I have never once looked a stranger in the face.
Not since I was twelve. Not since the night I looked around a room full of relatives and saw every single ending at once.
So I keep my eyes on chins and coffee cups, and work nights on a phone where nobody has a face at all.
Then a man walks into my office at four in the morning with a laugh he can’t hold in — and I look up, and I see nothing.
No hospital. No highway. No ending waiting for him anywhere.
For the first time in eighteen years, I can look at someone as long as I want, and it costs me nothing.
He rides for a club that hunts what nobody else believes in. I’ve got a wall of names and thirteen miles of road that’s been eating people for a decade.
Follow him out there, and I’ll finally have to look at the one face I’ve spent my life avoiding.
Mine.
