I started packing on a Tuesday.
Not the obvious things. Not clothes or toiletries or the jewelry I'd made over the years. Those could wait. I went for the storage closet in the second bedroom, the one we'd filled with boxes three years ago and never opened again.
College notebooks. Sketchbooks from my first design classes. A shoebox of ticket stubs and postcards. Things I'd been before I became Colton Pierce's wife.
I pulled down a cardboard box labeled "NYU - Freshman Year" in my own handwriting. Inside: a cracked phone case. Tangled earbuds. A stack of printed photos from before everything lived in the cloud.
And a phone.
Small. Silver. The screen cracked in one corner. I turned it over in my hands. My first smartphone. I'd replaced it sophomore year and tossed it in a box, meaning to recycle it, then forgot.
I plugged it into the charger on the kitchen counter.
Nothing happened for three minutes. Then the screen flickered. The battery icon appeared. Four percent.
I made coffee while it charged. Drank it standing at the window. The phone buzzed.
Twenty percent. The lock screen lit up. A photo I'd forgotten: me and Diana at orientation, both of us sunburned and grinning.
I unlocked it. The passcode was still muscle memory. Four digits I'd used for everything back then.
The apps were ancient. Half of them didn't exist anymore. I scrolled through old texts, old photos. Stopped on a blue icon I hadn't seen in years. A messaging app everyone used in high school before we all migrated to other platforms.
I opened it.
The last conversation was with Colton. I scrolled up. Months of messages. Short ones, long ones. Photos of homework. Inside jokes I didn't remember anymore.
I stopped on one from him, dated March of senior year: *"Waited for you after calc but you already left. Wanted to walk you to your car. It's raining."*
My response: *"I got a ride with Diana. But thank you."*
His reply: *"Next time then."*
I read it twice. The boy who wrote that had meant it. He'd actually cared whether I walked to my car in the rain.
I set the phone down. Picked up my coffee. It had gone cold.
The phone buzzed.
I looked at the screen.
A new message. In the same thread. From Colton.
Time stamp: 11:47 PM. But the date—
I blinked. Read it again.
The date was ten years ago. March twenty-third. A Thursday.
The message said: *"Hey, are you okay? I had this weird feeling all day like something was wrong."*
I stared at it.
Then I checked the phone's system date. It was correct. Today. This year.
But the message sat in the thread exactly where it should have been a decade ago, nested between his note about walking me to my car and a message I'd sent him the next morning about a chemistry test.
I set the phone on the counter. Stepped back. My heart was doing something arrhythmic and strange.
It buzzed again.
*"Grace? You there?"*
My hands were shaking. I picked it up. Typed: *"Colton?"*
The response came immediately. *"Yeah. Did something happen? You're freaking me out."*
I looked at the phone. At the cracked screen. At the impossible message thread.
Then I typed: *"How old are you?"*
A pause. Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
*"...Seventeen? Grace, are you feeling okay?"*
I sat down on the kitchen floor. The tiles were cold through my jeans.
Seventeen. He was seventeen. The message was coming from ten years ago, and he didn't know.
I typed slowly: *"What year is it?"*
Another pause. *"2015. Seriously, what's going on?"*
2015. March. Six weeks before prom. Three months before graduation. A lifetime before everything that came after.
I pressed my palm against my mouth. Tried to think.
This wasn't possible. Phones didn't work like this. Time didn't work like this.
But the messages were there. Real. Arriving in real time from a boy who didn't exist anymore except as the ghost inside the man who'd threatened me four days ago.
The phone buzzed.
*"Grace, you're scaring me. Please just tell me you're okay."*
I looked at the screen. At his name. At the timestamp that shouldn't exist.
Then I started typing.
I told him everything.
The affair. The photos. Arianna's message. The lawyer's threat. The dinner at The Plaza with his pregnant mistress sitting across from me in pale blue.
I told him about the cufflinks. About Marcus Webb. About the man he would become.
I typed for twenty minutes. My thumbs cramped. I didn't stop.
When I finished, I hit send and waited.
The three dots appeared. Stayed. Disappeared.
Five minutes passed.
Then: *"That's not me."*
I closed my eyes.
*"I would never. Grace, I would NEVER. You have to know that."*
Another message: *"I don't know what's happening or how you're texting me from the future or if I'm losing my mind but I swear to god that's not me. That will never be me."*
I read it twice. Then I typed: *"But it is. It will be. I'm living it right now."*
The response came fast. *"Then I'll change it. I'll make sure it doesn't happen. I'll—"*
He stopped typing. Started again.
*"Tell me how to fix it."*
I stared at the message. At the boy begging me across a decade to tell him how not to destroy us.
And I realized I had no answer.
Because I didn't know when it started. Which choice. Which moment. Which small compromise led to the man who'd brought another woman to our anniversary dinner.
The phone buzzed again.
*"Grace. Please. Tell me how to fix it."*
I typed: *"I don't know if you can."*
Then I set the phone on the counter and walked away.
Behind me, it kept buzzing. Message after message. The boy I'd loved, ten years ago, trying to save me from the man he'd become.
I didn't look back.
