Turn 6 of 12

Answer Meera's text and try to stop her from coming

You grab the phone. Your thumbs move fast, too fast, and you delete the first message twice before you get one that doesn't sound like a confession of its own. *I'm fine. Bad night, didn't sleep. Don't come over, I look like hell and I just need to shower and pull myself together. I'll call you later.* You hit send and set the phone face-down on the table and you wait.

It buzzes almost immediately. *Too late. Already in the car. Ten minutes.* You stare at the screen and feel something close to panic, the kind that sits behind the sternum and presses outward. You can't show her the ledger. You can't not show her the ledger — she's in it, her name is in it, your want of her is in it, and if the sixth confession grants while she's sitting at this table, she'll feel it, won't she? She'll walk through your door already needing you in a way she didn't five minutes ago, and she'll think it's her own feeling, and you'll have done that to her.

You pull the laptop closer. The page is still open, the cursor still blinking, the ledger still displaying its seven entries. You look at the box and think: one more. One more confession, something specific, something that might preempt the sixth. If the site grants wants literally, then maybe a precise enough want can outrun a broad one — I want Meera to be safe from anything I've asked for, or I want the sixth confession to never grant. But you tried that. Twenty minutes ago you tried to take it back and the box swallowed your retraction and made it another line in the ledger. Every word you type here becomes another loaded chamber. The box doesn't hear *don't*. It only hears *want*.

You stand up. The chair scrapes. You close the laptop — not gracefully, a little too hard, the sound of it louder than it should be in the quiet apartment — and you carry it to the bedroom and shove it under a pile of laundry in the closet, as if not looking at the page could stop it from working. You know it can't. The page is still open on the server, or wherever it lives. The ledger is still updating. Seven confessions pending, and one of them has your best friend's name on it, and she's ten minutes away in a car, driving to you because you didn't answer your phone, and you can't decide whether that's the best or worst thing about her.

You stand in the bedroom doorway. The apartment is quiet. The morning light is stronger now, the dishwater grey warming toward something almost gold, and you can hear the building waking up around you — a door closing somewhere above, water running through pipes in the wall. You have maybe eight minutes. You could shower. You could compose yourself. You could figure out what to say to Meera when she walks in — how much to tell, what to hold back, whether to let her see the page at all. Or you could open the laptop again and look at the ledger one more time, because the second confession — the one about being seen — has been pending longest, and there's a feeling in the air you can't name, a pressure, like the room is holding its breath.