The Turning Point

It started with a headline: “Local Man Dies In Train Collision.” the article read. The picture underneath showed a man named Peter Lockwood, his smile was wide and unaware that he would be dead in three days.

Lena Carter stared at the picture on her phone. She didn’t know Peter. She had not heard of him until that very moment. She clicked on the article. Her heart pounded as if some part of her already knew what was coming.

But when she tried to find the article the next day it was gone. No record. Not even a cached version. She asked her roommate, Aria, if she had seen anything strange.

“You okay?” Aria asked. “You looked like you just saw a ghost.”

“I think I did.” Lena mumbled. “Or I will.”

Day One: The First Ripple

Lena worked at a bookstore downtown. The bookstore was right in the middle of a bakery and a flower shop. On her break she would walk past the train station each day to the coffee shop where they sold her favorite blend of coffee. That’s when she saw him, Peter Lockwood. He was wearing the same jacket and the same kind smile.

Alive.

She was compelled by something she could not explain. Lena yelled to Peter.

“Hey, you dropped something.”

He turned around and looked confused. “I don’t think so.”

“Your phone.” She held up her phone as if it were his.

He walked over towards her. That’s all she needed. She told him the truth.

“You’re going to die in a train accident in two days. I saw the article.”

His friendly smile faded. “That is either some kind of elaborate lie or a bad joke.”

“I’m not joking.”

He looked directly in her eyes confused. “How could you possibly know that?”

“I don’t know.” She admitted. “But I think if you know what is going to happen. I can stop it. I can change it.”

He should have just walked away or even ran away but instead he missed the train that day. He didn’t die.

Lena didn’t fully understand the rules yet. But one thing that was clear: knowing the future was not enough. It had to be SHARED.

The moment someone else knew what was going to happen the thread could be cut and rewoven.

Peter e-mailed her the next week. “Still alive. Not sure how or why. But thank you.”

She couldn’t sleep for two nights in a row after that. The weight of it all sunk in. She could alter fates but only for those who believed her. And only when she told them.

Day Five: The Rules Become Clear

The visions came like dreams but sharper and sometimes crueler. A girl drawing in her own backyard swimming pool. A woman was struck by lightning while jogging in the rain. A boy was crushed by a falling tree branch in the park.

Lena kept a notebook with recordings of everything. Name. Location. Date. Cause and a column labeled TOLD OR NOT TOLD.

The results were terrifying and consistent. The ones she warned lived. The ones she didn’t–did exactly as she had seen. Then came the dilemma.

Who should she tell?

What if they didn’t believe her and thought she was insane? What if she altered too much?

So, she experimented.

When she told her barista, Cole, that he was going to spill coffee and fall and crack his skull in the alley when he took out the trash he laughed. He showed her the mop in the corner of the store.

Later he texted her: “I watched a guy slip where I usually walk in the alley and he broke his wrist. Thanks???”

But when she warned a woman named Dr. Ester Lin about a plane crash the woman ignored her and died. Lena found out about the crash online. That crushed her and she cried for two hours.

Day Twelve: The Catch

Aria walked into the apartment holding a flyer. “Have you ever heard of this guy? Nate Grey?”

“No.” Lena said cautiously.

“Apparently he has been talking about the idea of the future. He said that the future only shifts if someone expects it to.” Aria laughed. “It reminds me weirdly of you and your visions.”

Lena froze. She had not told Aria about the visions, not the real ones. She never told her about the death notebook, not even about Peter.

Until now.

It was a strange relief to tell her everything. Aria sat through it quietly and turned pale.

“Do you know anything about me?” She finally asked.

“Nothing bad.” Lena said.

“Good. I want to help. But, Lena, this is not sustainable. You can’t do this forever. You’re playing God with people’s lives.”

“No, I am trying to save them.”

“But what are the consequences? What are their choices?”

“What about their lives, Aria? What if I am making them better?”

Aria didn’t argue back.

But that night something changed between them. That night Lena had a dream of Aria on a rooftop. And the word JUMP.

Day Thirteen: The Choice

Lena didn’t want to believe it. But when she had visions they always came true. They have never been wrong.

