same time, she realizes, glancing at the stove clock. 3:17 AM. She stayed late at the office, lost track of time in the glow of spreadsheets and the dull hum of fluorescent lights. The city outside is a wet blur of tail lights and puddles, but the building’s hallway is still and warm.

She puts the food down without taking off her shoes and picks up the letter.

Mara,

You still haven’t finished the poem.

You know which one I mean. The one about the man in the elevator who always smells like oranges and static. You started it on the notes app in your phone and you stopped after the line about gravity, because you got embarrassed at your own earnestness.

You don’t have to be embarrassed with me. You never did.

By the way, you left your keys on the counter again. Turn around.

—Sebastian

Her breath stutters.

The keys are there, on the kitchen counter where she dropped them in her hurry to get to the letter. She spins in a slow circle, scanning the tiny apartment: the narrow kitchen, the sagging couch, the plants by the window leaning toward a streetlight instead of the sun.

“Hello?” she calls out, feeling foolish. “If someone is in here, this isn’t funny.”

Silence. Then the elevator cables groan somewhere above her floor, the low mechanical whine threading through the walls like a stuck note.

Her phone is on the couch where she left it in the morning. Hands shaking, she opens the notes app. The poem is still there, three lonely lines:

elevator boy always smells like oranges
like he rolled in sunlight
and got stuck coming down

She had written it six months ago after five consecutive mornings sharing the elevator with a stranger who had bright eyes and a very tired smile. On the sixth morning, he’d stopped appearing, replaced by a woman with a screaming toddler. She’d deleted the draft a dozen times, always undoing it. The note had never been shared or typed anywhere else.

“Okay,” she whispers to herself. “Okay.”

She should call someone. The police, maybe. Her sister. Her landlord. She imagines that conversation.

Yes, hello, someone is leaving me very personal love letters at 3:17 AM and they know about elevator boy and my childhood emotional trauma.

She puts her phone down. Picks it up. Puts it down again.

Instead, she answers.

She finds an old notebook, tears out a page, writes in blue gel pen because it’s the only one working.

Sebastian,

If this is a joke, it isn’t funny.

If this isn’t a joke, tell me something only I know that I’ve never told anyone.

And how do you know me?

—Mara

She hesitates, then shoves the paper halfway under the door, edge flush with the hallway carpet. For a second she feels ridiculous, like a kid leaving carrots out for a mythical reindeer.

She stays up until 3:17 watching the door.

Nothing happens.

At 3:18, she laughs, a short, harsh sound at her own expense. Of course. Of course there’s nothing. She’s tired. She’s stressed. Her brain is inventing romance, because no one in her waking life is texting her past 9 PM.

She leaves the letter there and goes to bed.

In the morning, the paper is gone.

No footprints, no drafts, no sign that the door has opened or closed. The hallway smells faintly of her next-door neighbor’s incense, the usual Wednesday morning sandalwood. The spot where her letter was wedged is empty.

On Thursday night, there are two letters.

One is under the door at 3:17 AM, just like the others.

The second is on her pillow.

She wakes to the brush of paper against her cheek, sits up so fast her head spins. The room is dark except for the blinking blue light of the modem on her desk. The digitized heartbeat of the alarm clock reads 3:17 in electric red.

Her throat is suddenly desert-dry.

The letter on her pillow is folded once, carefully, like someone who knew her preferred loose pages to tight creases.

She opens it with numb fingers.

Mara,

You were six when you decided on your favorite color. It was the exact shade of blue your grandmother’s teacups were painted.

You claimed it was because it looked like the sky on a good day, but really it was because she held those cups every morning while she read the newspaper and pretended not to be crying.

You remember the way she said your name when she was tired. The nickname she gave you when you refused to take off your yellow raincoat, even in the supermarket.

My little puddle.

You never told anyone that. You kept it like a secret talisman, thinking saying it out loud would break it.

I’m sorry. I’m the one who broke it.

—Sebastian

Her eyes sting.

