Turn 3 of 12

Reread the sixth confession carefully

You force yourself to look. The text sits at the bottom of the ledger, small and precise, and you read it the way you'd read a diagnosis — slowly, each word landing before the next one comes. 3:47 AM. *I want Meera to need me the way I need her. I want her to come to me first, every time, for everything. I want to be the person she can't do without. I want to be the one she calls at 3 AM when she's falling apart. I want her to choose me over everyone, and I want her to never stop.*

It's not cruel. That's the thing that makes it worse. It's not spite or envy or the kind of small meanness you can dismiss as a bad night. It's love, or something shaped like love, pressed flat and made into a demand. You want to own her. Not cruelly — tenderly, desperately, the way you want a thing you're terrified of losing. You wrote it at a quarter to four in the morning, and you meant every word, and now it's pending, and the page is patient.

You push back from the table. The chair scrapes on the floor and the sound is too loud in the apartment. Your phone is still on the table, Meera's last text glowing on the screen — *Rowan. Answer me.* — and you can't pick it up because you can't hear her voice right now, can't pretend the words on that page don't exist, can't un-know that you typed a confession that would turn your best friend into someone who couldn't leave. That's what it would do, wouldn't it? If the site grants it the way it granted the job — literally, exactly — then Meera would need you. Would call you at 3 AM. Would choose you over everyone. Would never stop. Not because she wanted to, but because you asked a box to make it so.

The cursor blinks. The box is empty. The word CONFESS sits above it, and for a moment — a terrible, honest moment — you understand why you typed all six. The job was greed. Being seen was anger. Knowing Meera's thoughts was jealousy. Being chosen was hunger. The version of your life you were supposed to have was grief. But this one, the sixth — this one was fear. The fear that she would leave, that she was already leaving, that one day she would stop calling and you would be invisible to her the way you were invisible to everyone else. And instead of sitting with that fear you put it in a box and asked the internet to make it impossible.

Meera texts again. Just a question mark this time, alone on the screen.