Page 106 of Stay Scared

A deletion queue fills the screen.

8,416 FILES.

Owen stares at the number.

“Local copies too.”

He looks at me.

“And the mirror you didn’t tell Ash about.”

A pause passes between us.

Then Owen opens an encrypted partition.

Thousands more files appear.

My apartment. My car. Halden Coffee. Parking structures. Street corners where I never knew a lens existed.

“The notebooks stay only where Rook appears.”

Owen’s fingers hover over the command.

I wait.

He presses it.

The archive begins disappearing. Morning after morning vanishes with coffee cups, clothes, routes home, hours inside my car, and nights asleep over a laptop. The private version of my life Owen built for himself collapses into empty storage.

He watches it happen.

I watch him.

“That hurts,” he says.

“I figured it would.”

He looks at me. “You aren’t enjoying it.”

“I’m not.”

I want him to feel the loss without making his pain something I have to enjoy.

The deletion counter keeps moving.

Owen watches another row of thumbnails disappear, and I realize I have spent the last hour learning exactly how much he knows about me while acquiring almost nothing that belongs to him.

I know how he watches.

I know how long he can sit without moving and how easily his attention finds the thing everyone else missed. I know what he wanted from me badly enough to build eight thousand files around it.

That is still information gathered from the wrong side of the lens.

“Your turn.”

Owen looks away from the deletion queue. “For what?”

“You spent months learning me. I get questions.”