Strings of Fate: The First Loop

CHAPTER 30

-----Betty-----

I saw him again.

That boy. The one who feels like a memory I never made.

We're back in that same field of flowers, but the petals look softer this time, like they’re made of colored glass catching the sun through a stained window. The light bends around him in a prism haze. He’s kneeling, not like someone who prays, but like someone who’s been crushed. Head down. Fingers pressed into the dirt like it’s the only thing tethering him to the world.

I don’t even speak. I just walk toward him. Carefully. Quietly. The grass brushes against my ankles like silk. I offer my hand.

He doesn’t look up. Not at first.

Then the mountains behind him begin to groan. A low, thunderous sound, not from the sky, but from deep beneath the ground. The kind of sound that tells you something old and buried is waking up. The trees shake like matchsticks, then jolt upward as if nature itself is having a tantrum, throwing them into the sky. I grab his hand. This time, he does look up. Just for a second. His eyes are, familiar. Like the answer to a riddle I’ve been living in.

But I don’t have time to think.

We run. I drag him behind me. Fast. The air has turned to smoke and trembling. The flowers wilt as we pass them, the trees behind us crashing one by one, roots pulled like veins from the earth. The soil churns like a sea.

He starts to slow. His hand grows heavier in mine, like he's sinking into something I'm not meant to follow. But I don’t let go.

I tighten my grip. I pull him harder.
Because that’s what you do when someone’s breaking.
You pull.

Just as we reach the edge of the clearing---
The earth splits beneath us.
Like it couldn’t hold our weight anymore.
Like it was never solid to begin with.
And we fall...

Black. Weightless.

And I wake up.

I sat there on my bed, legs tucked close, the blanket bunched around me like a shield. My hair stuck to the back of my neck, damp from the dream. The memories of it were already slipping through my fingers like smoke. The boy. The flowers. The fall.

But the feeling stayed. That desperate kind of falling, not into a hole, but into someone else's heaviness. Like love had turned into gravity.

I closed my eyes and checked the jar inside me.

It was still there. Cracked.
Barely holding together.
The glass thin and shaking, threatening to burst at any second from all the sadness, anger, confusion, guilt, so many things I’d never named.

And yet… I didn’t even care about that jar anymore. Not really. Not as much as I cared about James.

My James. The way he held me last night. Like he thought I might vanish if he blinked. The way his voice cracked when he said, “Just don’t leave me.”

God.

That look in his eyes, like the world had left him too many times and he couldn’t survive one more goodbye.

And me? Of course I held him. Of course I whispered that I’d stay.

Because that’s who I’ve always been.

Even when I was fifteen and my dad came home with red-rimmed eyes and silence tucked into his pockets, I held him too. Even then.

I’ve always made space for other people’s pain, even when there wasn’t room for mine.

I reached for the photo of Mom on my nightstand, the one where she’s laughing, eyes squinting in the sun.

“Mom,” I whispered, my throat tight, “I---I’m afraid.”