Senna hadn't left the cabin in three days.
Not really.
She paced. Wrote. Scratched out what she wrote. Tried again. She didn't eat much. Didn't sleep at all. Her eyes had gone glassy from reading and re-reading the same lines until they blurred.
The manuscript she'd sent Marianne was now growing into something else, something darker.
Because a new envelope had arrived.
No return address, again. Same handwriting. Same sterile, precise folds. Inside: a single sheet of paper, and one word typed neatly across the top:
"Rewrite."
Below that was a paragraph, barely fifty words. A description of a woman in a yellow coat. The corner of 6th and Palmer. A scream that never came. A pair of blue gloves. A name she hadn't heard in years.
Senna dropped the page like it burned.
It was her line.
Not just her voice, her rhythm. Her choices. Her fingerprints on the sentence.
But she hadn't written it.
At least, she didn't think she had.
And that was what terrified her most.
By noon, she'd pulled out every notebook from the last five years. The unpublished ones. The half-dreamed drafts. The ones she started while shaking or sobbing or slipping out of reality.
She scanned them, page by page.
Until she found it.
Buried in the middle of a spiral-bound blue book, water-damaged and full of broken paragraphs, was the original version of the scene in the envelope.
She had written it. Two years ago. During a blackout week she didn't remember.
Only this time, someone had taken it, edited it and brought it to life.
Which meant they had her journals.
Which meant… someone had been here.
She looked at the cabin door. The windows. The lock she thought was secure.
And for the first time in five years, she felt completely exposed.
She burned the blue notebook.
She didn't do it out of rage. She did it because she needed control. The fire was small, controlled in the stove, but it gave her something physical to hold onto.
As the pages curled and blackened, Senna stood silent, watching the smoke curl up like script.
"I'm not your narrator," she whispered. "I'm not your puppet."
But even she wasn't sure who she was saying it to.
That night, she started a new document on her laptop.
Not a journal. Not a story.
A list.
Who has access to my writing?
My editor .... dead, two years ago.
Marianne ... only parts. Never the full drafts.
Elias Mercer ....not directly, but he read me. Dissected me. Could've sourced them.
Him .... if he's real. If I didn't imagine him.
She stared at that last line a long time.
Then added:
What if he never left?
Outside, the rain had stopped.
But the quiet left behind was worse.
Senna turned off every light and sat in the darkness, manuscript in hand. She read it like a map, trying to trace back the thread. Trying to find the place where it all unraveled.
And there it was.
Page forty-eight.
The line she wrote five years ago and never shared with anyone:
"The final page is always hers."
It had been a throwaway. A metaphor. A whisper of rebellion.
But now it read like a sentence. Like a promise.
Or a warning.