Aria, her best friend, laughing one minute and the next falling. The paper she was holding fell off the balcony and floated down to the ground.

Lena confronted her friend.

“You’re not thinking about doing anything stupid are you?”

Aria looked at her friend confused and narrowed her eyes. “What are you talking about?”

“I saw…I think something bad is coming. You are on a rooftop and…”

“I work across the street from a bar called The Rooftop. Lena, are you trying to psychoanalyze my every move? If you are, maybe you should not have told me anything.”

“Well, you told me that you wanted to help.”

“I didn’t know that helping meant I was becoming your next vision.”

The silence between them stretched before it snapped.

That night Lena didn’t sleep. She watched the clock until the sun rose. She ran outside. She ran the ten blocks until she reached the Rooftop bar across the street from Ari’s workplace. And there she was. She was just sitting down on the ground looking down.

Lena didn’t yell. She just walked over to her and whispered, “You don’t have to fall.”

Aria looked at her. Her face was wet. “I wasn’t going to. I always come up here to think. I just came here to get it together when I don’t know anymore.”

They sat together until the morning light made everything seem less impossible.

Day Twenty: The Power Shifts

Word started to spread quietly. People who know someone had been “saved.” A whispered referral network. Lena’s inbox was filled with requests.

“I had a dream that I lost my puppy. Can you tell me if that is true?”

“My brother’s been seeing things. Should we be worried?”

“I’ll pay anything. Please tell me where my missing daughter is. Is she safe?”

And she did.

One by one she gave them fragments of their futures. And sometimes they changed. But a pattern emerged.

Only if they heard her words and accepted them into their whole beings, to their bones.

If they dismissed her and what she told them fate continued to be unbent.

That’s when she met Nate Gray.

Day Twenty-Five: The Man Who Knew

He found her outside the bookstore. “You’ve been changing the timelines.” He said with no introduction.

“Who are you?”

“I study people like you. Or rather the results of people like you. Ever wonder why the visions only alter when shared?”

She nodded.

He smiled. “It’s a paradox. The future is not fixed but reinforced by belief. When someone knows their fate it becomes less stable. Like looking at a shadow closely. It shifts.”

“So I tell them and it changes?”

“No. You tell them and they believe and belief makes the timeline malleable.”

She crossed her arms. “And what do you want from me?”

“I want you to stop.”

She blinked. “What?”

“You’re altering the natural course of too many lives. What about those who die because someone else didn’t. What about the future of someone who was saved but not meant to be? What about the future that should have happened?”

“I don’t care about fate.” She snapped. “I care about people.”

“And what if I told you that the more people you save the less stable you become?”

“What are you talking about?”

He handed her a mirror. And for a second her reflection flickered.

Gone.

Day Thirty: The Cost

Lena began fading in photos. Friends forgot the little things about her. People she saved walked past her like they were strangers. The more futures she changed the less she became connected to her own.

She kept a journal now. Not of the deaths and the saved but of herself now. Her favorite color. Books she loved. Names of people she knew and loved. Names of her childhood pets. One by one the entries blurred. She tried to stop. For one week she ignored the visions. Three people had died. One man she passed in a park. She couldn’t ignore the visions anymore. She made a decision.

Day Thirty-Four: The Final Share

Lena wrote a letter.

“If you are reading this you already know something is wrong. You’ve felt the pull, the dream, the sense that something should have happened but it didn’t. That’s because I changed it. I’ve been changing everything as much as I could. And now I am disappearing because of it.

But, if you believe this, if you can accept this fact that I existed and that I mattered maybe I could stay a little longer. Tell someone. Tell them that I mattered. And tell them what I did. Because it is maybe the only future I have left.”

She mailed it to Aria. And then she waited.

Day Forty: The Voice That Called Back

She woke up to a knock on her bedroom door. It was Aria. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. And she was holding the letter in her hand.

“I remember.” She said. “I remember that you saved me.”

Lena’s voice cracked. “I thought I was gone.”

“I told people, all of them, about you and the lives you have touched. About how real you are. And they believe. We all believe.”

And just like that the color rushed back into Lena’s reflection.

She smiled. Because belief hadn’t just changed her fate. It saved her.