The days that followed felt like a blur. My body had returned to the familiar rhythm of life, but my mind? It was still lost in the fractures of the other timeline. Emily’s face haunted me, her voice lingering in the spaces between my thoughts. The promise I made to her, the weight of it, was always there, pulling me forward even as I tried to piece my own life back together.

I woke up each morning to the same gray sky, the same soft hum of city traffic in the distance. Everything was as it had always been, and yet it wasn’t. Nothing felt real anymore. Not without her.

I spent hours at the workshop, but it was no longer the sanctuary it once was. The hum of machinery, the faint scent of oil and metal—it should’ve been comforting, but now it only felt hollow. Every tool, every device, every unfinished project stared back at me, mocking me for not being able to fix what was truly broken.

I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was missing something, or someone. The device still sat on my coffee table, dormant and silent, but its mere presence felt like a tether to something I couldn’t touch anymore. Something I had let go of.

One evening, after another fruitless attempt at getting any real work done, I found myself walking aimlessly through the rain-soaked streets of the city. The dull gray clouds above mirrored my mood, heavy and oppressive. The world felt muted, like a dream that refused to let me wake.

I didn’t know where I was going. I just needed to be somewhere else, somewhere that didn’t remind me of the fractured timeline I had left behind. My feet carried me through familiar streets, past storefronts that seemed unchanged, as though the city itself was untouched by time.

That’s when I saw her.

At first, I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. The figure standing across the street, under the dim glow of a streetlamp, looked like Emily. But it couldn’t be her. She was gone. I had left her behind, along with everything else.

I rubbed my eyes and blinked, but the figure didn’t disappear. She was real, standing there with her back to me, as if waiting for something—or someone.

I moved closer, my heart racing in my chest. Each step felt heavier than the last, as though the world itself was slowing me down, forcing me to question whether I really wanted to confront what I was seeing.

“Emily?” I called out, my voice shaking.

The figure turned slowly, and for a moment, time seemed to stop. Her face was familiar, but there was something different about her, something distant. The look in her eyes wasn’t the warmth I remembered. It was colder. And the faintest flicker of confusion crossed her features.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“Rohan?” she said, her voice a whisper lost in the rain.

I stopped in my tracks. My breath caught in my throat as I tried to reconcile the woman in front of me with the memory of Emily I had left behind. This wasn’t the same person. It couldn’t be.

But she was still here. And somehow, that meant everything had changed.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, my voice hoarse.

She tilted her head, her expression unreadable. “I was waiting for you.”

My chest tightened. “Waiting for me? But I—I left you behind. I’m not supposed to be here.”

She took a step forward, her gaze softening, though there was a trace of something unfamiliar in her eyes—an emptiness that made my heart ache. “I know. But sometimes, Rohan, things aren’t as simple as they seem.”

I shook my head, trying to push away the confusion clouding my thoughts. “I don’t understand. You were part of another timeline. You’re not supposed to exist here.”

Emily’s lips curled into a faint smile, though it lacked the warmth I once knew. “Is that what you think?”

I wanted to reach out to her, to bridge the gap between what was real and what wasn’t, but I couldn’t. There was something off about her, something I couldn’t put my finger on. And it terrified me.

“I don’t know what’s real anymore,” I admitted, the weight of my words sinking in. “I thought I’d left everything behind. But now I don’t even know who you are. Or what I am.”

Her eyes softened, a flicker of understanding passing through them. “Maybe you don’t need to know yet. Maybe you just need to trust that everything will make sense in time.”

“But what if it doesn’t?” I asked, my voice breaking. “What if I’m just a shadow of who I was? A ghost in this place that doesn’t belong to me?”

Her expression turned more serious, her gaze piercing. “Maybe you’re not just a shadow, Rohan. Maybe you’re exactly where you need to be. You just have to figure out why.”

I stepped back, my head spinning. “I can’t stay here. I can’t keep pretending that everything’s fine when I know it isn’t.”

She didn’t move, didn’t try to stop me as I turned and walked away. But I could feel her eyes on my back, the weight of her presence lingering like a shadow that refused to be cast away. I kept walking, my steps growing more frantic as I fought the urge to turn around and look at her again.

When I reached my apartment, the door closed behind me with a dull thud. I collapsed onto the couch, my hands trembling as I ran them through my hair.

What had just happened? Was she real? Or was she another fragment of the timeline, a remnant that somehow found its way here?

I glanced at the device on the coffee table. It was still dormant, still quiet. But the questions it raised—questions I wasn’t sure I wanted the answers to—gnawed at me.

What if everything I had done, everything I had tried to fix, was for nothing? What if I was always meant to return to this moment, this reality, where nothing made sense?

I didn’t have the answers. But one thing was clear: I couldn’t run from it anymore. The past, the fractures, Emily—everything was tangled up together in a way I couldn’t understand.

But maybe it didn’t need to make sense. Maybe the only thing that mattered was moving forward, one step at a time.

I reached for the device again, and for the first time since my return, I didn’t feel the weight of uncertainty pressing down on me. I was still broken. Still searching. But I wasn’t alone.

Not anymore.