The Missing Scene
Ren can see everyone’s ending—except Milo’s. When he asks why, she asks a terrifying question: "What if you already died, and you’re just… here with me?"
The first time Milo climbs out onto the fire escape, he’s not trying to make a ritual out of it.
He’s trying to get away from the argument still vibrating through the pipes of Apartment 4B. The words are muffled now—just the rhythm of anger, not the content—but his body remembers every syllable.
“You don’t try,” Jamie had said, somewhere between the casserole dish shattering and the neighbors’ TV getting turned up louder. “You just float. Do you even care if this works?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” he’d said, which was, in retrospect, a stupid answer.
Now, the metal of the fire escape is cold against his bare feet. The city below hums, a low, constant roar. The air smells like rain and old cigarettes.
Across the narrow gap, the window of 4A creaks open.
“Shit,” a voice says, softly.
Milo looks over.
She’s halfway out the window, one leg already over the sill, a cigarette tucked behind her ear. Dark hair in a loose knot, oversized t-shirt, bare knees. Her eyes widen when she sees him.
“Oh,” she says. “Sorry. I thought—never mind.”
“You thought no one else would be avoiding their life on the fire escape at midnight?” he says.
She huffs a laugh. “Something like that.”
They stare at each other for a beat. The metal grid between their windows is maybe three meters wide. Close enough that he can see the chipped black polish on her toenails.
“I’m Milo,” he offers.
“Ren,” she says. She jerks her chin toward his apartment. “Problem in there?”
“Just… life,” he says. “You?”
“Also life.” She pats the metal beside her. “I’d offer you a cigarette, but you look like someone who’s promised someone else he doesn’t smoke anymore.”
“I don’t smoke anymore,” he says automatically.
“Uh-huh,” she says. “So you want a ‘not-cigarette’?”
He laughs despite himself. “Yeah. Yeah, I kind of do.”
She tosses the pack with surprising accuracy. It lands beside him with a soft thud. The lighter follows a second later, the small flame blooming between his fingers like an old habit when he flicks it.
It’s 1:11 AM when he takes the first drag. He knows because his phone lights up with the time when Jamie texts:
we’re not done talking
He turns it face-down.
Ren sees the glow and looks away politely. They smoke in silence for a while, watching the city do its restless sleeping.
When he finally climbs back inside, the argument is waiting. But the next night, at 1:10, he’s already at the window, waiting too.
Ren arrives at 1:11 exactly, like the time is something they agreed on without saying.
“Hey, stranger,” she says, settling onto the metal, knees pulled up to her chest.
“Hey,” he says. “How was life today?”
“Overrated,” she says easily. “Yours?”
“Also overrated,” he says.
They don’t talk about their partners at first. They talk about the building (haunted, probably), the deli on the corner (overpriced, definitely), the weather (too hot for spring), the weird guy on the second floor who waters his plants at precisely 3:33 every afternoon.
“Numerology is big in this building,” Ren says. “You, me, 1:11. Plant guy, 3:33. My ex used to say the building had ‘bad numbers.’”
“Ex?” Milo asks.
She waves a hand. “On the way. We’re in the… pre-ex stage.”
He doesn’t push. He doesn’t have to. He recognizes the tone: the brittle joke hiding the fact that something is already broken.
He doesn’t tell her that Jamie moved into their shared apartment with three plants and a bookshelf and a soft, relentless expectation that Milo would eventually grow into the person he kept saying he wanted to be.
He doesn’t say that he’s been stuck between wanting to prove Jamie wrong and wanting to prove Jamie right since the day they signed the lease.
They smoke. They share stupid stories. They learn the shape of each other’s silhouettes against the city light.
The third night, she’s late.
It’s 1:14 when her window opens. Milo’s heart drops low in his stomach, and he tells himself he isn’t disappointed. He absolutely isn’t.
“Rough night,” she says, climbing out with less grace than usual. “Sorry. I was… busy.”