“Nana,” she whispers into the dark, the word small and sharp in her mouth. She can hear it, suddenly: her grandmother’s cigarette-rough voice calling from the kitchen, the clink of teacup against saucer, the damp smell of the raincoat that never quite dried in the hallway.

Little puddle.

No one else ever called her that. Not her mother, not her sister, not any counselor she half-heartedly tried in college.

Her hands are trembling so hard the paper rustles like leaves.

“Who are you?” she asks the empty room.

That’s when she sees the second letter, on the floor by the door.

She almost doesn’t want to read it.

This one is shorter.

Mara,

Thank you for the note.

You used to write me on blue paper, remember? You said the white pages felt like hospital sheets.

To answer your question: you do know me.

Just not yet.

—Sebastian

Her heart lurches. The room feels suddenly too small, the ceiling pressing down like a held breath.

“Not yet,” she repeats, voice cracked. “What does that even mean?”

The letters continue.

Every night, precisely at 3:17 AM, she finds one. Under the door. On the windowsill. Balanced on the back of a dining chair. Once, disconcertingly, inside the fridge, propped against a carton of almond milk.

They are never long. Often no more than a paragraph.

He remembers things she has not yet remembered herself.

The way she used to rehearse arguments in the shower, just in case. How she once tried to run away at thirteen and only made it as far as the corner store before buying a packet of gum and walking home. The playlist she made at twenty-one titled “If anyone ever loves me,” which she has never shown another soul.

Sometimes, he mentions things that haven’t happened.

Tomorrow, you will miss your train because you stop to help a man pick up his spilled groceries. You’ll be annoyed, but you’ll think about it all day.

You are going to forget your umbrella on Tuesday. Don’t worry. You won’t need it.

Take the red scarf to the interview. Trust me.

On the days she follows his advice, small things fall into place: an unexpected compliment, a kinder commute, a stranger’s smile when she needs it. On the days she ignores him, nothing terrible occurs, but the world feels slightly misaligned, as if she’s walking with one shoe half on.

“What are you?” she writes, one week in, when her fear has softened into something else: curiosity, affection, a strange aching trust.

She leaves the note under the door. She doesn’t stay up to watch this time. She’s learned it doesn’t matter. The letters come whether or not she is looking.

His reply arrives as always.

A ghost, technically.

Bound to the building, for reasons I haven’t figured out yet. I woke up in the walls, I think. It’s hard to describe. Time feels… wrong, in here. Stretchy.

I know this doesn’t help. I know you’re thinking of all the movies and all the rules and all the ways this should work.

They don’t apply. They never did.

I’m not here to haunt you.

I’m here because I loved you.

Once.

—Sebastian

“Once?” she mutters, pacing the length of her living room, the letter softening at the edges in her grip. “Once when, exactly?”

She Googles the building.

The internet tells her it went up in the 1970s. Brick, six stories, rent-controlled in a neighborhood that is rapidly forgetting what that means. Before that, there was a smaller structure here, a three-story place that burned in 1963. Nine people dead, according to an archived article with grainy photos of soot-blackened windows.

None of their names is Sebastian.

She goes to the clerk’s office during her lunch break, feeling absurd asking the woman behind the plexiglass about a man whose last name she doesn’t know. The woman raises an eyebrow, taps at her keyboard, shrugs.

“No Sebastian on the tenant register for your building,” she says, not unkindly. “Past ten years, anyway. You asking about someone you’re dating?”

“Something like that,” Mara says.

She doesn’t mention that the person she’s asking about leaves letters that smell like old paper, that the ink never quite sits flat on the page, always a little raised, like dried tears.

Nights stretch. The letters continue.

He remembers her laugh. The way she always left exactly one french fry uneaten “for luck.” The fact that she once confessed she didn’t know how to ride a bike, because her mother could never spare the time to teach her and her father wasn’t there to try.

He never tells her anything concrete about himself. When she asks, he deflects, gentle and infuriating.

What did I do for work? you ask.

I made you coffee, I think. And I listened.

What did I look like?

