
“Do you remember who you are, or are you just another page in our story?”
She tried to close the laptop, but the cursor wouldn't move. The PDF was at the final page now. Silas was reaching for Charlie, and Charlie was reaching for the truth. The last line of the file wasn't a period; it was a question directed at Elara.
Elara realized with a jolt that the more she read, the more her own memories began to fray. She couldn't remember what she’d had for breakfast. She couldn't remember her mother’s middle name. The digital ink was a vacuum, sucking her life into the fictional struggle of two soulmates lost in a cycle of forgetting.
Elara looked down at her hands. They were turning translucent, flickering like a low-resolution image. She wasn't the reader anymore. She was the sequel.