Guilt

[Remi's POV]

Everyone who lives will die, and nothing they do can stop it. That's the way things are. The circle of life. And a single undeniable truth. The minute we are born we start our journey of that cycle and we will continue down that path until we take our very last breath.

However, not all life spans are the same. Some people live to an old age. Others die young. Some die of natural causes, and others die of accidents, murder, or disease. It's the sad truth of being human and death doesn’t discriminate.

But what if someone could see their death coming? Would they do everything in their power to stop it from happening, or would they live their lives to the fullest since they knew it was coming to an end? Would they fight tooth and nail to be able to stay earthside for even a minute longer or would they succumb to the inevitable?

This is the universal question and the only ones who can answer it are the people who saw their deaths, people like me.

My name is Remi Woods. I'm eighteen years old, and for as long as I can remember, I've been able to see how a person will die with a single touch. At first, I wasn't quite sure what was happening and I was terrified that maybe I was going crazy, but after my visions kept coming to fruition no matter what I did, I knew I was different, and not in a good way.

It first started with my nanny, Nona. She was a sweet lady who helped raise me from a very young age. As the daughter of a CEO, I didn't see my parents much because they were always busy. That's why Nona became my family and was the one who kept me company night and day. Due to that, she was the person I loved the most in the world, and she was one of the most painful to lose.

I'll never forget the day I saw her death. We were at the park enjoying the warm spring day when she reached out and grabbed my hand. In an instant, the world around me disappeared, and I found myself at the top of the stairs of my home, staring down at Nona's shocked face as she laid on the bottom floor of our home, her head bleeding, her body contorted, and her eyes unseeing.

It was terrifying, and as a four-year-old, I couldn't quite process it. All I could think of was how and why. When I attempted to run downstairs to her, the vision vanished, and I was at the park again, with warm sunlight and a nice breeze tickling my skin. And, of course, Nona was there beside me holding my hand like what i saw never even happened. But despite having her there alive and smiling, I burst into tears and clung to her leg for dear life like she would disappear any minute.

It took a couple of hours for her to console me, and when I finally fell asleep, the unimaginable happened.

I remember waking up alone and feeling this horrible sense of dread as I crawled out of bed. I didn't quite understand how, but I knew that when I located Nona, I wasn't going to like what I saw, and when I found her lying motionless at the bottom of the stairs, I realized that what happened earlier in the day wasn't some nightmare but was actually the beginning of a spiral into darkness for me.

For the next few years, the same thing kept happening. I would touch someone and their death would come to me. Again and again, it happened, and when I would try to tell the person what I saw, they would think I was crazy. And before long, I found myself thrown into a mental health facility by my parents so that their precious daughter could stop acting abnormally.

After that, I started wearing gloves and long sleeves with pants year round, as I found I needed to have skin-to-skin contact to actually see another person's death. I also started to keep to myself. Not like I had a choice. When all my nannies ended up dying one by one, I was deemed a psychopath and a murderer, so all my peers and classmates stayed far away from me.

By middle school, I was a social pariah, and despite my parents insisting I go to boarding school where no one knew me and I could start over, I refused.

Running away would do nothing except make me look guilty, and I had nothing to hide. I wasn't a murderer. I wasn't crazy. I was just different, and bad luck seemed to surround me. At least, that was what I thought until the day my luck turned around and I found the one person who actually believed and understood me. But even this stroke of luck didn't come without its trials.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, and there is still much to my story—our story—that should be told before the happy ending, and it all started the day Kane Dupris came crashing into my life.