I didn't sleep.
How could I? Sora's ultimatum played on a loop in my head, a counterpoint to the phantom echo of a piano melody.
Stay away from her. You will break her. She won't remember you anyway.
Every word was a perfectly sharpened spike aimed directly at my most vulnerable points. She was right. Logic was on her side. Compassion was on her side. Every rational part of my brain screamed that walking away was the only sane, kind choice.
But my heart... my heart was a stupid, stubborn insurrectionist. It clung to the memory of Sina's face, the flicker of impossible recognition, the whispered question that had shattered the world: Who are you?
For seventy-nine days, I had lived a life defined by repetition. I knew what to expect. The pain of being forgotten, the joy of a new hello, the bitter sweetness of a perfect, fleeting day. But now, I was walking into the dark. What was the pain of being a stranger when she knew, on some impossibly deep level, that I shouldn't be?
CREAK.
I sat up in bed as the first, weak light of dawn seeped through my window. My room was grey and still. The silence felt accusatory.
The morning routine was an act of dragging a corpse through the motions. I felt hollowed out, scraped clean of the usual nervous energy that preceded a "first meeting." There would be no meeting today. No clever plan. No prophecy.
Zeke's morning text was tentative, as if he sensed the shift in the universe.
Agent Pineapple: Launch codes? Or is it… Ground control to Major Tom…?
His pop culture references were his way of asking how broken I was. I stared at the message for a full minute. Lying felt like too much effort.
Me: Mission scrubbed. Permanently.
The reply was instantaneous.
Agent Pineapple: WHAT?! No! Because of yesterday? We can fix it! Operation: I'm Not a Creepy Psychic, I Swear! I've already got ideas. It involves a wig and a fake mustache.
His loyalty was a small, warm candle in my cavernous misery.
Me: I can't, Zeke. I'll explain later. Just... stay out of it today.
Agent Pineapple: …Roger.
He knew from my tone. This wasn't a tactical retreat. This was a surrender.
The walk to school was a funeral procession for a future that had only existed for a few hours. The ghosts of past days were more potent than ever, mocking me. There was the bridge, the convenience store, the record shop. Sanctuaries that now felt like crime scenes.
When I arrived at the school gates, I saw her. And it was worse than I ever could have imagined.
She was standing under the cherry blossom tree, a lone figure in the morning crowd. She was clutching her notebook to her chest, her knuckles white. She wasn't looking at the sky or reading a book. She was scanning the faces of the students walking by, her expression a mess of anxiety and a desperate, searching hope.
She was looking for me.
The thought hit me with the force of a physical blow, stealing the air from my lungs. She didn't know who she was looking for. She had no name, no face to attach to the feeling. All she had was the ghost of yesterday's connection, an inexplicable pull towards a stranger she felt she was supposed to meet. The "static" hadn't vanished. It had lingered.
And my promise to Sora, to myself, meant that I had to let her search in vain. I had to be the missing piece.
This was a new kind of cruelty. It wasn't just about her forgetting me. It was about forcing myself to be forgotten, to deny the echo that I had so recklessly created.
I saw Sora standing near the school entrance, her eyes already locked on me. She gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. Stick to the plan.
I ducked my head, pulling the hood of my sweatshirt up, and crossed to the far side of the courtyard. Every instinct, every fiber of my being, screamed at me to walk over there, to say hello, to be the answer to the question in her eyes.
Instead, I put a football field of distance and a thousand tons of agonizing self-restraint between us.
From the corner of my eye, I watched her. Her searching gaze swept the courtyard again and again. For a horrifying moment, her eyes seemed to snag on my hooded figure, and my heart seized. But she moved on, her shoulders slumping just a little. The light in her eyes dimmed with a disappointment she couldn't even name.
I felt like a monster. This, I realized, was what Sora meant. Pushing forward would cause confusion and pain. But pulling away... seeing the effect of my absence... that was a unique and exquisite torture.
I practically ran into the school building, needing to escape her line of sight, to escape the suffocating weight of my own cowardice masquerading as compassion. I didn't slow down until I was in an empty classroom, my back pressed against the door, my breathing ragged.
My chest ached with a pain far sharper and deeper than the familiar pang of being forgotten. This was the pain of severance. The pain of deliberately, actively, cutting a thread that had miraculously refused to break.
The morning bell rang, a shrill, merciless sound that echoed the scream inside my own head.
Day 80 had begun. And for the first time, my mission wasn't to make her fall in love with me.
It was to make her stop looking.