Tethered to you

Chapter 1

By the time Earn Sanithada turned twenty-four, she no longer believed in coincidence.

She believed in patterns, because patterns were the only things that had ever been consistent in her life. Not good ones. Never good ones. Hers was a carefully curated sequence of small disasters that escalated precisely in proportion to how much something mattered to her.

When she was six, she tripped on stage during her first school play and split her chin open. When she was twelve, the science fair volcano she’d worked on for weeks erupted too early, coating the judges in red foam. At sixteen, the car she studied for months to drive broke down during her license test. At twenty-two, her college laptop crashed the night before her final thesis submission.

Every incident could be explained individually. Faulty wiring. Wet floors. Human error. That was what people said, what "logic" insisted.

But logic did not account for consistency.

Earn  woke every morning with a familiar, low-level tension in her chest, as if the day itself were a trap she needed to cross carefully. She had learned not to expect smoothness, not to trust ease. The days that started well were the most dangerous. They lulled her into forgetting herself.

On this particular morning, she woke fifteen minutes earlier than usual. That alone felt suspicious.

She lay still, staring at the water stain on her ceiling, mentally cataloging everything that could go wrong. The coffee maker might overflow. The bus might break down. Her phone might die. Something would happen. It always did.

She moved cautiously, like someone crossing thin ice.

The coffee maker sputtered, then stopped. She waited. Nothing spilled. No sparks flew. The silence made her uneasy. She poured the coffee into a travel mug and tightened the lid twice.

It was when she reached for her bag that the strap snapped clean off, sending the contents scattering across the floor.

Earn  closed her eyes.

“Of course,” she whispered.

She didn’t scream or cry. She never did anymore. Reactions felt wasted on inevitability. She gathered her things with practiced efficiency, tied a temporary knot in the strap, and checked the time.

Still early. Another warning sign.

Outside, the city hummed with its usual indifference. Cars passed. People walked. No one flinched at the way she scanned her surroundings, calculating probabilities. The cracked sidewalk ahead. The unstable-looking construction scaffolding. The cyclist weaving too close to the curb.

Her bus arrived late. When it did, it stalled halfway through the route.

Earn  got off and walked the remaining distance, heart pounding not from exertion but from expectation. She reached her destination, a modest office building, and paused before entering.

This was only a preliminary meeting. Low stakes. Which meant the disaster would likely be small. A printer jam. A spilled drink. Something humiliating but survivable.

She stepped inside.

Ten minutes later, the fire alarm went off.

The meeting was canceled. Again.

Earn sat on the steps outside afterward, notebook balanced on her knee. The notebook was thick, dog-eared, and meticulously organized. She flipped to a fresh page and wrote the date, the time, the incident.

"Fire alarm malfunction. Only this building. Only during my meeting."

She capped the pen and stared at the page.

People passed by, laughing, complaining, living in a version of reality that seemed to operate by different rules. Earn  felt like she was watching through glass.

She didn’t think she was cursed. Curses implied intention, and intention implied meaning. This felt colder than that.

This felt like math.

And whatever equation governed her life, she was the variable that caused collapse.