(AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN…) SAY PSYCH RIGHT NOW

Today was the day Taylor would finally free herself from the weight she had been carrying alone for far too long. For weeks she had imagined this moment, turning it over in her thoughts during quiet evenings and sleepless nights, wondering what it would feel like to gather enough courage to tell someone the truth. 

Now that the moment was here, the reality of it felt far more real than anything she had rehearsed. It settled over her with a kind of trembling certainty, the kind that made her want to breathe deeply and find a handhold just to steady herself.

She felt excited and frightened in nearly equal measure at the thought of speaking the words aloud, the two emotions intertwining until she could no longer distinguish where one ended and the other began. At one point, she tried to give the feeling a name—excit-ared, something invented and ridiculous—and the sheer silliness of it warmed her cheeks with a shy, startled embarrassment as soon as it formed in her mind. Mostly, though, she was happy. Truly, deeply happy in a way she had not been since long before the loops began.

Today, she would tell someone. It would not be a classmate who might shrug everything off, nor a teacher who offered only surface-level concern, nor an anonymous stranger online who might mistake her fear for a joke. Instead, she would be speaking to someone trained to listen, someone who would never dismiss her as confused or unstable, someone who took the time to understand rather than judge. Someone who might actually help her.

Jessica Yamada would hear her out, Taylor was certain of that. She would listen, she would treat every word with the seriousness it deserved, and that certainty had become something Taylor clung to like a lifeline.

She understood she was not free of the loops—she doubted she ever truly would be, not until the world itself ended—but if she no longer held the secret alone, if someone else knew she was dying repeatedly in ways no normal person could imagine, then she would no longer feel so utterly alone. There would be another voice in the dark with her, another person who would stand beside her, even if they could not fully understand, trying to help her make sense of the impossible.

That thought brought a warmth that spread from her chest to the very tips of her fingers.

She sat on the bus toward Lord Street, watching the city pass by her window in quick streaks of buildings, vehicles, and people going about their day. The sky had the muted brightness of a clear morning, the familiar gray palette that Brockton Bay wore so naturally, and the slight vibration beneath her feet offered a kind of unspoken reassurance. 

She held her backpack on her lap, hugging it closer than necessary, and mentally rehearsed how she would begin once she was sitting across from Jessica in her office. The words never came out quite right when she practiced them, but she kept trying anyway, trying to find the version that felt right.

She could do this. She believed that.

She really believed that.

But the world did not care about belief.

Without warning and without even the faintest suggestion that something had gone wrong, everything changed.

One moment she was seated on the bus, feeling it slow as it approached her stop, and the next she found herself standing on the sidewalk in front of said bus’s door. Her hand was already lifted toward the rail, her body positioned as though she had been about to climb aboard for the first time, not step off after nearly twenty minutes of travel.

Her breath hitched in her throat.

The world felt painfully still.

It was obvious what had happened, so obvious she felt her stomach drop straight through her shoes and into the earth beneath her.

Taylor Hebert had died.

How was she supposed to react to this realization? Her mind offered up possibilities in a frantic rush, each more useless than the last. She could scream in fury at the sky, as though sheer force of emotion alone might break the loop for good. She could cry until her eyes ached, as if tears might soften the truth that nothing about her situation would ever change. She could go numb and let the shock swallow her whole until she felt nothing at all. Or maybe she could go through all of those reactions, one after another or even all at once, in some desperate attempt to make sense of the impossible.

But none of it felt right, like something she wanted to do, so she did none of them.

She stepped onto the bus—helped along, in a sense, by the impatient shove of the man behind her telling her to hurry up—and moved automatically toward the back. Her body remembered the path before her mind caught up, guiding her to the exact same seat she had taken last time. But she recognized it only distantly, as though the knowledge came from someone else entirely, and she was only borrowing it for a moment..

Still, the recognition brought with it an exhaustion so heavy she lowered her head without thinking, folding forward until her elbows rested on her knees. She pressed her palms over her face, her fingers trembling slightly with each shallow breath she drew. 

She stayed that way for a long moment, long enough for the bus to draw nearer to her stop, long enough for her thoughts to begin spiraling again toward the words she had hoped to say.

And then everything ended.

Just like before, there was no warning or anything to mark the transition from one moment to the next. She found herself standing in front of the bus again, one hand lifted toward the door, the morning air caressing her face as though nothing had happened.

Her second death was equally as uneventful.