Turn 2 of 12

Scroll down to read the list of six confessions

You scroll down. Your finger moves on the trackpad and the white page yields, and for a moment there's nothing — just more white, more emptiness, the sense of a page that goes on longer than it should. Then text resolves at the bottom of the screen, faint at first, like ink bleeding through paper from the other side.

They're not formatted as a list. They're formatted as a ledger. Six entries, each with a timestamp, a status, and the confession itself in plain type. The first one reads 3:04 AM — GRANTED — and the text is the job, the salary to the cent, the firm name, all of it exactly as you remember typing it. Seeing it on the screen makes your chest tighten. It's real. It happened. The other five sit below it in a column, and each one is marked PENDING in small grey capitals.

You read the second one. 3:11 AM. *I want everyone who's ever looked through me to see me.* Your mouth goes dry. You remember this one — the feeling behind it, the anger of being invisible in offices and conversations, the fantasy of walking into a room and having every head turn. It reads back to you now like something a stranger would say, except you know the stranger is you, three hours and a lifetime ago.

The third: 3:19 AM. *I want to know what Meera really thinks of me.* And there it is. Her name on the screen, in your handwriting, in your want. You stare at it. The fourth and fifth are worse — or you think they're worse, because you can't fully remember typing them, and the language is jagged, raw, the kind of honesty that only happens when you've stopped caring about the consequences. The fourth: 3:28 AM. *I want to be the one people choose.* The fifth: 3:34 AM. *I want the version of my life I was supposed to have.*

The sixth confession is at the bottom. 3:47 AM. The text is longer than the others. You read it once and the words don't connect, so you read it again, slower, and by the third time the meaning arrives like cold water. It's about Meera. Not just her name — her. Something you thought at four in the morning and put into the box because the box took everything, and now it's sitting here in plain text, pending, waiting to become real.

You don't reread it a fourth time. You can't. The cursor blinks above the ledger, in the empty box, and the word CONFESS sits above it like an invitation. Your phone buzzes again — Meera, following up: *Rowan. Answer me.*