St. Mary's Church — then Rob's Apartment, 3 Days Earlier
Seven seconds.
I shouldered through a cluster of mourners — an "excuse me" that came out more like a grunt — and spotted the restroom sign past the fellowship hall. A woman with a tissue gave me a concerned look. I didn't have time to explain because I didn't have an explanation.
Five seconds.
The men's room door was one of those heavy oak things churches install so you can't hear anyone from outside. I hit it with my shoulder and stumbled into a two-stall bathroom that smelled like industrial soap and floor drain.
Three seconds.
I made it into the first stall, slammed the lock, and my back hit the wall as the countdown reached zero.
[DEPLOYING...]
My body went rigid. Not painful — like someone had pressed pause on every muscle at once. The stall, the bathroom, the church — all of it went white at the edges, then dark, then nothing. A sensation like falling in a dream, except the falling had a direction: backward. Through something thick and resistant, like swimming through cold honey.
Then the honey spat me out.
I was standing in a hallway. Narrow, carpeted in something beige and industrial, lit by a single overhead bulb that buzzed at a frequency designed to make you depressed. An apartment building. The kind where the walls were thin enough to hear your neighbor's TV and thick enough to pretend you couldn't.
My clothes had changed. The ill-fitting funeral suit was gone, replaced by khakis and a button-down shirt — casual professional, grief-counselor-adjacent. A lanyard hung around my neck with a laminated card: NEW ENGLAND BEREAVEMENT SERVICES — HOLDEN LAWSON, COUNSELOR. Below that, in tiny print: Referred by Ferdinando Family Funeral Home.
Huh. The system does wardrobe.
The phone sat in my pocket, now displaying a new interface: a timer counting down from 18:00 minutes, a minimap showing my position relative to a green dot labeled ROB HILLIARD, and a mission brief.
[MISSION: ROB'S LAST EXIT]
[Difficulty: E]
[Era: 3 days prior to funeral]
[Location: Rob Hilliard's apartment, Hartford, CT]
[Pivot Point: Rob's decision to skip the funeral]
[Success Condition: Rob must choose to attend Coach Buzzer's service]
[Failure Condition: Rob completes and sends cancellation text to Lenny Feder]
[Time Remaining: 17:42]
Seventeen minutes and forty-two seconds to convince a man I'd never met — a man who, as far as this timeline was concerned, had never seen my face — to attend a funeral he'd already decided to skip.
The green dot was behind the door at the end of the hall. Apartment 4B. A welcome mat that said NAMASTE in letters so faded only the N and the E were still legible.
I knocked.
Shuffling inside. A chain rattled. The door opened four inches, revealing one eye, a sliver of toupee, and the unmistakable wariness of a man who'd been visited by enough well-meaning strangers to know exactly what they looked like.
"Can I help you?"
"Mr. Hilliard? I'm Holden Lawson, grief counselor. The funeral home recommended—"
"They sent someone?"
"Standard service for family and close friends of the deceased. Just a brief check-in."
The eye traveled down to the lanyard, back up to my face. Rob Hilliard in his natural habitat looked smaller than he did in a church pew — a slim man in a faded yoga shirt and drawstring pants, barefoot on carpet, holding the door like it was the last line of defense between himself and the world's good intentions.
"Gloria," he called over his shoulder, "did you call the funeral home?"
From deeper in the apartment: "No, honey."
Rob looked at me. The eye narrowed. But politeness won — it always won with Rob, that was the thing about him. Four marriages, each one a testament to a man who couldn't say no to kindness even when kindness was the knife.
"Come in, I guess."
The apartment smelled like incense and chamomile. Small, tidy, decorated in a style I'd call "divorced hippie finding peace" — mismatched cushions, a shelf of crystals, a framed poster of the Dalai Lama next to a framed photo of Coach Buzzer in a basketball gym. Gloria sat in a recliner by the window with a crossword puzzle, and she looked up at me with the calm appraisal of a woman who'd seen every kind of man walk through her husband's life and had long stopped being surprised by any of them.