He hears the echo of shouting from inside her apartment—two voices, one low and furious, one sharp and tired. It stops like someone hit mute when she pulls the window shut behind her.
“Want to talk about it?” he asks.
“No,” she says. Then, “Yes.” Then, “God, I don’t know.”
He offers her the lighter. She takes it. Her hands are steady in a way that makes him think she’s been shaking for hours and has finally run out.
“I told him,” she says, staring at the flame. “I told him I’m done.”
“Oh,” Milo says.
“He said I was being dramatic,” she adds. “Which is funny, because this is me being extremely calm about the whole ‘I’m emotionally exhausted and I don’t like who I am when I’m with you’ thing.”
“People hate it when you don’t scream,” Milo says quietly. “It means they can’t pretend you’re just being hysterical.”
She looks at him sharply, a ghost of a smile touching her mouth. “Exactly.”
They smoke without talking for a long time.
Milo’s phone buzzes again, somewhere behind him, ignored. A siren wails distantly and then fades. The city’s glow is a low halo. Somewhere below them, a drunk sings along badly to a song only he can hear.
“Can I tell you something weird?” Ren asks suddenly.
“Please,” Milo says. “Normal isn’t working out for me lately.”
She takes a breath. Lets it out slowly. The tip of her cigarette burns bright, then dulls.
“I can see how people die,” she says.
He waits for the punchline.
It doesn’t come.
She doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t look at him like she’s kidding. She just watches the street, eyes flat and distant.
“What, like—” He gestures vaguely. “Metaphorically?”
“No,” she says. “Like, literally. When I look at someone long enough, I see… something. A moment. The moment. It’s not always clear, but it’s enough.”
He snorts, reflexive. “You mean like, ‘You look like you’re gonna die alone with cats’? Because I can do that too.”
“Cute,” she says dryly. “But no. I mean, I see you standing in the rain on the side of a road. Or in a white room with too much beeping. Or on a staircase with your foot in the wrong place. And if I squint, I see the rest.”
He opens his mouth to argue, to say that’s not funny, that trauma jokes are tiered and this one is too soon. But her profile in the streetlight is… empty of performance. She looks tired, not dramatic.
“How long?” he asks.
“Since I was sixteen,” she says. “First time, it was my grandfather. I thought I was losing it. Or, like, inventing it to make sense of things. But then it kept happening. And then—” She shrugs. “Then I tried to ignore it.”
“And that worked great, obviously,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to do but meet impossible with sarcasm.
“Obviously,” she echoes.
Silence rolls in again, thick and awkward this time.
Milo studies her face. The line of her jaw, the hollow at her temple. He tells himself she’s messing with him. That this is a bit he hasn’t caught onto yet. That he’ll laugh about it tomorrow, replaying the moment she says “just kidding.”
“Okay,” he says slowly. “Say I believe you. Which, to be clear, I do not.”
“Of course not,” she says. “That would be insane.”
“Say I did,” he continues. “What do you… see? When you look at me.”
He means it as a dare.
She flinches like he’s hit her.
“I don’t,” she says.
He laughs, surprised at how sharp it comes out. “What, nothing? I’m immortal? That seems off-brand for me.”
“I don’t see anything,” she says. “Ever.”
He sits up straighter. “What does that—”
“I see everyone. Even myself, in the mirror. Especially myself.” Her mouth twists. “But when I look at you, there’s… nothing. Like a missing page.”
He waits for that to land as comforting, somehow. It doesn’t. It feels like someone pulled the floor out from under him.
“So that’s why you come out here at exactly 1:11?” he says, trying to keep his voice light. “Mystery boy with no expiration date?”
She snorts. “Please. You fill a very important ‘smokes and deflects my feelings’ role. The death-vision thing is just a bonus.”
He wants to laugh. He does, a little. But the idea sits in his chest like an unlit match.
