Martin walked away from the Mioro house, the ghost of Oliver’s tears still hanging in the air behind him. The night was cold, the streets quiet. As he passed a modest, well-kept home, a scene through the brightly lit window stopped him dead.

  Inside, a family—a father, a mother, and a little girl no older than six—were in the middle of a living room dance party. The father lifted the giggling girl onto the dining table, where she spun in clumsy, joyful circles. Her parents clapped along, their faces alight with love and laughter, a silent song of pure contentment.

  Martin sank onto the cold curb across the street, a spectator to a life he couldn’t touch. He thought, I must have been that happy once. But when he tried to reach for the memory, it was like grasping smoke. The disease, the fear, the loneliness—they had erased the blueprint of his own joy.

  He watched the little girl, so blissfully unaware of the world’s sharp edges. Will she end up like me one day? The thought was a lead weight. She doesn’t know. That’s good. I wish I didn’t know either. He replayed his own short life, searching for the pivot point, the single decision that could have steered him away from this precipice. He found none.

  Then, a new sound encroached on the quiet. A low, building roar. An angry crowd. He looked toward the city center and saw it—the ominous, dancing glow of torchlight reflecting off building facades in the distance. The hijacked protest. They were on the move.

  His hand went to his phone. Instinct said fire department. But this was arson, a crime. He deleted the number and dialed the police. His voice was calm, detached, as he relayed the information: “A group has broken off from the protest. They’re armed with torches. Their first target is the City Manager’s residence on Wellington Lane. They intend to burn it.”

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  He hung up. The duty was done. He could go home now.

  But his feet didn’t turn toward home. They stayed planted, pointing back the way he had come. Oliver’s words, which had felt like noise before, now echoed with a different frequency. “Giving up doesn’t end pain. It just passes it on.”

  He saw Ava’s sneering face, her friends’ cruel laughter, Oliver on his knees. He saw the little girl spinning on the table.

  What can a dead man do to live again? The question wasn’t about a cure. It was about meaning. If he could snatch them from the fire… if he could do that one, final, undeniable good… could he, in that moment, be worthy of taking another breath?

  The walk back began slowly, then quickened. Then he was running, his bruised body screaming in protest, his lungs burning not with illness now, but with purpose. He had to get there first.

  —

  Sadie, the newspaper clutched in her hand, was also running, her heart pounding with a desperate, giddy hope. She dodged through familiar streets, the address she’d overheard Martin mention fixed in her mind. She imagined bursting in, seeing his face, watching the impossible news rewrite his future—their future. She rounded the corner onto Wellington Lane, the large Mioro house coming into view. The front door was slightly ajar. Perfect, she thought, too thrilled for formalities. She didn’t knock. She pushed it open and hurried inside.

  ---

  Martin hit the front door at a sprint. He burst into the foyer, taking the stairs two at a time, his voice raw as he shouted up to the party room. “EVERYONE! YOU HAVE TO GET OUT! NOW!”

  But as the words left his mouth, the world warped. Time stretched, slowed to a viscous crawl. A deep, primal sense of wrongness seized him—a feeling that his life was a plate about to shatter on the floor. Why?

  He didn’t see the arc of the molotov cocktail hurled from the shouting mob now filling the street. He didn’t see it sail over the fence. He didn’t see its flaming rag connect with the external pipe of the house’s large gas supply line.

  In the frozen moment:

  -Sadie was on the first step of the staircase, looking up.

  -Martin was at the top, yelling.

  -Ava and her friends were frozen in confusion before him.

  -Oliver was closest to the kitchen, to the source of the gas now hissing into the room.

  The torch melted through the pipe.

  The world didn’t go dark.

  It turned white.

  BOOM.

  A concussive wave of heat, light, and sound swallowed everything. The last thing Martin knew was not pain, but a blinding, silent negation—a single, devastating period placed at the end of his sentence.