What Comes Next

Jenna Hayes had spent forty-three minutes wondering if the word looked wrong in a sentence she’d already rewritten seven times. She stared at the paragraph on her laptop, read it again, and instantly hated the whole chapter. Three months ago, she’d told everyone she was almost done with her novel, but that had turned out to be a lie her past self made up to mess with her future. Chapter nineteen had been open on her screen for six days, and the blinking cursor felt more judgmental every morning. Jenna finally closed her laptop halfway and decided that making coffee counted as writing.

Her apartment wasn’t fancy, but it was hers, and that meant more than impressing anyone. Books filled two shelves, three piles on the floor, and a cardboard box she’d promised to unpack before Christmas. Two Christmases had come and gone since then, so the box was now just part of the furniture. Her desk was under the living room window, where she could watch strangers who seemed to have their lives together while she pretended not to notice her manuscript. Jenna liked to think half of them were probably avoiding something too.

She carried her empty mug to the kitchen and stopped when someone knocked on her apartment door. It wasn’t the gentle tap her elderly neighbor used when a package was delivered to the wrong place, but three slow knocks with long pauses in between. Jenna glanced at the clock above the stove and frowned—it wasn’t even eight yet. No one she knew would show up that early unless something bad had happened, and even then, most people would text first. She waited a few seconds, then headed to the door.

The hallway was empty when Jenna opened the door. She leaned out, looked toward the stairwell, then toward the elevator, but nobody was there. A medium-sized brown package sat at her feet with her name handwritten in thick black ink. Jenna Marie Hayes, it read, using the middle name she avoided unless legally required: no return address, shipping label, postage, company logo, or anything explaining how it arrived.

“Cool,” Jenna muttered. “Definitely not how murder documentaries start.”

She brought the box inside anyway, since curiosity outweighed all the survival instincts she’d picked up from watching too much TV. The package wasn’t heavy, and nothing rattled when she tilted it, which made her feel a little better. Jenna set it on the kitchen counter, grabbed scissors from the junk drawer, and cut the tape. Brown packing paper covered whatever was inside. When Jenna pulled the paper away, she held her breath for several seconds.

It was a manuscript. Not just any manuscript either. Her manuscript.

Jenna stared at the first page without touching it, trying to find a reasonable explanation. The title was at the top in the same font she’d picked months ago, followed by her name and the opening paragraph she’d rewritten so many times she could say it by heart. Even the annoying typo in the fourth sentence was there—the one where she wrote form instead of from and kept forgetting to fix it. Someone had gotten into her work. That idea wasn’t comforting, but at least it made sense.

Her laptop had a password, and her online backup used a different one, but neither was impossible to hack. Jenna lifted the thick stack from the box and immediately noticed it felt too heavy. Her unfinished manuscript was barely three hundred pages, but this one looked closer to five hundred. She flipped through the first chapters and saw scenes, dialogue, notes she’d forgotten about, and even an unfinished sentence she’d left during a late-night writing session two weeks ago. Whoever printed it hadn’t used some old, polished version she’d emailed months ago.

They had everything.

Jenna went back to her desk and opened her laptop, suddenly wide awake without coffee. All her files were still there, nothing was missing, and her email showed no strange login alerts. She checked her sent folder, cloud account, trash, downloads, and anything else she could think of while the printed manuscript sat next to her like evidence. Nothing explained it. Jenna finally picked up the stack again and flipped to where her real novel ended.

Chapter nineteen appeared exactly as she’d left it. Then came Chapter Twenty. Jenna frowned. She hadn’t written Chapter Twenty.

For several pages, the story went on normally, making her wonder if someone had taken her draft and finished the book as a joke. The writing copied her style almost perfectly, even her habit of starting too many sentences with character names and then getting annoyed about it later. Jenna read faster, looking for anything that would reveal who did it. By Chapter Twenty-One, the fictional characters were gone.

The first line read:

Jenna Hayes was startled at 7:13 Tuesday morning because someone dropped a coffee mug upstairs.

Jenna stared at it. “What the hell?” She looked toward the kitchen clock. 7:12.

She laughed before she could stop herself, because the other option was admitting the sentence had sent a chill down her spine. Clearly, whoever delivered the package knew where she lived. They probably knew her upstairs neighbor too, and writing a sentence about a coffee mug wasn’t exactly predicting the end of the world. Jenna watched the clock turn to 7:13 and folded her arms. Nothing happened. “Congratulations,” she whispered. “You’re creepy and wrong.”

Something shattered above her. Jenna jumped hard enough to knock her knee against the desk. A muffled curse followed from the apartment upstairs, then footsteps hurried across the ceiling. She stared up, then slowly looked back at the manuscript. The sentence remained unchanged. “No.”

The next line said: Her phone rang fifteen seconds later.

Jenna grabbed her phone right away and held the power button until the screen went black. She wasn’t sure what she was trying to prove, but she refused to sit there waiting for it to ring just because some stranger had written that it would. Fifteen seconds went by. Then twenty. Nothing. Jenna smiled despite herself. “Wrong again.” A ringtone suddenly erupted from the kitchen. Jenna’s smile disappeared.

Her old phone sat plugged into a charger near the microwave, something she used only for music because she’d canceled the service nearly a year ago. The screen glowed with an incoming internet call from her younger sister. Jenna stared at it while the sound bounced around the apartment. She slowly crossed the room and answered. “Why are you calling this phone?”

