There it was.

He looked at the memory card menu again. Then back at the screen. He realized he wasn’t thirteen anymore. The fear of endings had calcified into a strange kind of love. He thought of his mom. Of the final conversation they never had. Of all the games he’d finished since then, the saved worlds he’d left behind.

And for the first time in fifteen years, the save was complete.

The familiar piano of “To Zanarkand” played. He skipped the intro, loaded the game, and selected Slot 1.

The memory card was a grimy gray brick, no bigger than a pack of gum, but to Leo, it was a vault of ghosts. It had been wedged behind his dresser for nearly fifteen years, buried under dust bunnies and the silence of a childhood long over. When his father finally cleaned out the attic, he’d nearly thrown it away. Leo, now twenty-eight and living three states away, had stopped him with a frantic phone call.

Leo remembered that save. He was thirteen. It was the summer his mom got sick. He’d spent every night in this room, Tidus and Yuna’s story bleeding into his own. He’d maxed every character’s Sphere Grid. Bred the perfect chocobo. Dodged two hundred lightning bolts. He refused to finish the game. Because if he walked into that final battle and defeated Sin, the story would end. And in real life, his mom was fading.

He placed the gray card back into its slot, turned off the PS2, and unplugged it all. He put the console in a box, the memory card tucked into a small velvet bag.

The cubes rearranged themselves into icons. Leo navigated to the card and pressed X.

Then he overwrote it.