Faded Page Novels & Stories

Vivian’s eyes widened, horror dawning on her face as Maria continued. “It’s likely why you’ve had memory gaps,” Maria said softly. “But the effects have started to fade because you haven’t been exposed to the drug recently. I’m worried, though. Prolonged use of something like this could have caused other health issues. Whoever did this… wanted to make sure you would never remember.” Vivian’s hands clenched tightly around the papers, her knuckles white. She stared down at the documents, her mind racing so fast she bet Maria could hear it.

The calendar was no bigger than the size of a palm, with only 30 pages in total, making it look rather shabby. Isla disregarded their shocked expressions. She looked at Emmett and calmly said, "Starting from today, you should tear off one page every day, Emmett. When you get to the last page, there will be a surprise waiting—it's my belated birthday gift for you." Upon hearing her words, his roommates started laughing. "It's your 100th confession, right? You're truly persistent—it's been two years, and you're still going strong. Do you really like Emmett that much?"

By the seventh year of my relationship with Vanessa McBride, she inherited everything her late sister, Rebecca Holloway, had left behind, including her brother-in-law, Derek Holloway. Every time Vanessa returned from Derek's room, she would hold me close and whisper softly, "Just wait a little longer, Grant. Once I give him a child, we'll finally have our wedding." It was the only condition her family had imposed for her to inherit the McBride legacy. In the six months after returning to the capital, Vanessa went to Derek's room regularly. At first, it was once a month. Then, once every few weeks. Eventually, it became almost every other night. And after six months of being alone every

The twelfth entry was missing. I was aware of the way it was possible for old pages to disappear, with their edges crumbling from age or the ink fading to the point of no longer being readable. The page had disappeared in the same way that happens when a person decides it should no longer exist—cut cleanly along the binding using something sharp enough to leave not a single ragged edge, a precision which told him more than the fact of its absence did. The person who had done this had taken their time; they had not pulled the page out in a state of panic, but had removed it in the way a surgeon removes a lesion, deliberately, without rushing, and with the confidence that no one would ever not

I grab my phone with trembling fingers and start taking screenshots. One. Two. Three— The fourth disappears before I can capture it. “No, no, no—” I refresh the page. More posts vanish. The page goes emptier and emptier. Someone is deleting them. Someone is watching the exact page I’m reading and wiping it clean. My breath comes faster. I manage to screenshot five more before the entire forum goes blank. I refresh. Error 404. Page Not Found. “Shit.” My hand slams onto the desk.

She needed to find the text files of The Billionaire’s Constraint. The browser window opened with a flash but it didn't load her dashboard. The screen instantly turned a brilliant , blinding blue, like the vertical glass pods in the subterranean matrix. The standard mouse cursor vanished, replaced by a horizontal ticker tape of black text. CHRONOS_REWRITE_SYSTEM: RETRIEVING ARCHIVED DATA FOR VANCE_E... WARNING: SUBJECT IS CURRENTLY RETAINING IN EXCEPTION STATE... DELETION UNIT 01 EN ROUTE TO MAINLAND SECTOR...

Just ideas, caffeine, and the quiet understanding that everyone in the room was allowed to be brilliant. Jamie stood at the long table covered in sketches, mood boards, and half-finished wireframes. Julian was already there, sleeves rolled to the elbows, marker in hand, drawing rough frames for a motion piece they’d been arguing about—playfully—since breakfast. “You’re still wrong about the transition,” Jamie said, leaning over the table to point at the sketch. “Fade-to-black is lazy. We need something that feels like the screen is breathing.” Julian raised an eyebrow, amused. “Breathing.”

Her thoughts wouldn’t slow down. She began flipping through every page, desperate for sense. Then she noticed something strange, tiny marks in the corners of some pages. Dots. Circles. A pattern. She counted them, one, two, three, four… eight. The eighth marked page was the last one. She turned it slowly. It was blank. Or so it seemed. When she tilted the notebook toward the light, faint pencil impressions appeared, shadows of words written on a missing page that had been torn out.

In my previous life, my boyfriend's female best friend, Yvette Larson, decided to play a cruel prank on the firefighters with a few of her friends. They deliberately set off the fire alarm in our apartment complex and filled one of the rooms with smoke. "When the fire trucks get here, we'll hide and film them scrambling around trying to rescue everyone. This is going to go viral!" I did everything I could to stop them. I warned Yvette that they were wasting emergency resources and could even cause a stampede. However, she called me a buzzkill, and my boyfriend accused me of sticking my nose where it did not belong. Hence, I secretly called the property management office and tipped them of

she said quietly, “you should probably read all of it before you decide who you can trust.” I watched her walk away. Then I pulled the ledger from beneath my jacket. I opened it again. The page I’d found earlier was there. MERRYN VALE — CONTAINMENT. I turned the next page. Nothing. I turned to another. Still nothing. Then I noticed the numbering. Page forty-eight. Page forty-nine. Page fifty-one. I frowned. I flipped backward. Forty-nine. Then fifty-one. Page fifty was missing. I ran my thumb over the torn edge. The paper had been ripped out recently.