“How do you know it’s real?” he asks. “That what you see actually… happens.”
She flicks ash over the edge, watching it fall.
“Because I tried to change it once,” she says. “It didn’t work.”
He doesn’t ask for details. He can feel them hovering around the edges of her words, sharp and heavy.
“Okay,” he says.
“So,” she continues, “either I’m seeing inevitabilities, or I’m just really good at guessing. In which case, I shouldn’t be wasting it on death. I should be picking lottery numbers.”
He thinks of the way she looked coming out the window tonight, late and shaken. The way her voice went flat when she said she was done.
“Have you seen his?” he asks, nodding toward the wall between them, meaning the man in her apartment.
“Yeah,” she says.
He waits.
“And?”
She blows smoke out in a steady stream.
“Not my business anymore,” she says.
They don’t talk about it again that night.
But the next night, he’s the one who’s late.
When he finally crawls out the window, it’s 1:18. Ren is already there, sitting cross-legged, cigarette gone, hands wrapped around her knees.
“Sorry,” he starts. “Jamie and I—”
“You don’t have to explain,” she says. “Nobody’s at their best at 1:11 AM.”
He settles beside her with a groan, the metal grate imprinting lines into his skin. He smells like detergent and stress.
“You looked,” he says without preamble.
“I didn’t,” she says. “Not on purpose.”
“On accident, then.”
She doesn’t answer for a long time. The city hums around them, oblivious.
“There’s a difference between knowing and naming,” she says finally. “I knew he was going to leave before he did. I knew what his face would look like the last time I saw him. It still hurt.”
“That’s not an answer,” he says.
“No,” she agrees.
He leans his head back against the brick, staring up at the slice of sky. It’s washed-out, the stars swallowed by city glare. He used to pretend airplanes were falling stars when he was a kid, wish on them anyway.
“Do you see mine when you close your eyes?” he asks, half-joking.
“I don’t see anything with you,” she says. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
And she sounds… scared.
“Is that bad?” he asks. “Good?”
She laughs, short and humorless. “Depends on how attached you are to the whole ‘being real’ thing.”
He turns to look at her.
“Ren,” he says. “I’m real.”
“Yeah,” she says. “That’s what they all say.”
He wants to ask who “they” are. He doesn’t.
Instead, he says, “Tell me one.”
She frowns. “One what?”
“One death,” he says. “Anyone. Your call. Tell me, and then I’ll pull out my phone in, like, fifty years and check your work.”
She hesitates, then sighs.
“There’s a guy downstairs,” she says. “Third floor. Always holds the door for people, even when he’s running late. Smells like fabric softener.”
“I know him,” Milo says. “He told me once that socks are the only thing worth spending money on.”
She nods. “He slips in the shower,” she says. “One day. He hits his head. That’s it.”
Milo swallows. “That’s… boring.”
“It’s death, not Hollywood,” she says.
“I thought you’d say something more dramatic,” he admits.
“Oh, I can do dramatic,” she says. “There’s a woman on five who dies in a fire. And a kid who—”
“Okay,” he says quickly. “Message received.”
She smirks.
“Why tell me?” he asks quietly. “Why tell me you see this stuff?”
“Because I was tired of being the only person who knows the ending,” she says. Then, softer, “And because it doesn’t work on you.”
He fights the urge to ask what it means, this missing page where his future should be.
He doesn’t have to. The question hangs between them, even when they talk about other things.
Days bleed into nights. Nights bleed into 1:11.
They talk about music and movies and the best time to go to the laundromat. He learns that Ren used to want to be a paramedic until she realized she’d be walking into rooms knowing who wasn’t walking out. She learns that Milo once dropped out of art school because his professor said the worst thing you can say about someone: “He has potential.”
Their relationships fray in the backgrounds, unseen.
Sometimes, Milo hears Jamie crying quietly in the bathroom through the wall. Sometimes, Ren’s boyfriend’s voice rises and cuts off abruptly, the shock of a door slammed too hard.
