The sunrise on Day 86 was the first honest one I'd seen in three months. There were no plans to make, no scenarios to rehearse, no lies to prepare. There was only the raw, terrifying, and profoundly hopeful reality of what had happened last night.
My hug with Sina in the courtyard had not magically fixed everything. It had been a cease-fire, not a peace treaty. After our five minutes were up, Dr. Thorne had called us back in, and the evening had ended with a clear, clinical directive: space. Sina needed time to process. To sleep. To wake up and see what remained after the emotional earthquake.
I didn't expect to hear from anyone. So when my phone buzzed at 7 a.m. with a message from Sora, my heart seized.
Sora: She's awake. She read the notes.
The old notes. The ones that described her condition in stark, unflinching terms. I typed back, my fingers trembling slightly.
Me: And?
A few agonizing seconds passed before the reply came.
Sora: And then she opened the new folder on her laptop. The one I made last night. It's called 'The Archives.' She's watching the videos. By herself.
I dropped my phone on the bed, my legs suddenly weak. She was choosing to remember. She was actively, deliberately walking back into the fire. The bravery of it staggered me.
Sora: Our instructions from Dr. Thorne are clear. Non-interference. We observe. But… she asked me to send you this.
A new message popped up. It was a single line of text from Sina, forwarded by Sora.
Sina: Can you meet me at the bridge? Before school?
The bridge. The place of confession. The place of shattering. It was a deliberate choice. A return to the scene of the crime, or perhaps, the scene of the genesis.
My reply was instantaneous. Me: On my way.
The walk to the bridge was a journey into the complete unknown. I had no idea who I was going to meet there. Would it be the hurt, betrayed girl from yesterday? The brave, curious girl from the end of the night? Or a new version, one forged in the strange crucible of watching her own lost life on a laptop screen?
She was there when I arrived. She was leaning against the railing, facing the river, her lilac hair a soft slash of color against the grey morning. She was wearing the same cardigan as last night. Beside her on the railing, incongruously, sat the lopsided blue bear, Agent Blue.
She had brought a relic. An artifact from a lost day, a day she had now witnessed but still couldn't feel.
I approached slowly, cautiously. "Hey," I said, my voice quiet, afraid to break the fragile morning calm.
She turned, and my breath caught. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, evidence of a long and difficult night. But behind the exhaustion, there was a new clarity. The frantic, terrified confusion was gone. In its place was a deep, soul-shaking sadness, but it was a calm sadness. A sadness that knew its own name.
"Hey," she replied, her voice soft and a little raspy. "I... watched twenty-three of them."
Twenty-three days. Twenty-three forgotten lives, all consumed in a single night. "Sina..." I started, not knowing what to say.
"Day 54 was my favorite," she said, cutting me off, her gaze returning to the water. "The one where you tried to teach me how to skip stones, but you were terrible at it. And I was... I was really good. The girl on the screen... she looked so proud." A small, watery smile touched her lips. "I don't remember how to do it. Skip stones, I mean. But I remember watching myself know how. It's the strangest feeling."
She was speaking of her other self not as an object of envy, but as a sister, a past life she was getting to know.
"I am so sorry," I said, the words feeling heavy and inadequate. "For all of it. The lying. The confusion I caused. For..."
"Stop," she said, finally turning to face me fully. She picked up the blue bear, holding it in front of her like a small, soft shield. "The person I need to hear 'sorry' from most... is me."
I stared at her, confused.
"I read my notebook this morning," she explained. "My old entries. Before you. Before the 'Cat Rescue.' It's all just... lists. Weather reports. What Sora and I ate for dinner. Schedules. It's so... empty." She hugged the bear tighter. "That girl on the videos... she wasn't just happy because of you. She was happy because she was living. She was skipping class. She was getting into trouble. She was eating too much sugar and staying out until sunset. She was taking risks."
Her gaze met mine, and it was raw, honest, and devastating. "And every single night, I would come home and write it all down... and then in the morning, the next version of me would wake up, read it, and be too scared to do any of it. Too scared to be a burden. Too scared of the unknown. You built a thousand beautiful days for her, Kelin. And every single morning... I'm the one who threw them all away."
The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow. She wasn't blaming me for the lie. She was blaming herself for the forgetting. She saw the cycle not as a medical condition, but as a personal failure. A failure of nerve.
"Sina, no," I said, stepping closer. "That's not your fault. That's not a choice you make. It's..."
"But it feels like one now," she insisted, her voice trembling. "Watching the videos... I see the lie, yes. But I also see what the lie gave her. What it gave me. A reason to be brave. An excuse to feel something." She looked down at the bear in her arms. "I don't remember winning this. I don't remember being brave enough to face a stupid claw machine. But watching her do it... it makes me want to be."
This was the core of it. The raw, painful, beautiful paradox. The lie had been a cage, but inside that cage, she had been free. Now, with the truth, she was free of the cage, but terrified of the world outside it.
She took a shaky breath, gathering all her courage. "So. Day 86," she said, her voice small but firm. "I don't... know what to do. I don't know who you are to me. The liar? The boy from the videos? The stranger from my dream?"
She looked me directly in the eyes, her gaze steady for the first time. "But I know I don't want to go back to just... writing down the weather. I don't want to throw today away."
She held the blue bear out, an offering. "So. I have a really bad memory," she said, a fragile, hopeful smile on her lips. "My name is Sina. It's nice to meet you. For the first... and last... time."
It was a reset. A conscious one. An invitation. Not to lie, not to pretend, but to start over. For real, this time. Day 1. The first honest sunrise.
My heart, which had been broken into a million pieces, started to beat again, slow and steady. A real smile, the first one in days, spread across my face.
I gently took the bear from her hands. "I'm Kelin," I said, my voice thick with an emotion that was too vast for any single word. "It's nice to meet you too."