Strings of Fate: The First Loop

CHAPTER 18

Everything slowed.

Faded.

And then—

Nothing.

It’s warm.

Too warm for the ocean.

There’s no more salt in my mouth. No more burning in my lungs.

I open my eyes.

I’m lying in the middle of the street.

But it’s not just any street.

It’s our old neighborhood—before we moved, before everything changed. There’s our tiny green gate. The mango tree. The sidewalk chalk I drew when I was eight is still there, untouched by rain or time.

The sky is soft pink. Sunset, or maybe sunrise. The air smells like my mother’s soap and grilled meat from the neighbor’s backyard.

I sit up slowly.

My body doesn’t hurt anymore.

I look down. I’m wearing a yellow dress—my favorite one from years ago, the one I outgrew but never threw away. It’s not wet. I’m not wet. My skin glows golden.

I turn—and I see her.

Mom.

She’s sitting on the front step of our old house, legs crossed, a book in her lap.

She looks up and smiles.

Like she’d been waiting for me.

“Mom?” My voice breaks.

She nods, like this is all perfectly normal.

“Hi, anak.”

I run to her.

She doesn’t say much. She just opens her arms, and I fall into them.

She smells the same. Feels the same. Her fingers stroke my hair the same way they did when I used to cry into her lap after a bad day at school.

I hold her tight. Afraid to let go.

She hums.

That tune.

The one she used to sing while washing the dishes, when I couldn’t sleep, when Dad would come home late and quiet.

I pull back.

“You’re not really here, are you?” I whisper.

She cups my face, thumbs brushing my cheeks.

“No, baby,” she says. “But you are.”

I blink.

“But I don’t want to go,” I say. “I want to stay here. With you.”

She smiles sadly. “You can’t. Not yet.”

“I lost your bracelet,” I admit, tears welling in my eyes. “I tried to find it, I—I couldn’t just let it go—”

She leans in, kisses my forehead.

“You didn’t lose me.”

I shake my head, crying harder. “But it was all I had left.”

“No,” she says. “You have your father. You have James. You have your fire. That bracelet was only a piece of me, anak. But what we had? That’s in here.”

She presses her hand over my heart.

“And I’ll stay there.”

The world begins to flicker. Like the sun is dimming.

“I don’t want to leave you,” I whisper again.

“I know,” she says. “But it’s not your time.”

Her voice is fading. The colors are bleeding into white.

“But what if I forget your voice?”

“You won’t.”

She steps back.

And I’m alone on the sidewalk.

Then—rain.

Soft, warm, falling through the pink sky.

I look up.

And suddenly—

Pain.

Cold.

Screaming.

Not mine.

James.

“BETTY! BETTY, PLEASE!”

His voice cuts through everything like a blade.

And just like that—

The dream breaks.

The memory fades.

And I am rising, coughing, choking, being pulled back into a world of pain, of arms around me, of someone sobbing into my hair—

But I am alive.

And I am breathing.

The sea did not win.

Not tonight.