The Wrong Morning

~Lyra's POV~

The first thing I notice is the smell.

Pancakes. Warm butter. A faint hint of cinnamon drifting through the air like the house itself is trying to comfort me.

I lie still for a long moment, staring up at the ceiling. The ceiling is white with a thin crack running diagonally from the light fixture toward the window, a crack I memorized all my life, counting it like a familiar scar.

This ceiling.

This room.

I sit up slowly and my body feels… fine. No bruises. No deep bone-cold ache. No dried blood on my palms. I look at my hands, turning them over once, twice, three times. The skin is smooth, unbroken. Younger than I remember it being.

The door swings open and Zara walks in.

She is grinning, bright and easy, her locs pulled up in a messy bun with a pen stuck through them, wearing one of her ridiculous oversized hoodies that reads WORLD'S OKAYEST PERSON across the chest in cracked iron-on letters.

Alive. Completely, fully, annoyingly alive.

"Finally!" She throws her arms out like she's greeting a crowd. "I've been calling you for twenty minutes. Breakfast is getting cold and I will not be held responsible for what happens to the pancakes after this point."

I stared at her.

"Lyra." She narrows her eyes. "You're doing the face."

"What face?"

"The one where you look like you just watched someone get hit by a cart." She walks over and drops onto the edge of my bed, making the mattress bounce.

"Are you okay? You look pale."

I don't answer right away. I just reach out and pull her into a hug.

Not a polite hug. Not a quick shoulder-pat. I grab her and hold on, pressing my face against her shoulder, squeezing like she might disappear if I loosen my grip.

She goes stiff for exactly two seconds. Then she hugs me back.

"Okay," she says slowly. "You're scaring me a little."

"Sorry." I pull back and manage something close to a smile. "Just a bad dream."

She searches my face. "A bad dream."

"A very bad dream."

She doesn't look entirely convinced, but Zara has always known when to push and when to let something sit. She pats my knee once, stands, and points toward the door. "Pancakes. Now. We can unpack the dream stuff after food, those are the rules."

---------

Breakfast was a whole event.

Zara made a stack of pancakes taller than it had any right to be and then topped them with sliced bananas and chocolate syrup, which I had forgotten was our tradition on lazy mornings. She talked the entire time, looping from topic to topic without pausing for breath, she was telling me about our neighbour's new dog, some argument she'd had at the bookshop in town, and a theory she had developed about why the gardener kept rearranging the side gate.

I laughed. Genuinely laughed. Once, twice, three times.

It felt foreign in my chest. Like using a muscle I had quietly let go of.

"You're not eating," she said suddenly, pointing her fork at my plate.

"I am eating."

"You're moving food around and making it look like eating. There's a difference." She tilted her head. "You sure you're okay?"

"I promise." I took a real bite to prove it.

"Tell me more about the dog."

"His name is Biscuit and he is a menace," she said seriously, and launched back in.

I let her voice carry the table while I slipped my phone out from under the edge of my place mat and looked at the date one more time.

It was still there. Still the same. The year staring back at me like a door left open in a cold room.

Five years before the night in the plane.

Four years before I ever packed a single bag and left this house to become Ivan's Luna.

Three years before I became a stranger to my own reflection.

I put the phone face-down on the table and picked up my fork.

"So," Zara said, leaning back in her chair and wrapping both hands around her mug, "are we still doing the market town trip today? Because I've been mentally spending money in that fabric shop since Tuesday and I need to make it real."

"Of course," I said. "We're going."

She pointed at me. "You promised. Two hours out, the big market, lunch somewhere that isn't this house."

"I know. I promised."

She grinned. "Okay good. Because I already told Mama we'd be back before dark and she's already given me the lecture about road safety, so we're locked in."

I smiled back. "Give me thirty minutes to get ready."

--------

I excused myself to the bathroom on the second floor, the one with the cold tiles and the window that never shuts all the way. I locked the door behind me, sat down on the floor with my back against the wall, and closed my eyes.

And then the memories hit.

Not softly. Not the way a dream comes back in gentle pieces throughout a morning. They hit all at once, hard and without warning, a fist straight to the chest.

The pen scratching across the divorce papers. My hand still bleeding.

Marissa's face, calm and satisfied, like she was finishing a task she had put off too long.

The plane door. The cold air screaming in.

Hands grabbing my arms.

The sky flipping. The mountains impossibly far below and then impossibly close. The wind tearing the scream out of my mouth before I could even shape it.

You are not done yet.

I pressed my palms flat against the cold tile and breathed through it. Slowly. In, out, in, out.

When it passed, I was still here. Still twenty-three. Heart still beating too fast, but beating.

I sat on that floor for a while.

And then, quietly, like a candle catching in a dark room, one thought surfaced through everything else.

Today is the day Zara dies.

I remembered it clearly now, sharp and specific the way trauma carves certain things into permanent memory. I had been told it happened at the market town trip. The familiar route. The intersection at the bottom of the hill where the signal light had been broken for months. The lorry that came too fast from the wrong direction.

I pressed my back harder against the wall.

Not this time.

Maybe I woke up here for a reason.

I stood up. I washed my face with cold water, watched the colour come back into my skin, and looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment.

This face. Unbroken. Unhollowed. Still mine.

I dried my hands and went back downstairs.

--------

Zara was already at the door, keys in hand, wearing a yellow jacket I had forgotten she owned. It looked exactly like her.

"There she is," she said. "Ready?"

"Ready," I said. "But change of plans."

She blinked. "What?"

"I want to go somewhere different today." I kept my voice easy, casual, just a thought I was trying on. "There's that other market, the one further east, off the riverside road. I heard it's better."

She frowned slightly. "That's almost three hours out."

"So we leave earlier and take snacks. Come on." I bumped her shoulder with mine. "You said you wanted a proper day out, didn't you? This is a proper day out."

She looked at me for a long second, suspicious in the particular way only Zara ever managed, like she could hear the thing I wasn't saying underneath the thing I was. Then she sighed and pointed the keys at me.

"Fine. But I'm choosing the music."

"Deal."

"And we're stopping for food on the way, I'm not surviving three hours on willpower alone."

"Obviously."

She pulled the door open and the morning light fell across the threshold, warm and unhurried. She stepped outside first, already scrolling through her phone for a playlist, already mid-monologue about which roadside spots had the best meat pies.

I stood in the doorway for one breath.

Different route. Different destination. Different day.