Chapter 337: Every Ending Is a New Beginning

She was so caught up in her thoughts, eyes fixed on the ground, her mind spinning, that she wasn’t paying attention to where she was stepping.

And on one of the steps, her foot slipped.

Mary lost her balance and pitched forward, her stomach lurching as she felt herself falling.

But before she could hit the steps, a pair of arms caught her firmly, stopping her fall at the last instant.

"...Huh?"

Mary looked up, dazed, to see who had saved her.

And her heart stopped.

It was Mark.

"You okay?" he asked, helping her regain her balance. "Quite the slip there. Gotta be careful with these stairs, they’re always damp. You didn’t hurt yourself?"

She stared at him in silence, completely unable to answer.

Mark was always like this.

That way of his, worrying about other people without expecting anything in return, even when he barely knew them.

The same kindness he’d shown her that first night in the rain.

And that made the guilt unbearable.

Between what she’d done, the fear over the test, and the way Mark kept treating her, everything started piling up on her all at once.

Her breathing quickened, her chest grew heavy, and for a moment she felt the world around her start to spin.

"Hey, hey, easy," Mark said, noticing her state, concern growing on his face. "You feeling okay? You want me to call someone?"

But in the middle of that panic attack, a thought began working its way into Mary’s mind.

A small, desperate, and utterly absurd hope.

What if, deep down, he’d recognized her?

What if, even just a little, something from that week had stuck with him?

He didn’t need to remember the details, or what had happened.

It would be enough for Mary if her face looked familiar to him.

Enough to have the smallest sign that she meant something, anything, to him.

With that, she’d find the courage to take the first step, to try building something real, this time without lies.

Mary clung to that thought with desperation.

"I... wait," Mary said, looking into his eyes, her voice shaking. "I know this is going to sound really strange, but... I have to ask you... Do you... remember me? From anything? Don’t I look familiar, even a little?"

Mark looked thrown by the question and studied her more carefully.

She definitely wasn’t at her best. She had noticeable bags under her eyes, her hair a little messy, and looked too thin, but even so, there was something about her he found endearing.

It was hard to explain. She looked vulnerable, almost sweet, like someone who needed to be taken care of.

"Sorry, but... no," he answered, frowning slightly. "Do we know each other from somewhere? Should we? Sorry if we do, I’ve got a pretty terrible memory for faces."

Mark’s words finished shattering the little hope Mary had started building.

He didn’t remember her.

And the more she thought about it, the more obvious it became.

During that whole week he’d barely been aware of what was happening around him.

He’d been too drunk to recognize who was putting him to bed, who was staying by his side, who was trying to take care of him.

"...No," Mary answered quietly, lowering her gaze, swallowing the lump forming in her throat. "It’s nothing... Sorry... I... mistook you for someone else. That’s all."

"Ah... well, no worries," Mark replied with a smile. "Although, now that I think about it, your face does seem kind of familiar... I don’t know from where, but—"

Mary felt like she couldn’t take it anymore.

Before he could finish the sentence, she turned and bolted up the stairs. Tears blurred her vision, but she didn’t care.

She just wanted to get away from there, from his voice, from that casual way he was trying to remember something that had meant so much to her.

Mark stood frozen at the bottom of the stairs, not understanding what had just happened.

"...That was weird," he muttered to himself, scratching the back of his neck.

For a few seconds he tried to place where he knew that girl from, but no matter how much he racked his brain, he couldn’t. In the end, worn out from work and not wanting to overthink it any further, he decided to let it go. He’d probably just crossed paths with her somewhere in the building before, nothing more.

He turned to head back to his apartment, but he’d barely taken a step when his foot bumped into something.

Mark stopped, looked down, and found a small plastic object lying on the floor. He picked it up without much attention and examined it for a few seconds.

It was a pregnancy test.

"What’s this doing here?" he muttered, frowning.

Turning it over, he saw the small result window, though at first he didn’t understand what it meant.

He had no experience with this kind of thing and was about to just leave it where it was, but then he spotted a small reference printed on one of the sides.

He compared the mark against the guide and raised his eyebrows slightly as it clicked.

"Oh..."

The test was positive.

Meanwhile, one floor up, Mary burst into her apartment in a flood of tears.

She rushed past the entrance without stopping, dropping the bag of beer by the door, and ran straight to her room.

Her mother, from the couch, watched her pass with an eyebrow raised.

"What’s gotten into her?" she muttered, picking the beer up off the floor with little interest. "Bah, probably that time of the month... That’s why she’s all sensitive and weepy. Young girls and their drama."

She brushed it off and cracked open a can.

In her room, Mary collapsed onto the bed and buried her face in the pillow, crying inconsolably.

"I’m such an idiot," she told herself between sobs, her voice muffled. "A complete idiot... How could I think, even for a second, that he’d remember me?... That someone like him would remember a plain, pathetic nobody like me?"

She clenched her fists against the sheets.

"Of course he doesn’t remember me... He never really saw me... I was such a fool for thinking I had even the slightest chance... For thinking I deserved one."

She wiped her tears away angrily, though new ones quickly replaced them.

"That’s it," she murmured, face pressed into the pillow. "I have to forget about him, once and for all... It’s for the best, for him, for me, for everyone. I just... have to forget him."

But Mary soon discovered forgetting him wasn’t so simple. And within days she slipped right back into her old habits.

She barely slept, spending every night in front of the computer, jumping from one match to the next until she watched the sun come up through the window.

But she wasn’t doing it for fun anymore. It was just a way to keep her mind occupied and stop her thoughts from circling back to Mark, over and over.

With each passing day, Mary felt more exhausted, more distant, and less concerned about whatever might come next.

That’s how the days went by, until two weeks later, it all came to an end.

That night, her mother had beaten her worse than usual and sent her out to buy more alcohol, as she had so many times before.

Mary obeyed.

On her way back home, still dazed and cursing the world, she crossed the street without noticing a truck approaching.

Mary didn’t even have time to react and died instantly.

After that, everything carried on as if nothing had happened.

Her mother didn’t go looking for her, and no one made much noise over her absence.

The girl who had spent her whole life feeling invisible vanished from the world in exactly the same way.

A few days later, Mark died too.

He’d been fired that very afternoon, exactly as he’d feared for so long, and while walking home not knowing what he was going to do with his life, he ended up crossing paths with a mugger in an alley.

Things went badly.

And that was that.

Two people who had spent years just surviving however they could ended up disappearing within days of each other.

Neither had had much luck, neither had gotten a real chance, and when their lives ended, the world kept moving forward, barely even noticing.

For anyone else, that would have been the end of the story.

But for Mary and Mark, that was only the beginning.