On Monday morning, Rhea did not get on the 8:15.
She stood at the top of the stairs at Indiranagar station with her metro card in her hand and her heart going hard, watching the train pull in below her, watching the doors open and the crowd pour in, and she could not make her feet move. The words in the diary sat in her head like a stone. Don't get on the 8:15 metro. In her own handwriting.
The doors closed. The train pulled away. She let out a breath she had not known she was holding.
She took an auto to work instead, ninety minutes in traffic, and arrived late and sweaty and irritated with herself. At 8:31, as she sat stuck in traffic under the Marathahalli bridge, her phone buzzed with a news alert. Purple Line services halted between Baiyappanahalli and Swami Vivekananda Road due to a power failure. Passengers stranded on elevated track. No injuries reported.
No injuries. Just a power failure. She had missed a delay, that was all.
She felt ridiculous. She also felt, underneath it, something cold.
That night there was a new entry, dated Tuesday.
Good. You listened. That's more than I did.
Now you have to keep listening. Every day, I'll tell you what to avoid. The 8:15. The coffee shop on 12th Main. The client call on Thursday. Your mother's call on Sunday — don't pick up. Trust me. I've seen where all of it goes. I'll keep you safe.
Rhea read it three times. It was comforting, the way the diary said it. Like a hand on her shoulder. She had spent months feeling that every choice she made was wrong, and here was someone — herself — offering to make them for her.
Don't pick up your mother's call on Sunday.
She frowned at that line. Then she closed the diary and slept better than she had in weeks.
By Friday she had avoided four things the diary warned her about, and nothing bad had happened. She had also not been to the coffee shop where she sometimes chatted with the barista, not taken the client call that might have got her promoted, not gone to the metro station where, three weeks ago, a kind old woman in a blue saree had held her hand. Her world was getting smaller and safer and quieter every day.
On Sunday evening, her phone lit up. AMMA.
Rhea looked at the diary on her bedside table. It lay closed, its brass clasp like a closed eye.
The phone rang, and rang, and rang.
She did not pick up.
When it stopped, she opened the diary. There was a new entry, and for the first time, it was not in her handwriting. It was in a thin, old, shaky hand, and it said only:
Child, she is not keeping you safe. She is keeping you small. Come to Ulsoor, behind the lake. Before she decides you don't need to leave the flat at all.
(This is the other path: the Rhea who listened. Where does obedience lead — and who is really writing her future? Continue this branch.)
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