Like someone you trusted.

Were we happy?

Most days, you smiled first.

On a rain-slicked Thursday, after a long day of small humiliations at the office, she stands in the hallway at 3:16 AM with her back against the door, heart pounding.

“I want to see you,” she says.

The lights in the hallway flicker.

For the first time since the letters began, she feels it: a change in the air. The hallway grows cooler, the faint smell of old perfume—citrusy, with something warm underneath—threading through the usual detergent and takeout.

The light above her head hums. The door behind her thrums, a subtle vibration like a cat’s purr.

Something moves at the edge of her vision.

She whirls, but there is nothing there. Just the thin strip of darkness at the bottom of her door, the worn carpet, the scuffed baseboards. No looming figure, no translucent face.

A sheet of paper slides out from beneath the door and touches the toe of her sock.

She swallows and picks it up, hands perilously close to shaking.

Mara,

If I show you now, you won’t believe me.

Time is messy from here. I’m afraid that if you see my face, you’ll recognize it sooner than you’re supposed to.

You deserve to fall in love without knowing how it ends.

Trust that I’m real.

And that I’m sorry.

—Sebastian

She presses the paper to her chest.

“For what?” she whispers, to the door, to the walls, to the invisible veins of the building that hum with old electricity and new grief. “What are you sorry for?”

The pipes clank. Someone’s toilet flushes on the floor above. Her own pulse is a drumline in her ears.

No answer comes that night.

The next letter is longer.

Mara,

Once, the first time we moved in together, you cried because you found a mug you liked in a box you didn’t remember packing.

You said, “It feels like a gift from past me. She was thinking ahead.”

You cried harder when I laughed.

We spent an entire Sunday painting the living room the wrong color. You called it “bone,” but it looked like wet paper towels. We sat on the floor and ate takeout surrounded by drop cloths and you said, “I can live with this if you’re here.”

I wasn’t, always. That’s part of why I’m sorry.

I was tired. I was selfish. I thought there would be more time.

There’s never more time.

—Sebastian

Her chest tightens. The apartment around her, with its off-white walls and thrift store shelves and single sagging couch, suddenly feels like a set. Like she is waiting for furniture that never arrived.

She starts noticing things.

A chipped mug in the back of her cabinet that she doesn’t remember buying. A paint swatch under the sink: “Bone White.” A faint ring on the living room floor where a small round table might have been.

“Did someone live here before me?” she asks her landlord, casually, as they share the elevator down one morning.

He laughs. “Of course someone lived there before you. This is New York, not purgatory.”

“No, I mean—” She pauses. “Recently?”

He shrugs. “Had a couple in there maybe four years ago. They broke the lease early. He died. Car accident, I think. She moved out west. Or something. I don’t really pry.”

Her heart stutters.

“Do you remember his name?” she asks, trying to sound uninterested.

He frowns, digging through his mental Rolodex. “Sam, maybe? Scott? Something with an S. They were… what do the kids call it? Low drama. I barely heard them. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious,” she lies.

That night, she writes:

Did you live here before me?

Did you die in a car accident?

Is your name even Sebastian?

She leaves the note on the kitchen table.

The response is on her bathroom mirror the next morning, taped at eye level.

Mara,

I didn’t die in a car accident.

I didn’t live there before you the first time.

And yes, my name is Sebastian.

You used to call me Seb, except when you were mad. Then it was Sebastian. Full name, like I was in trouble.

I shouldn’t know what your landlord told you. I’m too far out of sync, even for that. But the walls remember more than they should.

I think I’m caught between.

Between versions. Between endings.

I think I’m a ghost of a future that didn’t happen the way it was supposed to.

I think I lost you.

That’s what I’m sorry for.

—Sebastian

She stares at the words until her breath fogs the glass, blurring the ink. When she wipes it away with the heel of her hand, the letters remain untouched, dry and sharp.

