I never meant to snoop.
The leather-bound journal had fallen from the shelf while I was helping Emma unpack her boxes in our new apartment. It landed open, pages splayed across the hardwood floor, and my name caught my eye instantly—my full name, Michael Andrew Bennett.
“Sorry,” I called out to Emma, who was arranging dishes in the kitchen. “Knocked a book down.”
I reached to close it when the date in the upper corner stopped me cold: May 12, 2023.
The entry detailed our first coffee date at Riverside Café—my nervous laugh, the blue shirt I was wearing, how I’d spilled my americano when she mentioned she was also from Vermont.
But that was impossible.
Emma and I met on March 15, 2024. Ten months after this entry was written.
I flipped to another page, my heart racing.
July 8, 2023: “Michael took me to dinner at Massimo’s tonight. He ordered the rigatoni and kept apologizing for talking too much about his work. I told him I loved hearing his passion for architectural restoration. He reached for my hand across the table.”
My fingers trembled as I turned more pages. Dozens of entries—all about me, about us—spanning months before we’d ever met. Our first kiss described in vivid detail. The time I surprised her with concert tickets. Arguments we’d had and made up from. All perfectly accurate. All impossibly prewritten.
“Find anything interesting?”
I jumped at Emma’s voice. She stood in the doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel, her head tilted with that slight smile I’d fallen for so quickly.
“I—” I snapped the journal shut. “Sorry, it fell and I just… What is this, Emma?”
She walked over, sitting beside me on the floor. Her face betrayed nothing as she gently took the diary from my hands.
“I guess this was bound to happen eventually,” she said, running her fingers over the embossed cover. “I should’ve been more careful.”
“How is this possible?” I whispered. “These entries… they’re from before we met. But they describe everything exactly how it happened.”
Emma was quiet for a long moment. “Would you believe me if I said I’ve been having dreams my whole life? Dreams about you?”
I stared at her. The woman I’d moved in with after only four months of dating. The woman who had seemed to understand me from the moment we met, who always knew what I was thinking before I said it.
“Dreams,” I repeated.
“Since I was sixteen,” she continued. “At first, they were fragments—your face, your laugh. By the time I was in college, I was dreaming entire days with you. I started writing them down.” She tapped the journal. “In these.”
“That’s…” I searched for words. “That’s not possible.”
She gave me that smile again—the one that had always seemed so mysterious. “I recognized you instantly that day at the coffee shop. I’d been waiting for you for eight years.”
I stood up, needing distance. My mind raced through our relationship, reframing every moment. How she’d ordered my favorite drink for me before I told her what it was. How she’d known about my shellfish allergy before our second date. How perfectly we fit together from the very beginning.
“There are a dozen journals,” she said quietly. “This is just the most recent.”
“Show me.”
Emma disappeared into the bedroom and returned with a cardboard box. Inside were eleven more identical leather-bound books. She handed me the oldest one, its spine cracked from repeated reading.
The first page was dated October 3, 2015: “I dreamed of him again. He was older this time—maybe early thirties. We were in an apartment with blue walls, unpacking boxes. He found my journals.”
Ice shot through my veins. I dropped the book.
“You’re frightened,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Wouldn’t you be?” My voice sounded strange to my own ears. “This is… this is crazy, Emma.”
“I know how it seems.” Her composure unnerved me. “But I’ve had years to come to terms with it. These dreams—they’ve always come true. Not always immediately, but eventually.”
I looked around our half-unpacked apartment. The blue walls I’d insisted on painting myself last weekend.
“What else happens?” I demanded. “In these dreams of yours—what happens to us?”
Emma hesitated. “You don’t want to know that.”
“I think I have a right to know my own future,” I insisted.
“The future changes,” she said. “The more I tell you, the more it shifts. That’s why I never said anything.”
I picked up another journal, flipping through pages at random. Our life together played out in neat handwriting—holidays we hadn’t taken yet, arguments we hadn’t had, milestones we hadn’t reached.
“This is a violation,” I said finally. “You’ve been… what? Following a script? Manipulating me?”
Pain flashed in her eyes. “No. Never. I just… recognized moments as they happened. I never forced anything.”
“How can I believe that? How can I trust any of this was real?”
She reached for my hand, but I pulled away.
“I need air,” I mumbled, grabbing my jacket from the hook by the door.
“Michael,” she called as I opened the door. “There’s something you should know.”
I paused, not turning around.
“The dreams stopped the day we met,” she said. “I haven’t had a single one since. Whatever I wrote about our future beyond March 15th… it’s not predetermined anymore.”
I looked back at her, surrounded by the scattered journals of our relationship—past, present, and possible future.
“I don’t know if that makes it better or worse,” I said, and closed the door behind me.
That night, I walked for hours through the city, trying to separate my memories from her writings. Had I chosen Emma, or had she chosen me through some cosmic cheat sheet? Had anything between us been genuine, or was I just following a path she’d already mapped out?
When I returned to the apartment near dawn, I found Emma asleep on the couch, waiting for me. The journals were gone, nowhere to be seen. Except for one—the newest—placed on the coffee table with a note:
“This is the last one. I’ll never look at the others again. What happens next should be unwritten.”
I stood watching her sleep, this woman who had known me before I knew myself. Then I picked up the journal and began to read the final entry, dated March 14, 2024—one day before we met:
“Tomorrow I’ll see him in person for the first time. I’m terrified. What if the real Michael doesn’t feel what the dream Michael feels? What if finding these journals drives him away? What if telling the truth means losing the future I’ve glimpsed? Some dreams showed him leaving after discovering them. Others showed him staying. I don’t know which reality we’ll live. For the first time in my life, I’ll have to live each day without knowing what comes next. Just like everyone else.”
I closed the journal, placed it back on the table, and sat beside her on the couch. I’d have questions—hundreds of them. I’d need time to process this impossibility. But as I watched her sleeping, I realized something important.
Emma hadn’t been following a script these past months. She’d been terrified of deviating from it, of losing what her dreams had promised her. And now she was offering to face the unknown with me.
When she woke, we would start writing our story together. Uncharted. Unplanned.
For the first time.