"Water? Tea?" Rob offered. Already hosting. Already performing the role of the gracious person being visited.
"I'm fine, thank you."
He sat on the couch. I sat across from him in a chair that was harder than it looked. Between us, a coffee table held a bowl of dried mango and Rob's phone, screen up, a draft text visible.
I read it upside-down because the system hadn't gifted me super-vision — just a counselor's lanyard and a ticking clock:
Hey man, don't think I can make it to the service. Gloria's not feeling great. Give my best to the guys.
Fourteen minutes and change.
"So," Rob said, crossing his bare feet on the carpet. "How does this work?"
"I just wanted to check in. Losing a coach — a mentor — that's significant. Sometimes people don't give themselves permission to grieve properly."
"I'm grieving fine."
"Good. That's good."
A pause. The incense curled. Gloria's pen scratched across the crossword.
"The service is in three days," I said. "Are you planning to attend?"
Rob's hand went to his toupee. Touched, adjusted, dropped. The tell. In the movies, it was a gag — the toupee askew, the friends ribbing him, the audience laughing. Sitting three feet from him, it was armor. The thing he checked to make sure was in place before letting anyone see underneath.
"Probably. Yeah. We'll see."
"The other four will be there. Lenny, Eric, Kurt, Marcus."
Something shifted behind Rob's eyes at the names. Not warmth — recognition of an old distance.
"Yeah. The guys."
I leaned forward. I had fourteen minutes and a headful of meta-knowledge, and I was going to use it.
"Coach Buzzer was more than a basketball coach, Mr. Hilliard. He brought your group together. The 1978 championship — that wasn't just a game. It was the foundation of every friendship that came after. And those friendships need you in that church."
Rob listened. He had the posture of listening — head slightly tilted, eyes on mine. But his fingers hadn't moved toward the phone to delete the draft, and his body hadn't shifted forward. He was absorbing, not engaging. The polite, exhausted patience of a man who'd sat through therapy with better therapists than me.
"I appreciate you coming by," he said.
That's the dismissal. That's the 'I'm done listening but I'm too kind to say so' voice.
"The group needs you there, Rob. They need all five—"
"They won't even notice."
The words came out flat. Not bitter — that would've been easier to work with. Just factual. The tone of a man stating a weather observation.
"They had a whole sequel without me," Rob said, and the sentence confused me for a full second before I realized he meant something else entirely. Not the movie sequel. The years. The intervening decades where four became the number and five was a memory.
"That's not—"
"It is. And it's fine." He uncrossed his feet, recrossed them the other direction. Gloria's pen had stopped. "Coach would understand."
I pushed harder because the clock was at eleven minutes and I couldn't afford to be gentle. I talked about Buzzer's legacy, about what the funeral represented, about the bond between five boys who'd won a championship and the debt they owed the man who believed in them. I pulled from everything I knew — both movies, every scene of Buzzer's influence, every moment where the friendship mattered.
Rob nodded through all of it. The way you nod at someone telling you things you already know in a language you've already stopped translating.
"You seem like a nice guy, Holden."
Nine minutes.
"But you don't know me. You don't know us. And the thing about friendship — real friendship — is that it doesn't need a counselor to explain it." He smiled, and the smile was the saddest part. "If they wanted me there, they'd call."
"Maybe they think you're already coming."
"Maybe." Rob reached for his phone. Casual. Like checking the time. "But they haven't called. Not Lenny, not Eric, not any of them. Buzzer died and they called each other and somebody eventually texted me the details. Texted."
His thumb hovered over the draft message. The cursor blinked at the end of Give my best to the guys.
I tried once more — desperate now, seven minutes, my Social Resonance score a pathetic twelve against a lifetime of this man feeling invisible. "Rob, if you could just—"
"I appreciate you coming by."
Said with the same warmth as the first time. Exact same cadence. The script of a man who'd been therapized by professionals through four marriages and knew exactly how to end a session without being rude.
