Turn 7 of 12

Get the laptop back out and watch the ledger for changes

You pull the laptop out of the closet. Laundry tumbles off it — a shirt, two socks, a towel — and you carry it back to the kitchen table and open it with hands that aren't steady. The screen wakes. The browser tab is still open. The page loads in its plain white way, no banner, no loading bar, just the box and the word and the ledger below.

Seven entries. Seven PENDING statuses. Nothing has changed. You watch the screen the way you'd watch a heart monitor — waiting for a blip, a shift, anything that tells you the machine is still running. The cursor blinks in the empty box. The timestamps sit in their column like a timeline of your worst night. 3:04. 3:11. 3:19. 3:28. 3:34. 3:47. 7:12. Each one a door you opened and can't close.

The second entry stares back at you. *I want everyone who's ever looked through me to see me.* PENDING. It's been sitting there for over four hours now — longer than the first confession took to grant. You keep waiting for the grey letters to change, for the word PENDING to flush into something else, and the waiting is a kind of sickness, your stomach tight with the anticipation of a thing you can't predict. You try to feel whether it's already happening — whether the barista at the coffee shop this morning looked at you a beat too long, whether the woman in the parking lot held your eye contact a moment longer than strangers do. You can't tell. You're too tired to tell.

A knock at the door. Not a buzzer — a knock, knuckles on wood, which means she's already inside the building, which means someone let her in, which means she's here. You look at the screen. Seven confessions. Seven wants. One of them has her name on it, and she's standing on the other side of a door that's twenty feet away, and the laptop is open on the table like a wound.

Another knock. Harder. "Rowan." Her voice, muffled through the door.

"I saw your car. I know you're home. Open the door or I'm using the spare key under the mat."

You have seconds. The laptop is open. The ledger is visible. The sixth confession — the one about her, the one that would make her need you forever — is right there on the screen, plain text, undeniable. You could close it, shove it back into the closet, let her in and pretend the morning is about a bad night's sleep. Or you could leave it open and let her see what you did, what you wanted, what you asked a white box to do to her at quarter to four in the morning. The knocking comes again, three sharp raps, and her voice through the door is worried and firm and exactly the way she always sounds when she's decided she's not leaving.