Turn 5 of 12

Scroll through the ledger to see if there's any pattern or rule you missed

You scroll back to the top of the ledger. Your eyes move across the entries the way they'd move across a contract, looking for the clause that saves you — a rule, a pattern, some logic in the ordering that tells you how this works and how to stop it. The timestamps climb steadily: 3:04, 3:11, 3:19, 3:28, 3:34, 3:47. Gaps of seven minutes, eight, nine, six, thirteen. No rhythm. No acceleration. Just the record of a person typing through the small hours, each entry a little further from caution than the last.

The statuses don't help either. The first is GRANTED. The other six — seven, now, seven — are all PENDING, identical grey capitals, no priority, no queue order, no indication of which one moves next. You look for a button, a link, a settings icon, anything that suggests the page exists inside a larger system. There is nothing. The box at the top, the ledger below. The word CONFESS. You check the URL bar — the same meaningless string of characters from last night, no domain name you recognize, no path structure, no query parameters. You try selecting text below the ledger to see if there's hidden content, and your cursor drags through empty white space that goes on longer than the screen should allow.

One thing catches your eye. The first confession, the one marked GRANTED — it was timestamped 3:04 AM. You received the email from Cecilia Aldenhof at 6:47 AM. Three hours and forty-three minutes between the confession and the grant. If that interval means anything, if there's a processing time, then the second confession — 3:11 AM, the one about being seen — has been pending for over four hours. It should have granted by now. Unless the timing isn't fixed. Unless something else determines when a confession activates.

You scroll back to the seventh entry, the one you just added. 7:12 AM. *I want her to be free to choose or not choose me on her own.* It sits at the bottom of the ledger like a counterweight to the sixth, and for a moment you let yourself imagine that they might cancel each other — two contradictory wants, mutually exclusive, the universe forced to choose. But you know that's not how this works. The site doesn't cancel. It adds. And if both grant, if both become real, then Meera will need you desperately and also be free to choose — and the collision of those two things inside one person is something you don't want to think about.

Your phone buzzes against the table. The call has gone to voicemail. A notification drops down: a new text from Meera, three words. *I'm coming over.* You stare at the screen, at the ledger, at the seven entries that are all some version of you at your worst and most honest, and you have maybe twenty minutes before she's at your door, asking questions you can't answer without showing her what you typed.