Morning brought no comfort.
Shreya sat at her desk in class, hands trembling, replaying the night over and over. She tried to tell herself it was a hallucination—fatigue, shadows, adrenaline—but the image of the man's hollow eyes refused to fade.
Mehul leaned over, glancing at her notes. "Shreya, you okay? You look… like you saw a ghost."
She froze. His words echoed the truth she couldn't yet accept.
Later, she heard about the accident.
The same bridge. Same road. Same time.
A man had died.
Shreya's stomach churned. Her body ached with the impossibility of it. She had saved him. She had touched him. Yet now, the world insisted he never existed yesterday.
She checked her phone. No missed calls from him. No messages. Nothing.
Only her memory held the impossible truth.
And then she saw something worse: in photos taken that night, there was no man at all. Only the empty fog, the bridge, and Shreya's trembling hands.
Something alive had erased him.
Shreya realized, with a cold horror, that if she didn't act, she might be next.