“Good morning to you too,” Ashley said. “Your other one went straight to voicemail.”

Jenna looked toward the manuscript. “What did you want?”

“Mom wants to know if you’re coming Sunday, and before you start, I told her you’re probably working.” The next printed sentence waited beneath the first two. Ashley would ask about Sunday and blame their mother. Jenna hung up without explaining why.

For the next ten minutes, she tested the manuscript, hoping to force reality to admit it was all a trick. One line said she’d stand by the window, so Jenna sat on the couch instead—until someone screamed outside and she rushed to the glass without thinking. Another line said she’d search the hallway again, so she refused—until she remembered she’d left the empty package outside. Each prediction was normal enough to happen by chance, but specific enough that it got harder to believe it was just coincidence. Then she found a line that almost made her laugh.

Jenna made coffee.

“Oh, absolutely not.” She went into the kitchen and grabbed tea from the cabinet instead. Jenna filled the kettle, dropped a tea bag into her mug, and smiled when a few minutes passed without her touching the coffee maker. Whatever was going on, she’d beaten one sentence. Then her elbow hit the mug as she reached for her phone, spilling hot tea across the counter and onto the floor.

“Son of a bitch.” She cleaned up the mess, tossed the soaked tea bag, and stood glaring at the cabinet. Making another cup of tea would prove her point, but suddenly the whole silly contest felt exhausting. Jenna reached for the coffee instead. Halfway through filling the machine, she stopped.

The manuscript hadn’t been wrong. She went back to her desk with coffee she didn’t even want and closed the pages. Predicting something wasn’t the same as causing it, but Jenna couldn’t decide which idea scared her more. If the manuscript knew what she’d do, then her choices weren’t as private as she thought. If reading it somehow made those things happen, then opening the package had already been a mistake.

She should’ve stopped reading. Instead, Jenna flipped ahead.

Most people probably would have called someone by now, but she had no idea how to explain this without sounding crazy. Ashley would show up right away, her mom would panic, and the police wouldn’t care about a stack of paper that predicted breakfast. Jenna skimmed a few pages, hoping to find out who wrote them. Instead, she found a name she’d never seen before.

At 2:16 p.m., Jenna Hayes met Adam Carter. A strange unease prickled at the back of her neck just reading his name, as if something in the air had shifted. She couldn’t say why, but it felt less like a meeting, and more like an edge she was about to slip over.

She read the sentence twice. The next one was worse.

She would spend some time wishing she hadn’t. The thought unsettled her because whatever came next felt personal, as if the stranger behind the manuscript knew exactly what she cared about and how much she had left to lose. Her family, her home, the fragile control she had over her own future—all of it suddenly felt at stake, hanging on decisions she had barely begun to understand.

Jenna quickly searched Adam Carter on her phone and immediately regretted it—there were thousands. Social media showed her businessmen, college students, musicians, dads, teenagers, retirees, and even one guy holding a fish the size of a toddler. None of them looked familiar. She didn’t have an Adam Carter in her contacts.

“Fine,” Jenna said. “Then I don’t meet him.” She checked the time. 8:04. That gave her more than six hours to do absolutely nothing.

Jenna locked the door, slid the chain across, and decided she wouldn’t leave until after 2:16. Whoever Adam Carter was, he couldn’t just show up in her apartment. She’d order food if she had to, ignore the door, turn off her phone, and spend the afternoon proving at least one prediction could be wrong. For the first time since opening the package, Jenna felt like she had some control again.

Then she noticed the manuscript. The page had changed.

Jenna leaned closer because she was sure exhaustion had finally started screwing with her vision. Her breath caught and a chill prickled across her scalp. Only two sentences had appeared beneath Adam Carter’s name before. Now a dark mark appeared beneath them. For a moment, Jenna’s hands hovered above the page, trembling just enough to make her clench her fists in her lap. Ink spread slowly across the paper. Not handwriting. Not glowing letters. Printed words. Her heart hammered as she watched, frozen in place, as the first sentence formed.

You have three choices.

Another line appeared beneath it.

Meet Adam at 2:16.

Then another.

Find Adam before 2:16.

The final option took longer.

Make sure Adam never finds you.

Jenna stared at the page until her eyes burned. A final sentence began appearing underneath them.

Choose carefully.

Jenna gripped the edge of the desk, her mind spinning. Three choices stared up at her in stark black print, but their weight settled like stones in her stomach. Was she really being asked to decide her own fate out of options that felt impossibly real? She tried to calm her breathing, pressing her palms flat to the wood, but all she could hear was her own pulse pounding in her ears. Did she really want to meet this stranger, to chase after him, or to hide from him for the rest of her life? None of the options made sense, yet the longer she stared, the more she felt every possibility closing in. Was this someone’s twisted joke, or did she somehow owe herself an answer? For the first time since the package arrived, Jenna realized she could not avoid choosing. She had to decide—now. And before she could choose, the ink shifted again.

At 2:16:45 p.m., you will meet Adam Carter. Choose how.

A. Taking the elevator at 2:17. It will fall.

Jenna swallowed as another option appeared.

B. Crossing the street at 2:17. An accident will happen.

Her stomach twisted. Neither choice told her who got hurt. Neither told her whether she and Adam survived. Then one final sentence formed beneath them.

You’re meeting him either way. Choose what happens first.