Turn 9 of 11

Close the panel and walk home before someone on the street notices you acting strange

You close the panel. Not slowly, not with the careful deliberation of someone preserving evidence — you slam it shut the way you'd slap a laptop closed at a cafe when you realised someone was reading over your shoulder. The tags vanish. The street snaps back into focus: the greyhound man is half a block away now, the bus has gone, and a woman in a green coat is walking toward you with a tag that reads just-signed-the-papers and you look away from it so fast your neck hurts.

You walk. Fast, at first — the pace of someone who needs to be inside, who needs a locked door and a flat surface and thirty minutes of silence to think — and then slower, because your legs are shaking and the shaking won't stop if you keep pushing through it. You make it to the tube station at the end of the street, tap through the gates on autopilot, and stand on the platform with your hands wrapped around your own elbows while a departure board cycles through destinations that don't matter.

The fragments are still there. k, 4, R, 9, a, x-or-something-else. Six characters, clearer than anything you pulled from Tamsin's log, and you repeat them under your breath like a mantra until the train comes and you get on and sit down and press your forehead against the cold glass of the window. The train pulls out and the tunnel swallows the light and you are alone in the dark with your reflection, which looks like a woman who has just discovered she is not the only god in the pantheon.

Three weeks. Three weeks of edits — not just to Tamsin but to you, more frequently, more carefully, a pattern of small adjustments that reads like someone studying you through a one-way mirror. prone-to-isolating added and removed and added again, like they were testing the weight of it. testing-trust-issues, appearing twice before it stuck. And believes-she-is-the-only-one-who-can-see-this — that one isn't an observation. That's a message. That's someone writing a note and slipping it under your door, and the note says: I know what you think you are, and you're wrong.

Your stop comes. You walk the four blocks home in the dark, keys ready, and let yourself in and close the door and stand in your hallway with the lights off, breathing, and the fragments are still there, still clear, and you have two days before Saturday and the question is no longer whether someone is editing you. It's whether they're editing you the way you edit Tamsin — carelessly, lovingly, without permission — or whether they're doing something else entirely. Something you haven't named yet.