My Boyfriend Is My Doom

Theona's POV

Lucian placed the last folder on the desk and stepped back from it. I stood on the other side of the desk with my hands at my sides, watching him arrange the folders into a neat stack.

"These are the records from my old life," Lucian explained. "I gathered them over five years, one page at a time."

"Show me the first one."

He opened the folder and slid a school registry across the desk. The page listed the students of a small school near the harbor. A name had been scratched out in the third row, and the pen had cut through the paper. A new name had been written above it in a hand that looked too neat.

"That name used to be mine," he revealed. "Somebody replaced it, and nobody questioned the change."

I leaned over the page and studied the scratches. The ink around the new name was a different shade from the rest of the row, suggesting someone had written it much later than the other entries.

"Records do not usually change themselves."

"They do when somebody rewrites the story."

I looked up at him. Lucian spoke as if a story could climb off the page and take the world apart, yet the registry sat between us as evidence that something had happened to his past. I reached for the next folder, then stopped when he opened it himself.

He took out a photograph. It showed a boy of about eleven standing in front of a red door. The boy had thick black hair and grey eyes, and he held a brown dog in his arms. The dog had one white ear. The boy was smiling as if nothing in the world could ever go wrong.

"That was me when I was eleven," Lucian said. "The dog was called Argos."

My fingers tightened against the edge of the desk. I knew that dog. I knew the red door, the white ear, and the name. I had written all of them in a notebook when I was thirteen years old.

"Say the name again."

"Argos." Lucian studied my face. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I know him because I invented him. I invented him long before I ever met you."

Lucian frowned and looked down at the photograph. He did not seem angry. Instead, he turned the picture slightly, examining it as though he might find an explanation hidden in its corners.

"Tell me what you wrote."

I opened my bag and took out the small green notebook that I carried everywhere. The cover was soft from years of use, and the corners had curled. I turned to a page near the middle and held it under the lamp on his desk. My handwriting covered the paper in tight blue lines.

"This is a story about a boy who lives above a harbor," I explained. "He has a brown dog with one white ear, and the dog follows him everywhere. The boy lives behind a red door that his mother painted after a storm."

Lucian walked around the desk and stood beside me. He read the page over my shoulder without speaking. I could feel the warmth of him through my sleeve, and I stayed very still, keeping my attention on the notebook.

"My mother painted that door after a storm," he admitted at last. "She painted it the week my father left for the mainland."

"I never wrote that part."

"No, but the rest is exact. Even the color is exact."

He reached across me and turned the page himself. His fingers were careful, and they did not shake. The next page held a drawing of a lighthouse with a broken lamp at the top.

"There is a lighthouse on the north cliff of our town," Lucian explained. "The lamp has been broken since I was nine."

"I drew it from my window when I was thirteen. The lamp was already dark in the drawing."

His gaze moved from the drawing to my face. Neither of us spoke for several seconds. The similarities were too specific to dismiss, and yet neither explanation made sense.

"We should check every detail," he ordered.

We worked at the desk for almost an hour. Each time Lucian named something from his childhood, I found it written in my own hand. He had a scar on his left knee from a fall on the harbor stairs, and I had given that scar to my boy in the story. He hated the taste of figs, and so did the boy. He counted the steps to his study every night before bed, and the boy counted the steps to his attic.

I moved between the notebook and his records, checking each detail against the next. Nothing changed. The same small habits, the same physical marks, the same childhood memories appeared in both places. Every discovery made it harder to believe that I had simply imagined a character who happened to resemble a real person.

By the end of the hour, the desk was covered with open pages. Lucian sat down heavily in his chair and pressed his hands against his face. I stayed on my feet, gripping the back of my chair as I watched him struggle to process what we had found.

"Somebody built my life from your pages," he said through his fingers.

"Or I wrote your life before it happened."

"Both ideas are impossible."

"Both ideas are sitting on your desk."

He lowered his hands and looked at me. For the first time since I had met him, he seemed younger than twenty. The photograph remained beside his elbow, the boy in it smiling beneath a childhood neither of us could explain.

"I have been alone with this for so long," he muttered. "I did not know how heavy it was until you read me that page."

"I do not know what to say to you."

"You do not have to say anything. You only have to stay in the room."

I sat down in the chair across from him. The clock on the wall ticked toward one o'clock, filling the silence between us. Somewhere below us, a door closed, and footsteps crossed the hall.

Lucian lifted his head and listened until the footsteps faded. His attention remained fixed on the doorway for another moment before he turned back to me.

"That was my brother," he said. "Nikos does not like it when I bring anyone into this room."

"Does he know what you have been collecting?"

"He knows some of it."

I looked down at the folders again. Something at the bottom of the stack had caught my eye. A corner of cream paper stuck out from beneath the school registry, and it did not match the other pages.

I pulled it free and turned it over in my hand. It was an envelope with no name on the front. The flap had never been sealed.

Lucian leaned forward as soon as he saw it. The color drained from his face, and his eyes remained fixed on the envelope.

"I have never seen that envelope before."

"It was in your folder."

"I know where it was," he insisted. "I still have never seen it."

I glanced at him before opening the flap. If he was telling the truth, someone had placed the envelope among his records without his knowledge. If he was lying, he had a reason for pretending not to recognize it.

I slid out a single sheet of paper. The page was thin and creased, and the ink had faded to a soft brown. Four lines ran across it in slanted handwriting.

I read the first line, then stopped.

My hands began to tremble. I read the page again, following each letter with my eyes before I trusted what I was seeing. The slant of the letters was wrong in only one place. The tail of every letter g curled backward, and the crossbar of every letter t rose to the right.

I had made those marks a thousand times in my life. I had never forgotten the shape of my own hand.

"Theona, what does it say?" Lucian asked.

I held the page toward him, unable to speak. He took it and read it aloud in a low voice.

"When the sea turns silver, the boy will bring a girl into his study. The records will show them the same wound. Then the one who forgot will remember, and the door that should stay shut will open at the house of Nadia Petrakis."

The room went completely silent.

Lucian lowered the page slowly, and his eyes came up to meet mine. I saw the question in his face before he asked it.

"Did you write this?"

"I do not remember writing it."

"Is that your handwriting?"

"Yes. Every letter of it belongs to me."

Lucian looked toward the window. Outside, the sea had turned the color of polished tin under the noon sun, shining so brightly that it hurt my eyes. The line of silver ran all the way to the edge of the sky.

I had never seen the water look that way in all my years in that town.

My phone buzzed in my bag.

The sudden sound made me reach for it too quickly, catching the strap against the edge of the chair. I pulled it free with shaking fingers and looked at the screen.

A message had arrived from a number I did not recognize.

There were only seven words.

Come to Nadia's house tonight, please hurry.