One night, Ren comes out with a suitcase half-open behind her, clothes spilling like something gut-shot. There’s a fresh bruise blooming across her forearm, fingers-shaped.
Milo stands up so fast the fire escape rattles.
“Did he—”
“It’s not as dramatic as it looks,” she says.
“Ren,” he says, the name feeling like it belongs to him now, a little. “Has he ever—”
She cuts him off with a look that’s all teeth.
“He leaves in three months,” she says. “Heart attack in a rental car. No seatbelt. Makes the news for about twelve hours.”
“That doesn’t make this okay,” he says.
“It makes this temporary,” she says.
He wants to argue. He doesn’t, because her eyes are already shiny with something that isn’t tears.
“What about you?” he asks instead. “Do you see…that? For yourself? Him? You? I mean—”
She laughs once, sharp. “Oh yeah. Over and over. Every time I brush my teeth, I see myself coughing in a hospital bed. Every time I look at him, I see—” She snaps her mouth shut. “Anyway.”
He exhales slowly. His own life suddenly feels like a hallway with all the doors labeled in a language he can’t read.
“Maybe that’s why you can’t see mine,” he says. “Maybe I’m just… boring.”
“Trust me,” she says. “Boring people slip in showers and die just fine. This is something else.”
“Protection?” he suggests. “Doom? Something stranger?”
“Don’t quote me back at me,” she says, but her smile is small and real.
They don’t name what’s happening between them.
They dance around it, talk around it, build conversational walls instead of looking directly at the thing sitting between them like a third person on the fire escape.
He notices the way her laugh changes when he’s the one who causes it. She notices that he smokes less around her and more around his own guilt.
One night, he comes out to find her already there, no cigarette, feet bare and pale in the streetlight.
“I ended it,” she says without preamble.
He feels something uncoil in his chest.
“Good,” he says. “Are you okay?”
“No,” she says. “But I will be.”
He sits beside her, closer than usual. Their shoulders almost touch.
“You ever think about just… leaving?” he asks. “Like, disappearing. Start over somewhere no one expects you to be anyone.”
“Every day,” she says. “But I always imagine myself dead there too, so.”
“Jesus,” he mutters.
“You asked,” she says.
He thinks of Jamie, of the promises they made on a cheap couch in a cheaper apartment, both convinced that loving someone meant saving them. He thinks of the way his chest feels tight now when he walks into rooms Jamie is in, the way he scans for hurt he might cause.
“I want to leave,” he says quietly.
The words surprise him more than her.
“I know,” she says.
He turns.
“How?”
She looks at him like it’s obvious.
“You always look back at the door,” she says. “Like you’re checking if it’ll lock behind you.”
He hadn’t noticed. He believes her.
“Does it?” he asks.
“Sometimes,” she says. “Sometimes you lock it yourself.”
He laughs, tired.
“What do you see?” he asks.
“With you?” she says.
He nods.
She sucks in a breath.
“Nothing,” she says. “Still. It’s… blank. It’s wrong. I keep thinking it’ll fill in one day and it never does.”
“You sound disappointed,” he says lightly.
“I sound unsettled,” she corrects. “I am very comforted by my own morbidity, thanks. You are ruining my brand.”
He smiles, despite the knot in his stomach.
It’s a week later when he finally asks.
By then, he’s moved into the living room. The fight with Jamie this time wasn’t a slammed door, but a quiet, exhausted decision.
“I can’t keep betting on who you might be,” Jamie had said, folding a shirt with too much care. “I’m losing too much on the person you are.”
Milo had nodded like he understood, because he did. He just didn’t know what to do about it.
They agreed he’d look for another place. He’s been dragging his feet, because leaving makes it real. But each night at 1:11, the fire escape feels more like home than his couch.
“It’s weird,” he says, lighting up. “Not sleeping in the same bed.”
