Chapter Two: The Mistake That Never Happened
In the morning, the mirror was covered with an unnatural fog.
I hadn't showered, and the room wasn't cold.
But the glass was coated with a soft layer of mist, as if something had breathed on it before I opened my eyes.
I wiped the glass with the tips of my fingers.
My face was the same. Ordinary.
But I felt a shadow behind me. I didn't turn around.
The page on the table hadn't changed.
But the sentence was different.
Today it wrote something to me I didn't immediately understand:
"The mistake didn't happen... and that is why you must pay the price."
A mistake? What mistake?
If it didn't happen, why am I being held accountable?
Who is writing this?
Is it me, but from another time? Is it Ryan?
Or has the novel no longer needed a writer?
I sat before the page, staring at the ink.
It wasn't printed. The words were handwritten, but the pen wasn't mine.
I felt some moisture on the paper, as if the sentence had just been written, as if someone had left the room a second before I entered.
I remembered something old.
When we were kids, Ryan told me:
"Sometimes, the thing you don't do... creates a nightmare bigger than the thing you did."
I didn't understand him back then.
Now I understand him more than I should.
I went down to the basement.
There was nothing visible.
The same old smell.
Dust.
A harsh silence that seemed to know more than I did.
I searched for the old papers.
The novel we started.
I found it incomplete. Only fifteen pages.
But strangely, the sixth page wasn't ours.
The handwriting was different. The style unlike ours.
The words spoke of a future we didn't know back then.
"On the day you don't open the door, the novel will begin."
I remembered that day.
Ryan knocked on the door. I was behind it, and I didn't open.
I was angry. Or scared. Or something I don't know the name of.
And I didn't open it.
Maybe this novel began there.
At the closed door.
On the new page, the next day, a new sentence:
"Regret does not write, but it frees."
I didn't understand it at first, but I felt its weight.
As if the letters themselves were looking at me.
I wanted to tear the paper. I couldn't.
I felt it wasn't just a paper.
It was another mirror, not reflecting my face, but what I tried to forget.
At night, I dreamed I was reading a chapter I hadn't written.
Every sentence knew me. Every line described a situation I had lived but told no one about.
In the dream, I was reading chapter seventeen.
But now I had only written two.
I woke up at three seventeen.
And the sentence before me had changed.
Now it said:
"Do not write to remember. Write to forget what will never be forgiven."
There is no sound in the house.
No one is with me.
But I have begun to feel that someone else reads with me, every time I open the page.
This novel is not waiting
for me.
It is ahead of me.
And now, it has started telling me what I will do, not what I did.