CHAPTER 4: The Soft Woman Is Gone

Kara’s pov

The notification sat on my phone like a small, polite trap.

Lunch with Selene. 1:00 p.m. The little Italian place near the river that still put too much garlic in the bread and charged extra for water. We had made the plan two weeks ago in this timeline before I died, before I came back. In my old life, lunch had happened. I smiled through it, paid for both of us because Selene “forgot” her card again, and listened to her complain about her boyfriend for an hour while my own problems stayed locked behind my teeth.

I stared at the reminder until the screen dimmed.

Old habits rose first. The soft voice in my head that still wanted to be liked. Just go. It’s only an hour. She’ll be hurt if you cancel at the last minute. You can use the time to fish for information.

I set the phone face-down on the table and walked to the window.

Traffic moved below in the same ordinary patterns as yesterday. People with plans. People who still believed the future would look roughly like the present. I used to be one of them.

The version of me who kept saying yes to Selene had believed it too. That version had died in the dirt with a list of names and a hole in her side.

I picked the phone back up.

My thumbs moved before the soft voice could finish its argument.

Something came up at work. Rain check?

I hit send. No emoji. No apology paragraph. No offer to reschedule right away.

The reply arrived in under a minute.

Seriously? I already left the house. You’re being weird lately.

I watched the typing bubbles appear and vanish twice. Then nothing.

The familiar guilt tried to climb up my throat. I let it sit there for three full breaths, then swallowed it like bad medicine. Selene had been my best friend for six years in the old timeline. She had also been the first person to stop answering my calls when the shortages started.

When I finally reached her shelter in year two, she had looked through me like I was already a ghost and told the guards she didn’t know anyone by my name.

Quiet cut. Clean.

I locked the phone and opened my laptop instead.

Market research came next.

I pulled up current commodity prices, wholesale food distributors, and the stock pages I had once ignored completely.

My future knowledge sat like a second set of eyes. Rice and dried beans would spike hard eighteen months before the red moon, then again when the first coastal ports slowed. Antibiotics and basic medical kits would become currency. Fuel stabilizers. Water purification tablets. Solar chargers that still looked like expensive hobbies right now.

I made notes in the same notebook from yesterday. Nothing dramatic. Just columns of numbers and names of suppliers who still sold in bulk to regular people. One regional warehouse chain would quietly change ownership in two years and start prioritizing government contracts. Another would go under after a single bad quarter and leave its inventory sitting in a liquidation auction. I circled that one.

The soft woman I used to be would have spent the afternoon worrying about Selene’s feelings.

The woman sitting at this table needed starting capital and a plan that did not rely on anyone else’s goodwill.

My stomach growled. I realized I had forgotten breakfast.

I grabbed my jacket and keys. The apartment felt too small suddenly, like the walls were listening. Outside air would help.

The city streets were the same mix of hurry and boredom I remembered. A guy on an electric scooter nearly clipped me at the crosswalk and shouted something rude. Two women argued over a parking space. The smell of coffee and car exhaust mixed in the cool March air. Ordinary. Fragile.

I walked without a clear destination, letting my feet choose the route while my mind stayed on the numbers. A small hardware store on the corner still had the same faded “Bulk Orders Welcome” sign in the window. In the old timeline that store had been looted clean by the end of the first year. Today its shelves were full.

I stepped inside just long enough to check prices on heavy-duty tarps, rope, and basic tools. The clerk, a middle-aged man with a kind face, asked if I needed help. I smiled the polite smile that cost nothing and said I was just browsing.

Old pattern. Soft. Harmless.

I left before he could ask anything else.

Back on the sidewalk I checked my phone again out of habit.

No new messages from Selene. Good.

I opened a browser tab and kept researching while I walked, pausing under awnings when the screen glare got bad. Current gold prices. Second-hand solar equipment groups.

A forum where preppers argued about shelf lives and looked like paranoid hobbyists to everyone else. In five years some of those same people would be dead or running fortified compounds. Others would become the worst kind of predators.

I bookmarked three usernames that had given solid advice in the old timeline and three more that had turned vicious the moment the rules changed.

Information first. Money second. Everything else later.

The system stayed quiet. No new text. No points. Just the cold empty storage space at the back of my mind, waiting.

I bought a cheap sandwich from a cart and ate it on a bench, watching people pass. A couple argued quietly about weekend plans. A kid chased a pigeon and laughed when it flew. Somewhere a bus hissed to a stop. The world still thought it had time.

My phone buzzed against my thigh.

I wiped my fingers on a napkin and pulled it out, expecting another message from Selene or maybe a work email.

The name on the screen stopped me cold.

Marcus.

Former husband.

The man who had once put a ring on my finger and later left me bleeding in an alley because I had become inconvenient. In this timeline we were already divorced, clean, quiet, finalized eight months ago. We barely spoke. There was no reason for him to text me on a random Saturday.

The preview showed only the first line.

Hey. Been thinking about you.

I stared at the words until the screen dimmed.

The soft woman was gone.

But the past, it seemed, was not finished with me yet.