“A future that didn’t happen,” she repeats, trying to wrap her mind around it. Her reflection looks back at her, pale and wide-eyed, hair an unruly halo. She doesn’t recognize the woman in the mirror as someone who has ever lived with anyone. The apartment is hers, singular and small. There is no evidence of toothbrushes side by side, no extra keys on the hook.

And yet.

There is always that second indentation on the couch cushion, as if someone just stood up.

The next letters are different.

He starts using present tense more.

You are pacing right now, chewing the inside of your cheek. (Stop. You’ll make it bleed.)

You are thinking about whether you should move. You won’t. Not yet.

You will meet me in two years.

You will hate me first.

“Two years,” she says to the empty air, the number both distant and terrifyingly close.

She has never thought more than six months ahead. The future has always been a vague fog of maybe promotions and maybe vacations and maybe someone, someday, who will think her particular way of making coffee is endearing rather than annoying.

Two years is rows of trash days and paychecks and birthdays. Two years is a person, apparently, whose shadow is already walking through her days.

“You can’t just tell me that,” she says, pointing at the letter as if scolding a dog. “You can’t just—what, pre-love me? That’s not how this works.”

The radiator hisses in what she chooses to interpret as disagreement.

She writes back anyway.

If we meet in two years, where?

How?

What should I look for?

What if I mess it up now that I know?

She expects him to avoid the question again.

He doesn’t.

We meet in this elevator.

You are holding too many grocery bags. I am holding my phone and a plant I will kill within a month.

You are wearing the red scarf I told you to keep last winter.

You are crying, quietly, because your mother just called you selfish without saying the exact word.

I offer you half of my chocolate bar without asking why you’re sad.

You take it without thanking me, because you are afraid that if you do, you’ll start sobbing.

You realize later that I didn’t press any floor buttons.

That’s how it starts.

You don’t mess it up.

We do.

Her eyes blur.

“And now?” she asks. “What about now?”

Now, he writes the next night, you are reading a letter from a man you haven’t met, who already ruined the best thing that ever happened to him.

She laughs, broken and disbelieving.

“Smooth,” she mutters. “Very dramatic.”

She carries that letter around for days, folded in the back pocket of her jeans, edges softening with each reread. She feels ridiculous and sixteen and strange. She feels, for the first time in a long time, like the main character of something.

She half expects the universe to punish her for that.

Instead, life goes on.

Her boss forgets her name in a meeting and calls her “Maria” for the third time. The subway stalls in a tunnel and a toddler screams for seven uninterrupted minutes. Her sister sends her a photo of a positive pregnancy test, then calls to insist she’s “not becoming that mom, don’t worry, I’ll still drink at your place.”

The letters keep coming.

When she has a bad day, Sebastian writes things like, Remember the cat we almost adopted because it bit me? You said that meant she had “boundaries.” It makes her smile against her will.

When she has a good day, he writes, You deserve this. You never believed that when we were together. Maybe you will now.

She starts writing back more.

She tells him about her coworkers, about the strange man who plays the violin under her window every Friday evening, about the way the sun sets in slices between the buildings across the street. She tells him things she has never told anyone: her terror of turning into her mother, her secret desire to move to a small town somewhere with trees taller than the buildings, her fear that she is difficult to love.

He always contradicts that last one.

You are not difficult to love,

he writes.

You are just specific.

One night, weak with something like longing, she writes:

If you’re from my future, does that mean you’re… my future husband? Boyfriend? Ex? What are you to me?

The reply slips under the door like a sigh.

All of the above.

For a while, you called me your person.

I called you home.

Something in her chest cracks open at that.

She listens for him, after that. In the creak of the floorboards, in the rush of the radiator, in the buzz of the fluorescent hallway light. She presses her ear to the wall and whispers goodnight. She wakes at 3:17 AM even on nights she swore she would sleep through.

The fear has not left entirely. It sits under her ribs, a quiet animal. But it is braided now with something softer. Anticipation. Grief for something that has not yet happened, but already has, somewhere, somewhen.

Weeks pass.

The letters shift.

