Rule#0: The Author's Prerogative
The fluorescent hum of the bus station locker room is the only company I have left. Outside, the world is a grid of blue and red lights, a city-wide dragnet looking for a ghost that finally grew a face. They are looking for a monster, but all they’ll find is a manuscript.
I used to believe that love was a clock. You wind it up, watch the gears turn for three hundred and sixty-five days, and then you stop the heart before the alarm can sound. It was a perfect system. For five years, I was the architect of my own gravity, deciding exactly when and how the men in my life would fall. I learned early on that the world doesn't look for a killer when it’s too busy comforting a grieving widow. Grief is not just a stage of loss; it is the ultimate camouflage.
But the problem with writing your own destiny is that eventually, someone else wants to pick up the pen.
My fingers ache as I finish these final pages. Each rule I’ve recorded—how to stage the "natural" end, how to fade into a crowded terminal, how to breathe when the air is thick with the scent of your own ending—was meant to be my legacy. Now, they are the very tracks the hunters are following.
They think they know how this story ends. They think the hunter has finally become the prey. But they’ve forgotten the most important rule of all.
A story is only a tragedy if you stay for the final bow. And I’ve always been very good at getting away.