Ren snorts. “You two weren’t exactly cuddling before.”
He startles. “You could hear that?”
“Dude, this building has the acoustic privacy of a cereal box,” she says. “Also, you talk in your sleep.”
He freezes. “What do I say?”
“Nothing,” she says. “You just… say my name sometimes.”
Heat floods his neck.
“Oh,” he says.
She looks just as startled she said it.
“Sorry,” she blurts. “That was—I shouldn’t have—”
“No,” he says quickly. “It’s fine. It’s just…”
He trails off.
“Something stranger?” she says, echoing his earlier joke.
“Something,” he says.
He stubs out the cigarette, suddenly nauseous. The city feels too close, the air too thick.
“Ren,” he says. “What if—”
He swallows.
“What if I’m already dead?”
The words hang there, absurd and heavy.
He means it as another joke, a way to puncture the weirdness. If she can see everyone’s ending but his, maybe the ending already happened. Maybe he’s a ghost. Maybe that’s why everything feels off lately, like he’s half a second out of sync with everyone else.
She doesn’t laugh.
She turns her head slowly, eyes narrowing, scanning his face the way she scans strangers’.
“I’ve thought about that,” she says.
A chill creeps down his spine.
“Okay, not the answer I was expecting,” he says. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Milo, you’re very alive and annoying.’”
“You’re very alive and annoying,” she says, automatically. Then, “But that doesn’t mean you’re not… something else too.”
He stares at her.
“What does that—”
“I told you I tried to change it once,” she says, cutting him off. “What I saw. With my mom.”
He goes still.
“I saw her in a car,” she says. “Rain on the windshield. Headlights too bright. An impact. I told her. I begged her not to take that road. She didn’t listen, or she did and forgot, or she did and the universe rerouted. I don’t know. All I know is she died in bed, three years later, in her sleep. Heart just… stopped.”
“Ren,” he says softly.
“I thought I’d done it,” she continues. “Changed the story. I thought, okay, maybe it’s loose. Maybe we’ve got room to move.” She laughs once, hollow. “But every time I think about her, it’s still the car I see. Not the bed.”
He doesn’t know what to do with that.
“So which is real?” he asks.
“Both, I think,” she says. “Neither. We’re all walking around with a thousand possible endings, and I just happen to get the highlights reel.”
“Lucky you,” he says.
“Yeah,” she says. “Jackpot.”
She twists the cigarette between her fingers.
“With you,” she says, “it’s like… I’m watching a movie, and there’s a missing final scene. The film just… stops. Not with you dying. Not with you walking away. It just… cuts out.”
He feels suddenly dizzy.
“Maybe the projectionist got bored,” he says.
She ignores him.
“I keep wondering,” she says quietly, “if maybe… this is it.”
“This?” he echoes. “The fire escape? The cigarettes?”
She nods.
“What if this is the missing scene,” she says. “What if everything after this was… never shot. What if you already died. And you’re just… still here. With me.”
The fire escape groans under them as the building shifts, ancient metal adjusting to temperature. It sounds like something exhaling.
“If I was dead,” he says, “wouldn’t I… know?”
“Do any of them?” she asks, nodding toward the windows, the people whose endings she carries in her head like unwanted spoilers.
“Fair point,” he says.
He looks down at his hands. They’re solid. Calloused. Warm.
He presses his heel against the metal grate. It bites into his skin.
He breathes in. Out. The air burns his lungs the way it always has.
“What does it feel like,” he asks, “for the others? Before. When you see them?”
“Empty and crowded at the same time,” she says. “Like they’re already half-gone.”
“And me?” he asks.
She swallows.
“Loud,” she says. “You feel loud.”
“Loud,” he repeats.
“Like standing too close to an amp at a show,” she says. “Like feedback. Like… the moment right before a song starts, when everyone’s holding their breath.”
He lets that sit between them.
