CHAPTER 13

A MESSAGE FROM THE PAST**

The message arrived at 2:17 a.m.

I was still awake, sitting at the desk in my apartment with the logistics reports open and a cold cup of coffee beside my hand. The city outside the window had gone quiet in the way it only did in the middle of the night.

My phone screen lit up.

Unknown number.

I almost ignored it. Spam calls and empty threats had become common since the rumors started moving through the company. But something about the timing made me open it.

One line.

No greeting. No name.

“You still keep the blue notebook in the second drawer of your bedside table. The one with the broken clasp. In the original timeline you burned it the night before the court hearing.”

My hands went still.

The blue notebook.

I hadn’t thought about it in weeks. It was an old thing from university — cheap cardboard cover, bent metal clasp that never closed properly. I used to write lists in it. Stupid ones. Things I wanted. Things I was afraid of. After I woke up in this timeline I had found it again in the same drawer and left it there, untouched.

No one knew about that notebook.

Not Chloe. Not Ethan. Not my father.

In the original future I had burned it the night before the hearing that took everything from me. I had stood in the kitchen of a rented apartment and watched the pages curl until there was nothing left but ash. It was one of the last private things I destroyed before they locked me away.

No one else had been there.

No one else could have known.

I stared at the message until the screen dimmed, then tapped it bright again.

My thumb hovered over the keyboard.

Who is this?

The reply came in under twenty seconds.

“Someone who watched you lose the first time.”

A second message followed immediately.

“You’re changing things faster than you should. The logistics transfer was smart. Telling your father was not. He will never believe you. He didn’t last time either.”

Cold moved down my spine.

I stood up and walked to the bedroom. I opened the second drawer of the bedside table. The blue notebook was still there, exactly where it had always been. Broken clasp. Faded cover. I picked it up. The weight of it felt too heavy for something so small.

I carried it back to the desk and set it beside the phone.

Another message arrived.

“Seiberstin is not the only one who remembers. Stop looking at him like he has all the answers. He doesn’t.”

My pulse was loud in my ears.

I typed: What do you want?

This time the pause was longer.

Almost a full minute.

Then:

“I want you to survive long enough to see the real ending. You’re still playing checkers. Chloe is only the first knife. There are others.”

I waited.

Nothing else came.

I typed another question. Then another. The messages stayed unread. After five minutes the number showed as unavailable. When I tried to call it, the line didn’t connect.

I set the phone down and looked at the notebook.

Someone else had lived the original future.

Someone who knew about the notebook. About the hearing. About the exact way my father had dismissed me. Someone who was watching the changes I made and measuring them against the version of events they remembered.

Not Seiberstin.

He had already shown me he knew things. But his messages had a different weight. Different timing. Different language.

This felt older. Colder. More patient.

I opened the notebook.

The pages were still filled with my own handwriting from years ago. Lists of books I had wanted to read. A half-finished letter to my mother I had never sent. A single page where I had written Chloe’s name over and over until the ink bled through the paper.

I closed it.

Outside, a car passed on the street below. The headlights swept across the ceiling and disappeared.

I picked up the phone again and took a screenshot of the entire conversation. Then I forwarded the images to an encrypted folder and deleted the thread from my main screen.

Sleep was impossible.

I sat at the desk until the sky started to lighten, going over every person who had been close enough to me in the original future to know about the notebook. Every name I could remember. Every face that had been there in the final months when everything collapsed.

None of them fit.

Most of them had either betrayed me or disappeared.

Someone new was in this timeline.

Someone who had already lived through my destruction once and was now watching me try to prevent it.

I looked at the last message again in the screenshot.

“Chloe is only the first knife. There are others.”

I had spent every day since waking up focused on my stepsister and Ethan. On the betrayal I knew. On the future I remembered.

I had never seriously considered that the original timeline might have contained more enemies than the ones I had seen.

The sky outside turned pale gray.

I closed the notebook and put it back in the drawer.

Then I opened my laptop and created a new file.

At the top I typed a single heading:

People who should not know what they know.

Underneath it, I left a blank space.

I had a feeling it wouldn’t stay blank for long.