He writes less about the past (their future) and more about the now. He comments on the book she’s reading, the way she hums under her breath when washing dishes. He teases, gently, when she leaves laundry in the machine too long and has to rewash it.

He stops apologizing so often.

One night, as December nudges the edges of the windows with frost, she finds a single line on the page:

It’s almost time.

Her heart stumbles.

“Time for what?” she asks, not sure where to direct the question.

Another line appears below the first, the ink blooming on the page as she watches, impossibly and unmistakably.

For me to stop writing.

Her fingers go cold.

“No,” she says, out loud. “No, you can’t just—no. You started this. You don’t get to disappear.”

Snow taps against the glass. The radiator clanks awake. Somewhere above, a child runs down a hallway, their footsteps a muffled thunder.

Her pen digs into the paper, the blue ink gouging a slightly different track through the fibers than his neat black loop.

Why?

She leaves the page on the kitchen table, heart rattling like a loose window. She drinks tea she does not taste. She folds and unfolds the cuff of her sweatshirt. She jumps at every small noise, certain it will herald the slide of new paper, the whisper of an answer.

Nothing comes.

At 3:17, she sits on the floor by the door, back pressed against the wood.

“Please,” she whispers.

The hall outside is quiet.

For the first time since the letters began, dawn comes without ink.

The absence is a physical thing. It sits on her chest like a sleeping cat, heavy and warm and impossible to move. She goes to work in a fog, makes mistakes in emails, pours salt into her coffee instead of sugar.

The second day without a letter, she almost texts her sister and says everything. She stops herself at the last second, as if speaking it aloud will break whatever thin thread is still tying her to the impossible.

The third day, a letter appears.

It’s on her pillow when she comes home, coat half off, mind half convinced this is over.

Mara,

I’m sorry for stopping without warning.

I needed to see if time would snap back if I let go for a moment.

It didn’t.

Which means this is fixed.

I can’t keep writing.

Every word I send you pulls me further from where I’m supposed to be and deeper into this version of the building. Of you.

I am not meant to live here.

You are.

You will meet me in two years. You will fall in love with me without the weight of knowing how it ends.

If you keep looking for me now, you will change that.

And for all the mistakes I made, you were always brave enough to start over.

I won’t take that from you.

So this is my last letter.

I loved you.

I love you.

I will love you.

You taught me that all three can be true at once.

When you walk into the elevator someday, holding too many grocery bags, crying quietly, please take the chocolate.

It tastes better shared.

—Sebastian

Tears blur the last line before she finishes it.

“You can’t just—” she starts, then stops, pressing the heel of her hand to her mouth.

The apartment feels cavernous. The air is too still. The walls, which had begun to feel like a presence, are now blank.

She waits that night anyway.

At 3:16, she sits by the door.

At 3:17, nothing moves.

At 3:18, she lets herself believe him.

She stands, knees stiff, and goes to the kitchen. The clock over the stove ticks with ordinary precision. Her reflection in the dark window looks back at her, eyes red, hair wild.

“Okay,” she tells herself. “Okay.”

She takes a magnet off the fridge—a tiny ceramic cat she bought at a bodega—and pins the last letter to the door, where she will see it every time she leaves.

For a few days, she glances at it and feels only loss.

Then, slowly, something shifts.

She starts drafting the elevator poem again, lines filling the notes app between subway stops and meetings. She stops pretending the scar on her shin is from soccer and, when a new coworker asks, she tells the truth. She calls her grandmother’s sister, who hasn’t heard from her in years, and asks, “Did she ever call me anything? When I was little?”

Over the crackle of the line, the older woman laughs.

“Always,” she says. “You were her little puddle. You don’t remember?”

“I do,” Mara says. “I just needed to hear it.”

Time passes.

Winter drapes itself over the city in slush and salt. Spring peels it back in slow, wet layers. The violinist under her window learns a new song. Her sister’s belly swells and then, one sticky June night, her phone erupts with photos of a baby that looks like a startled potato.

The letter stays on the door.

