Headlights. Screaming brakes. His face across the road, shifting from confusion to horror as the bus came in too fast.

Asphalt against your body. Someone shouting your name.

Then Chandler, abandoning the sidewalk, sprinting straight into traffic.

Another horn. Another impact. Darkness.

You wake sucking in air like you've been underwater.

No pavement. No resort. No blood.

You're in bed.

The cheap curtains Minnie swore were cute hang crooked on their rod. There's a dent in the wall beside the closet where she backed into it with a laundry basket junior year. Textbooks spread across the desk in that fatal order you only ever achieve during finals.

For several seconds you can't move.

Then you look at your hands.

Young. Unlined. No wedding band.

You're up and moving before you decide to be. The bathroom door bangs off the wall. Fluorescent light. The mirror.

Twenty-one-year-old {y/n} stares back—wide-eyed, bare-faced, hair a mess from sleep.

You tear the apartment apart. Desk drawers. Couch cushions. Coat pockets. You finally find your phone wedged under the bed.

No pictures of three children. No family group chat. No contact listed as Holden with a heart beside it.

Just texts from Minnie about a stats quiz and a GroupMe for a class you took years ago.

They don't exist.

You're crying before you finish scrolling. Open-mouthed, sobbing into your own hands in a bedroom that smells like cheap detergent and the vanilla candle Savannah gave you that one Christmas—no. Minnie. Minnie gave you that candle.

Three knocks. A pause. Two faster ones.

Your entire body goes still.

You know that knock.

You've heard it at a hundred doors—dorm rooms, apartments, the house you bought together. You heard it the morning after he first told you he loved you. You heard it the night he came home late and you already knew.

Your hand finds the deadbolt and turns it before your brain can stop you.

Holden.

Twenty-two years old. Backpack slung over one shoulder like it weighs nothing. Thick dark hair flopping into his eyes. That jaw. That ridiculous smile already forming as the door swings open, sun on his face from the hallway window.

Every bit the boy you married.

The smile flatlines the second he sees you.

Across town, your phone starts buzzing against the floor. Minnie, probably. Or a GroupMe. Lana DelRio is at her own kitchen table, eating cereal and being twenty-two. And hours away, in a dorm room you've never seen, a quarterback your husband once hated has just checked the date on his phone for the third time.

None of that reaches you yet.

Right now there's only Holden. Holding you. Asking what's wrong.

You have about ten seconds before he asks again.