Turn 10 of 13

Tell Rae about the second email and the forum reply before anything else

You pull the phone from your back pocket before Rae's kettle has finished. Your thumb finds the screen and the words come out ahead of the story she asked for — not the beginning, not the course, but the two things waiting in your inbox like hooks set in water.

"There's more. Two things came in while I was on the landing. A second email — no subject line, same address. And a forum reply in a thread I don't remember subscribing to."

Rae comes back to the doorway, dishcloth in one hand. She doesn't say *show me*. She says, "Which one first?"

"I don't know. I haven't opened either."

She sets the cloth down on the counter and comes back into the living room, pulls the armchair close, and sits. The kettle is boiling behind her and she ignores it. You hold the phone between you — the screen bright in the grey light — and the two notifications sit there, patient, unhurried, the way a suggestion sits once it's already in.

"Forum first," Rae says. "That's other people. Other people are real. Let's start there."

You tap the notification. The thread loads slowly — the forum's interface is bare, almost deliberately old-fashioned, white text on a grey field. The thread title reads *Module Three — Duration Anomaly?* and the original post is yours. You don't remember writing it. The timestamp is 2:14 AM, which is inside the forty-four minutes you lost. The body of the post is three sentences: *The induction ran longer than the transcript indicates. I lost approximately nine minutes. Has anyone else experienced a discrepancy between the audio runtime and the written script?* Nine minutes. You wrote nine, not forty-four. You told the truth as far as you knew it, and the truth as far as you knew it was wrong.

The reply is from a user called *maren_w*. Three words: *I heard it too.*