"Who the hell has left this lunatic loose?"
Richard was in a poor state of mind. The mysterious man's smiling face was looking at him with amusement, and Richard moved forward to politely introduce his elbow to it — but to his surprise his body wouldn't move. The people around him were frozen, turned to statues mid-motion. A man who had jumped was suspended in the air. A woman drinking water stood with the liquid stopped in mid-pour. On the street, every pedestrian, every car, every passing moment had simply halted. Only the man in the black suit could move.
"Settle down, kid," he said, gesturing calmly.
Richard found himself able to stand but nothing more. The man came forward and said, "Here is the deal." From his coat he produced a small notebook, tore a single page free, and held it out.
Text appeared on the page one word at a time, as if written by an invisible pen:
Terms of the Contract: I, the undersigned, agree to trade 10 years of my future life in return for being sent back 5 years into the past.
Richard's hands were trembling as he finished reading. He was not a religious man, but this was something beyond explanation, and it felt truer with every passing second. The man drew a pen from his left coat pocket and offered it.
Although unaware of the real cost and hidden details of the deal, Richard knew one thing clearly — if it meant more time with Jessica, he would do it without hesitation.
He took the pen and signed. The paper burned the moment his signature was complete.
"Now what?"
"We shake on it," the man replied, extending his hand.
Richard grabbed it. As he shook it slowly, the world around him disappeared — he was streaming into light, dissolving into nothing, the world coming apart at its seams.
Ring! Ring!
The alarm pulled him back. He was in his own room. His smartphone showed 6 am, and when he checked the date, he was really back — five years earlier.
He pinched his cheek hard. It hurt like hell. He looked at his window, his bed, his surroundings. It still felt unreal.
It was the day of the horror movie — the night Jessica had grabbed his arm and never quite let it go, the moment he remembered with such precision because it had been the beginning of everything. He opened his notes app and began typing: the date five years from now when things turned worse, the day Jessica would collapse, important figures, outcomes, lottery numbers.
He had five years. He needed to use every one of them.
His phone buzzed with a salary credit notification — something he would have barely glanced at before, now a small exhale of relief. The irony was not lost on him.
He messaged Jessica about the horror movie — things should go as they went last time — and then went to the coffee shop to inject some espresso into his system and organise his thoughts.
The first idea arrived quickly. At a get-together months from now — or years ago, depending on how he counted — a friend had mentioned a lottery. Five million dollars. The winner was a man named Gabe. The winning tickets were purchased two days from now at the neighbourhood lottery centre. That would be his starting capital.
He opened his laptop and set up betting positions across the coming month — NFL results, NBA outcomes, a handful of other events whose endings he knew. He was careful to scatter small losses among the wins, keeping his pattern close enough to lucky to avoid drawing attention. Then he closed the laptop, finished his espresso, and let the pop songs playing through the café speakers slow his mind down for one quiet hour.
After that, he went home and pressed his clothes. His hair needed grooming. He had a first date to prepare for.
The day ended well. Jessica said yes, grabbed his arm at the exact same second as before — the same fraction of a moment, the same dopamine — and agreed to the first date at the posh, elite restaurant that neither of them could properly afford. He felt his heart lift the same way it had the first time, and was surprised to find it hadn't dimmed with repetition. If anything it was sharper.
Two days later he bought every lottery ticket at the centre, spending ten grand he could barely spare. Then he took Jessica on their first date.
That evening, watching the host announce the lottery numbers on television, he felt something between disbelief and grim satisfaction. He put on a face mask, went to collect the winnings, navigated past the charity representatives and the photographer, went directly to the bank, encashed the cheque, and watched the figure appear in his account.
It was the first time he had seen that many digits in a bank statement with his own name on it. In another life — the shallower one — this would have been the end point. A mansion. A sports car. A bar, probably. Those thoughts passed through him like seconds on a clock and were gone.
The money grew. His betting positions settled, his stock strategies compounded, and the figure in his account climbed toward something that made even bold financial speculators look cautious. Certain circles began referring to him as a young Warren Buffett, which he found mildly amusing and entirely beside the point.
The best part of those months was not the money.
Reliving the defining moments of his relationship with Jessica gave them a freshness he hadn't expected. He appreciated them differently now — with more weight, more attention, more credit for what they actually were. The daily pranks when they moved in together were funnier the second time because he could see her planning her revenge before she knew she was planning it. He knew her favourite songs, her boredom triggers, the plot points in her novel she was still working out — and he could nudge things in the right direction, just subtly enough to bring her joy without making it obvious.
He watched her on the sofa one evening, her wide eyes and half-smile, that unfinished manuscript open on her lap, her mind clearly somewhere in the middle of a chapter. He thought: this is what the money is for. Not the number. Her, specifically. This.
When his account crossed a hundred million dollars, he called it what it was — a financial heist conducted in plain sight — updated his notes, and began researching pharmaceutical companies.
The company he found was mid-sized, focused on rare diseases that larger competitors had quietly deprioritised, perpetually underfunded and perpetually ambitious. Richard met their board, transferred thirty million dollars, and became the majority shareholder in the same week. Jessica asked once or twice about his mysterious trips. He showed her his trading app briefly, angled so she could see it was doing well. She stared at it, then started teasing him. He let her.
As the major shareholder he redirected the company's entire R&D focus toward the specific disease that would eventually kill Jessica if he did nothing. He hired the best specialists from universities, rival companies and research partnerships. Progress reports arrived monthly — significant step forward, promising indicators, early trial results. The R&D consumed money at a rate that should have alarmed him. It didn't. It was the only thing the money was for.
The experts told him, each time he consulted them, that a permanent cure would likely require twelve to fifteen years of sustained research by the best minds in the field — with no guarantees.
He had five years.
He watched his gamble begin to fail with the particular dread of someone who had always known this moment was coming.
Jessica noticed his increasingly stressed face and asked about it more than once. He deflected each time. He could tell her about the man, the contract, the time travel — but it would help nothing and cost her the peace she had left.
On a Sunday afternoon, he was returning to the table with a sandwich he had decorated with green salad specifically to make her smile. He heard the sound before he saw her. He already knew what it meant.
She collapsed.
He took her to the hospital feeling broken in a way the first time hadn't prepared him for, because this time he had done everything right and it hadn't been enough.
The doctors delivered the same diagnosis to Jessica and her arriving parents. Then Richard transferred ten million dollars to the treatment account in front of all of them without breaking his expression.
Jessica stared at him. "Who are you, Richard?"
"Just some savings, darling." He looked at her for a moment. She looked back at him, then pulled him into a tearful hug.
He owned the company manufacturing her medication. He had the top specialists worldwide joining Zoom consultations within forty-eight hours. Some evenings he sat beside her bed holding her cold hand while she slept, and when she woke and told him to go home and rest, he refused.
The treatment stabilised her. It did not cure her. Her body was taking a toll from the chemicals being used to manage the disease. Month by month, the reports showed incremental progress and insufficient speed. He needed more time.
On a Wednesday evening she collapsed a second time, in front of him.
He was in the corridor outside her room when he finally broke — sliding down the wall, crying in a way that had no performance in it, truly lost.
He heard footsteps.
"Looking for me?"
The man in the black suit stood before him wearing the same devilish smile, as if Richard's misery was a mildly interesting development.
"You can make another deal," the man said. "Though I should mention — the rate has gone up." He rubbed his fingers together slowly, with the ease of someone who has never once been on the wrong side of a transaction. "How much time do you want?