Sometimes she touches it on her way out. Not reading, just… acknowledging. Like a mezuzah, like a ritual, like a promise.

She does not tell anyone about Sebastian.

She doesn’t have to.

He is everywhere in her days.

In the way she buys a plant for the living room, even though she has killed every plant she has ever owned. In the way she catches herself saving half her chocolate bar sometimes, without thinking. In the way she steps into the elevator every morning with a tiny anticipatory flutter, even though she knows—it’s not yet.

Not yet.

Two years can be forever and no time at all.

On a gray Tuesday that feels like any other, she is running late.

Her mother has called to ask why she never visits. Her boss has emailed asking if she can “hop on a quick call” that is never quick. The sky is spitting a half-hearted drizzle, just enough to turn the streets slick and the air thick.

She nearly forgets the red scarf.

At the last second, she sees it hanging on the back of a chair—worn and soft, an old gift from her sister—and grabs it, looping it around her neck as she shoulders two overfull grocery bags. She had meant to cook for herself this week, to stop eating cereal for dinner. The bags dig into the soft skin of her fingers.

The elevator doors are already closing when she reaches them.

“Hold, hold, hold,” she mutters, jabbing the button with her elbow.

The doors shudder, then open.

A man stands inside, holding a small potted plant and his phone. The plant droops, as if already resigned to its fate. His hair is slightly damp from the rain. There’s a smudge of ink on his thumb. He looks up, startled, as she nearly barrels into him.

“Sorry,” she says, breathless. “Sorry, I—thanks.”

She squeezes in. The doors slide shut.

For a moment, there is only the gentle jolt of descent, the hum of machinery, the rain streaking down the narrow window. Her reflection floats ghostly in the metal.

She is not crying. Not yet.

The phone in her pocket buzzes. She knows without looking that it’s her mother. She knows without answering what the message will say. She feels the familiar pinch in her throat.

She bites her left thumbnail.

“Rough morning?” the man asks, quietly.

His voice is warm, with a lilt she can’t place.

She blinks at him. Up close, he is unremarkable in that particular way that makes people beautiful: tired eyes, kind mouth, crooked nose you could grow fond of. There is something familiar about the way he holds himself, as if always preparing to apologize for taking up space.

“I—” she starts, then stops. Something strange curls under her ribs, half déjà vu, half vertigo. “Yeah. You could say that.”

He hesitates, then reaches into his coat pocket with his free hand.

“I was going to eat this while I waited for the bus,” he says, producing a slightly squashed chocolate bar. “But it seems like you might need it more.”

He breaks it in half, holds out the larger piece.

It tastes sweeter than any chocolate she has ever had.

She takes it without thanking him, because if she opens her mouth right now she will sob, and she doesn’t want to cry in front of a stranger in a metal box. She stares at the dark square in her hand instead, words from a letter written on a night that hasn’t happened yet echoing in her mind.

When you walk into the elevator someday, holding too many grocery bags, crying quietly… please take the chocolate.

She is not crying.

Not yet.

She swallows a mouthful of chocolate and rain-flavored air and manages, finally, a hoarse, “Thank you.”

He smiles, small and surprised, as if he hadn’t expected her to accept.

“No problem,” he says. “I’m Sebastian, by the way. I just moved in on six.”

Her heart does something that she will later, much later, describe to friends as “a weird thing.” In the moment, it feels like the world blinking.

She nods, hands clenched around plastic handles and sugar, the red of her scarf bright against the dull metal.

“Mara,” she says.

The elevator hums.

The building breathes.

Behind her, on the inside of her apartment door three floors up, a letter flutters slightly in a draft, the ink steady, the paper still smelling faintly of old cologne and something like hope.

The End.

Author’s Note:

I wanted this story to feel like being haunted by your own future—not with jump scares, but with tender, inconvenient intimacy. The letters are love and regret poured through a crack in time, and the ending is that achey moment where fate finally catches up with what you already know in your bones.

Let me know if you enjoyed this story! I certainly enjoyed writing it.

— Aveline

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Best,

Aveline <3

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