The sketchbook lies on the floor between us like a confession. A beautiful, damning, undeniable confession.
The silence in the now-empty classroom is a living thing. It's thick with the scent of charcoal and unspoken questions. The page is splayed open, a mosaic of my face staring up at the fluorescent lights. Haunted Marcus. Confused Marcus. Smiling Marcus from some memory she shouldn't have. It's an intimate, terrifying window into her subconscious, and it's just lying there, exposed.
Sophia doesn't move. She's frozen in the doorway, a statue carved from mortification. I can see the tension in the rigid line of her shoulders, the way her hands are clenched at her sides. Her back is to me, but I know she's acutely, painfully aware of me, of my eyes on the sketchbook, on her.
This is a crossroads. In any normal high school rom-com, this is the moment where I'm supposed to be the charming hero. I should walk over, pick up the book with a gentle, non-threatening smile, hand it back to her, and say something suave and reassuring. Something like, "Wow, you're a really talented artist."
But this isn't a normal rom-com. And my life isn't normal. The thought of being charming feels like a lie. Every instinct I have is screaming, but not in a single, unified direction. One part of me wants to run, to spare her the humiliation of this moment. Another, darker part of me wants her to be exposed, to be forced to confront the impossible connection between us.
But the part of me that has loved her across forty-seven forgotten days—that part just wants her to not be in pain.
I don't stand up. I don't move toward the book. I just stay in my seat and wait, giving her the space to make the next move. This is her decision. Her moment to either run from the evidence or to claim it.
An eternity passes in the space of about fifteen seconds.
Then, she moves. Slowly, like she's wading through thick mud, she turns around.
She finally looks at me.
Her face is pale, her expression stripped of all its usual defenses. There's no witty armor, no cool detachment. All I see is a raw, profound vulnerability. Her gray eyes are wide, and they're not just looking at me; they're searching me, pleading for some kind of answer that I don't have.
She takes a slow step back into the room, then another. She doesn't break eye contact. It feels like she's walking a tightrope, and my gaze is the only thing keeping her balanced.
She stops in front of the sketchbook, but she doesn't bend down to pick it up. She just stares down at it, at the scattered evidence of her obsession.
"I don't know why I did that," she whispers, her voice so quiet it's almost swallowed by the cavernous silence of the classroom. The words aren't for me. They're for herself. An attempt to explain the unexplainable.
My heart aches for her. To be haunted by a feeling you can't name, to be drawn to a person who is a stranger—I can't imagine how isolating that must feel. For me, the loop is a prison I understand. For her, it must feel like her own mind is betraying her.
"It's okay," I say, my own voice soft.
That's when she finally looks away from the book and back at me, her expression shifting into something sharper. Frustration. Anger. "No, it's not okay," she says, her voice gaining a harder edge. "It's weird. Why do I keep… why are you everywhere?"
The question hangs in the air, a direct hit. It's the question that's been shadowing her for three days, and she's finally voicing it.
I have a thousand answers, and none of them are the truth. Because the universe is a romantic sadist. Because our souls are entangled. Because I'm trapped in a time loop and I've memorized the map that leads me back to you.
I decide on a fraction of the truth. The only part I can give her.
"I don't know," I say, and it's the most honest thing I've said all day. "But I… I feel it, too."
Her breath hitches. A flicker of something—not fear, but maybe recognition—passes through her eyes. "Feel what?"
"This," I say, gesturing vaguely at the space between us, at the sketchbook on the floor, at the silent, humming tension. "This feeling that… that we've met before."
I watch her process this, watch her internal battle play out across her features. Part of her wants to call me crazy, to shut this down, to retreat back into the safety of logic and reason. But the other part of her, the part that dreams of infinite libraries and wakes up sad, knows I'm not lying.
She swallows hard. "I… My whole life, I've had this feeling," she says, her voice trembling slightly. "Like I'm waiting for someone. Like I'm missing something I've never actually had. And then you showed up, and… it's gotten louder." She gestures at the sketchbook again. "So I tried to draw it out. To see if it would make sense on paper. It didn't."
My chest feels tight, full of a feeling too big to name. It's a mix of validation and a deep, crushing sorrow. She's felt it her whole life. The echo of me, of us, has been a part of her from the beginning. This isn't just a forty-seven-day loop. This is so much bigger than that.
She finally bends down and picks up the sketchbook, closing it gently. She holds it to her chest like a shield.
"I have this… I'm scared of things," she says, looking at a point somewhere over my shoulder. It's a confession. A monumental act of trust. "I'm scared of people getting close. I'm scared of them… leaving."
I know about her parents. I know about the fear of abandonment that she channels into her art, that she hides behind a wall of detached wit. In Cycle 1, she told me about this on Day 38. We're on Day 3. Everything is accelerating. She's letting me in, even though every instinct she has is telling her to run.
I stand up slowly, making sure my movements are calm, unthreatening. I take a step toward her.
"What if they stayed?" I ask quietly.
The question lands in the room with the weight of a dropped anchor. Her head snaps up, her eyes locking onto mine again. This time, they're shining with unshed tears.
What if they stayed?
It's the question that lies at the very heart of her fear. The one possibility she's never allowed herself to consider. It's the counter-argument to every defense mechanism she's ever built.
She doesn't answer. She doesn't have to. I see the answer in the tremor of her lower lip, in the way she clutches her sketchbook so tightly her knuckles are white.
I take another step, closing the distance between us until we're only a few feet apart.
"Sophia," I say, and her name feels sacred on my tongue. "I'm not going anywhere."
It's a promise I've made to a hundred different versions of her, in a hundred different timelines. But this is the first time it feels like it might actually be true.
She just stares at me, her defenses completely gone, her soul laid bare in her wide, searching, heartbroken eyes. The bell for the next period is going to ring any second, shattering this fragile, impossible moment.
But for now, in the quiet of this art room, surrounded by the ghosts of a hundred of my faces, we just stand there.
And for the first time, I think she's actually starting to see me. The real me. The boy who will stay.