Six minutes.
I opened my mouth to push again, to say something — anything — that would crack through the polished exhaustion of a man who'd made peace with being an afterthought.
[SRE CHECK: FAILED. Threshold not met for cold-read emotional intervention on guarded target.]
[MISSION STATUS: FAILED]
[Cooldown initiated: 6 hours]
[Debug glitch generating...]
The recall hit like a rubber band snapping. One second I was sitting in Rob's apartment watching his thumb hover over SEND, and the next the apartment was dissolving at the edges — the incense smell, the crossword scratching, Gloria's steady gaze — all of it pulling away like a tide. The last thing I saw was Rob pressing his thumb to the screen, completing the text, and the notification sound as the message left.
He sent it. He—
The church bathroom materialized around me. Same stall. Same industrial soap smell. My back was against the wall, knees half-buckled, and there was a ringing in my ears that tasted like chamomile and failure.
I sat on the tile floor. The cold seeped through the suit pants. My hands were shaking — adrenaline, or temporal jet lag, or the specific kind of tremor that comes from trying to save someone who didn't ask to be saved and failing in exactly the way the system told you you would.
He sent the text. The cancellation. In the real timeline — the original one — someone or something convinced him to come anyway. But that someone wasn't me, and the something wasn't a stranger with a lanyard and a motivational speech.
The phone screen displayed the mission debrief in clinical detail:
[MISSION FAILED: ROB'S LAST EXIT — Attempt 1 of 2]
[Analysis: Host SRE (12) insufficient for cold-read persuasion of emotionally guarded target. Rob Hilliard's resistance to stranger intervention exceeds Host's current social resonance by factor of 3.2. Recommend: Establish indirect approach. Direct motivation from unknown individual carries negative efficacy on this target.]
[Cooldown: 6 hours. Retry available after cooldown.]
[Debug Glitch Applied — Target: Rob Hilliard — Severity: Minor — Effect: Ringtone override. Duration: Until next mission attempt.]
I read it twice. Closed the app. Opened it again. The analysis was cold and correct and completely useless. Direct motivation from unknown individual carries negative efficacy. Translation: pep talks don't work on a man who's been pep-talked by experts for thirty years.
So what does work?
I needed a strategy that made Rob want to go. Not because a stranger told him to, not because it was the right thing, not because Coach deserved it. Rob already knew all of that. He needed a reason that came from inside his own chest — the specific, stubborn place where belonging lived and bled.
Six hours of cooldown. One retry left at Rank F. And the funeral wake was happening in the church fellowship hall in about forty minutes, where five friends were gathering to remember a dead man, and Rob Hilliard wasn't going to be there unless I figured out what pep talks couldn't do.
I pulled myself up off the bathroom floor. Washed my hands because the tile was questionable. Checked my face in the mirror — Holden's face, still alien, still blue-eyed and sharp-jawed and not mine. My tie had gone crooked during the deployment.
I fixed it. My hands were steady this time.
The bathroom door opened into the fellowship hall, where mourners were already transitioning from grief to food in that uniquely human way — casserole dishes appearing on folding tables, coffee urns steaming, the volume lifting from reverent murmur to something approaching conversation.
From across the hall, Eric waved at me. Genuine, uncomplicated, the wave of a man who remembered shaking your hand twenty minutes ago and decided that made you friends.
I waved back.
And then, from somewhere near the exit — a ringtone. Loud. Obnoxiously, catastrophically loud.
Not just any ringtone.
"It's Raining Men" blasted from Rob Hilliard's pocket at concert volume, and every single head in the fellowship hall turned.
Rob's hand dove for his phone, face going red from collar to toupee. Gloria closed her eyes with the patience of a woman who'd married this man knowing exactly who he was.
The debug glitch had landed.
And Rob — phone finally silenced, standing in the doorway with his car keys in one hand and his dignity in the other — hadn't left yet.
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