His Last Regret: Unmade

“The city festival lights blurred, then the world exploded into screams and dust. Liam was on top of me, saving me again, for the third time. But this time, his last words, choked out with blood, were not what I expected. "If only... I had never met you." Ten years of a cold marriage, of my unrequited love, ended with that brutal, devastating line. At his funeral, his mother's sharp voice cut through my grief: "He died because of you. Always you." The whispers followed me out of the church, society agreeing I was the reason Liam Walker, the city's golden boy, was dead at thirty-three. I was branded the burden he'd carried to his grave, utterly alone and consumed by guilt. Liam's words echoed, haunting me: "If only I had never met you." I desperately wanted to undo it all, not for a romance that never was, but for *his* peace, for *my* peace, to save him from a life of quiet desperation. Then, a whisper from the city's underbelly reached me: the "Chronos Device," a secret, experimental temporal machine. It was unstable, dangerous, and, according to the scientist, tied directly to the deepest regrets of the person whose fate you were trying to change. I knew Liam's regrets intimately from his hidden journals: marrying me, abandoning his music, and failing to "save" Jessica, his true love. Driven by this desperate knowledge, I strapped myself into the humming machine, ready to rewrite his regrets, to give him the life he wanted. Even if it meant erasing myself from his life and future forever.”