“Maybe that’s just anxiety,” he offers. “I’ve been told I give off strong ‘overthinking in the corner’ energy.”
She smiles, small.
“Maybe,” she says.
He shifts closer without deciding to. Their shoulders brush. It’s not a mistake.
“If I’m already dead,” he says quietly, “does that make this cheating or not?”
She exhales, a soft laugh that sounds like it hurts.
“We’re cheating on people we’ve already left,” she says. “Even if we’re still in their apartments.”
“That’s a very poetic way of saying ‘yes,’” he says.
She turns her head. Their faces are closer than they’ve ever been. He can see the flecks of light in her eyes, the tiny scar on her lower lip.
“What if,” she says slowly, “the reason I can’t see you is because you’re not headed toward one ending anymore. You’re headed toward a… fork.”
“And you’re standing at it,” he says.
“So are you,” she says.
He hesitates.
“I don’t want to hurt him,” she says suddenly, voice thinner. “The one inside. Even if he hurt me. Even if I saw it. I don’t want to be the one who… chooses the version where he’s alone sooner.”
“I don’t want to hurt Jamie,” he says. “But I already have. Every day I stay and pretend there’s still a version of us where we’re not resenting each other, I hurt him more.”
Ren’s hand is resting on the metal between them, fingers splayed. His own hand moves before his brain does, cover sliding over hers.
Her breath catches.
“Maybe,” he says, “the missing scene is just… unwritten. Because we’re the ones holding the pen.”
“That’s cheesy,” she says.
“Extremely,” he agrees.
She doesn’t move her hand.
They sit like that for a long time, the city wrapping around them like a loud, indifferent blanket.
When she finally speaks, her voice is small.
“I don’t know if you’re dead,” she says. “Or if I am. Or if we’re both somewhere between. All I know is that when I look at you, for once, I don’t see the end.”
He could say something clever. He doesn’t.
“I’d like,” he says instead, “to see what happens if we stop waiting for it.”
She turns her hand under his, fingers lacing with his. Her palm is warm and slightly sweaty. Human.
“Then I guess,” she says, “we have to go inside and actually end things. On purpose. While we still can.”
Terror and relief spike in his chest, twins.
“You think that’ll… start the movie again?” he asks.
“I think it’ll start something,” she says.
He squeezes her hand.
“Will you still come out at 1:11?” he asks.
“Probably,” she says. “I’ll need the cigarette.”
“And the company?” he asks.
She smirks. “We’ll see if you’re still here.”
He stands, legs shaky.
“Ren?”
“Yeah?”
“If it turns out I really am dead,” he says, “you’ll tell me, right?”
She leans back on her hands, looking up at him, expression soft.
“If you were,” she says, “I don’t think it would feel this terrifying.”
He laughs, breathless.
“Good,” he says. “I’d hate to haunt a fire escape alone.”
He climbs back through the window, heart beating too fast, lungs full of smoke and something almost like hope.
Inside, Jamie is sitting on the edge of the bed, hands clasped, eyes tired.
“We need to talk,” Milo says.
“I know,” Jamie says.
On the other side of the wall, a door opens and closes. A suitcase zips. A life rearranges itself.
At 1:11 AM, the fire escape is empty.
The city hums on, unaware that two numbers in two apartments have shifted, two stories untangled themselves from endings they thought were fixed.
Later—weeks, months, he won’t be able to say—Milo will climb out onto the metal again, more out of habit than need. He’ll find Ren already there, legs swung through the bars, cigarette between her lips, eyes on the sky.
“You’re late,” she’ll say.
And he’ll smile, sitting down beside her, heart loud.
“Sorry,” he’ll say. “I was busy being alive.”
The End
Author’s Note:
I wanted this one to feel like an intimate haunting where the ghost might actually be the future you’re avoiding. Ren’s “death vision” isn’t there to doom them so much as to force them to look at the endings they’re drifting toward—and choose something messier and more alive instead.
— Aveline
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