The first time someone called me "the cursed ghostwriter," I laughed.
I was alone in my apartment, rain dripping down the windowpane, my laptop glowing like a heartbeat in the dark. The words weren't mine. They weren't meant to be mine. And yet, the world had started noticing.
Rumors started online. Strange messages on forums. Comments under old articles I'd ghostwritten. "She stole everything. Now she's haunted."
It felt… unreal. Like reading my own obituary written by a stranger.
And then the emails came faster. Shorter. Sharper.
"Do they know the truth? Does anyone? You hid it all too well. But hiding doesn't save you, A.K."
I tried to ignore them. Tried to believe it was just someone messing with me. But the drafts kept appearing. The typewriter kept clattering. Every word reminded me of that night, Jules pinned, Kane thrown, my lie swallowed by fire.
I didn't leave my apartment. I didn't answer the phone. My reflection in the black screen of my laptop looked like a stranger, pale, exhausted, broken.
And yet, I kept writing.
Not for me. Not for anyone. But for him.
Every chapter I typed, every line that appeared without my touch, felt like a tether pulling me closer to the past I'd tried to bury. The past that had never left.
"You write for the living, now write for the dead," one email said.
I whispered to the empty room, "Why me?"
The rain tapped harder. The lights flickered. And for a moment, I thought I saw him, Kane, O., someone, in the reflection of the screen. Watching. Smiling. Waiting.
The world outside my apartment didn't know. Couldn't know. But the people online… they were beginning to sense it. The scandal, the curse, the story that had never truly ended.
I realized then that I was no longer just a writer.
I was the story.