I looked around. Nothing. No light except the faint glow of the chain counter, now reading 1,000 exactly.
Then my desktop reappeared. The rain had stopped outside. My reflection in the dark window showed a woman who looked exhausted but awake. Not saved. Not fixed. Just... present.
It read: "Drea—You are on iteration 47. In iteration 12, you erased the hospital but kept the playground. In iteration 23, you hesitated for 4.7 seconds before erasing the dog. You told yourself it was because the dog looked like Buster. But Buster died in 2019, and you didn't cry then either. Why are you crying now?" obliterate everything 4
I erased the letter.
I pressed Y.
The kitchen didn't explode. It un-existed . The refrigerator didn't burst into flames—it simply stopped being a refrigerator. The geometry collapsed inward, colors inverted to negative for a frame, then everything became a smooth, featureless gray cube where the kitchen had been. A sound like a held breath being released.
I opened my email. There was a message from my mother's old account—impossible, she'd been dead for three years. But there it was. Subject line: "Christmas." I looked around
I'd just erased a library—every book, every shelf, every dust mote—when the voice said: "You have not yet asked why."