He Ignored My Pleas for Help, and Regretted It for the Rest of His Life

Five minutes before the freight train crushed me against the tracks, I somehow managed to dial my boyfriend's number.

Ten years in the future.

Tristan, help me... the train is coming...

A baby's sharp cry echoed through the receiver, layered beneath Tristan's tightly repressed fury.

Ariel, are you done? Milly just pushed out a baby, and you decide right now is the perfect time to put on this psycho act?

"Are you seriously trying to compete with a two-hour-old infant for my attention?"

"I blew my early admissions interview for Yale ten years ago to save your life. Are you trying to ruin the life I have now, too?"

Blinding white light pierced the darkness at the end of the tracks, stinging my eyes.

Over the phone, Tristan was still mocking me.

"Milly's weak. I need to get her transferred to a private recovery suite."

"Ariel, I dragged your pathetic life back from the Grim Reaper himself ten years ago. I didn't save you so you could use your life to blackmail and manipulate me today. Cut the crap. You make me sick."

The line went dead.

Five minutes were up.

I stared at the roaring, massive steel machine hurtling toward me, and a bitter, self-deprecating laugh escaped my lips.

So, the boy who once traded his bright future for my life now saw me as a stumbling block to his happily ever after.

If that was the case, I would just give it back.

...

I died on those tracks at the age of seventeen.

Five minutes before my death, I had dialed the Tristan from ten years in the future.

The thick hemp rope dug viciously into my wrists. My back was pressed against the freezing steel rails, sharp gravel slicing into my flesh.

The wind howled across the barren field, carrying the sickening stench of wet rust and rotting mud.

The automated voice from the distant station platform echoed through the night.

"Approaching train. Five minutes."

Five minutes.

I had exactly five minutes before I was pulverized into a stain on the tracks.

Fighting through the agony, I scraped my fingers against the dirt until my nails tore and bled, finally nudging my old phone out of my jacket pocket.

I knew Tristan's number so well I typed it blindly on the cracked screen.

The call connected.

But the voice that greeted me wasn't Tristan's bright, familiar tone. It was the loud, piercing wail of a newborn baby.

My mind went completely blank.

Why was there a baby with Tristan?

But the primal instinct to survive overrode my confusion.

I opened my mouth, but the metallic taste of blood flooded my throat, choking my words into broken syllables.

"Tristan, help..."

"The train... it's coming..."

The line went dead silent for two seconds.

Then came Tristan's voice, laced with an icy, biting irritation.

"Ariel, are you done?"

I froze.

It was his voice, but it wasn't my Tristan.

My Tristan would never speak to me with such venom.

The tracks beneath me began to vibrate. A faint, rhythmic trembling that traveled through the steel directly into my spine.

Time was running out.

Yet Tristan was on the other end, interrogating me word by word.

"Milly just gave birth. Her body hasn't even recovered. Do you really have to pull this crazy stunt right now?"

"What, are you jealous of a two-hour-old baby? Is that it?"

Milly?

A baby?

The harsh wind stung my eyes, and tears spilled down my cheeks without warning.

"No..."

"Tristan, I'm tied to the tracks."

"The train is coming. It's really coming!"

"Please, call the cops, call anyone..."

My desperate pleading was interrupted by a weak, feminine voice in the background.

It was Milly.

"Tristan, who is it? The baby is crying again..."

Tristan's tone instantly softened into a gentle cadence I had never heard before.

"It's nothing. Just an unimportant call. Don't worry about it, just rest."

Then, his voice shifted back to absolute ice as he spoke into the receiver.

"Ariel, ten years ago, I skipped my finals to save you. I lost my full-ride to Yale."

"Do you think ruining my life once wasn't enough? Are you trying to destroy the life I have now?"

Ten years ago?

What did he mean, ten years ago?

I was seventeen. So was he.

That scholarship interview was supposed to be tomorrow.

And Milly? Wasn't she just the annoying sophomore who followed Tristan around, the girl he barely spared a glance?

Why...

The mechanical voice from the station drifted over again. "Approaching train. Three minutes."

A quiet voice in my head whispered the truth.

Tristan didn't want me anymore.

I shook my head violently, trying to throw the terrifying thought away.

No.

Tristan wasn't like that.

My seventeen-year-old Tristan was the boy who carried me on his back through a torrential downpour when I had a fever, running two miles to the nearest clinic.

The boy who shoved his last lunch card into my hand while he chewed on dry bread.

The boy who, when I was cornered by local thugs in the alley, charged in with his backpack swinging, his eyes red and his voice completely hoarse from screaming.

He had said, "Ariel isn't trash."

He had said, "She has me."

But the Tristan on the phone was colder than the steel pressed against my spine.

"Ariel, I am so completely sick of you."

"Milly is exhausted. I need to get her to a private suite."

"I snatched your life back from hell ten years ago."

"I didn't do it so you could use it to threaten me today."

"Stop the act."

"You disgust me."

My blood turned to ice.

The roar of the train was deafening now. So far away, yet terrifyingly close.

A blinding sphere of white light erupted from the darkness, hurtling straight at me, so bright it burned my retinas.

"Tristan..."

I wanted to call his name one last time, but the phone only spit out a dial tone.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

He hung up.

"Approaching train. One minute."

I lay alone on the freezing tracks. The violent shaking of the earth vibrated through my bones, the mechanical roar drowning out everything else.

I suddenly remembered sophomore year. Tristan standing beneath the old brick school building, smiling up at my window.

The afternoon sun rested on his shoulders. He looked so young, so full of unstoppable promise.

"Ariel, once I get that Yale acceptance, we're moving out East together."

"They have the best schools, the brightest city lights."

"I'm going to give you a real home."

Four seconds.

Three seconds.

Two seconds.

The monstrous roar of the train swallowed the world.

In the final second, I stopped struggling and closed my eyes in absolute despair.

I'm sorry, Tristan.

I guess I won't get to see that home.

...

I didn't feel any pain.

When I opened my eyes again, I was floating in the sterile, blindingly white hallway of a hospital.

A newborn's cry echoed from a partially open door, piercing the quiet night like fine needles pricking the heart.

I looked down at my hands.

They were translucent.

I was dead.

I had died at seventeen, crushed on those tracks.

Yet my soul had somehow drifted ten years into the future.

Through the crack in the door, I saw Tristan's tall frame blocking the entrance. He was gripping his phone so hard his knuckles were white, his face dark with suppressed anger.

On the hospital bed, a pale Milly held a swaddled, wrinkled newborn.

"Tristan, was it Ariel?"

Tristan didn't answer, but his rigid jawline was answer enough.

Milly's eyes immediately welled with tears.

"Is she still mad at me? Mad that I... had your baby?"

"I know she's your wife."

Tristan rubbed his temples aggressively, his voice thick with exhaustion.

"Stop overthinking."

"She's just having another one of her psychotic episodes."

Floating by the doorway, I listened to them and slowly realized the truth. The man I had spoken to minutes ago wasn't my seventeen-year-old boy.

It was his twenty-seven-year-old self.

My final, desperate plea for life was nothing more than another "psychotic episode" to him.

My nose stung violently, but I couldn't shed a single tear.

Dead girls don't cry.

Milly looked down at the baby in her arms, fat tears dropping onto the blanket.

"But I heard her mention a train..."

"Tristan, what if she was telling the truth?"

Tristan looked up. The dark circles under his eyes were heavy, making him look like a man who hadn't slept peacefully in years.

He stayed silent for a long time. Long enough that I actually thought he might run out the door to find me.

But then he let out a cold, hollow laugh, dripping with exhaustion and mockery.

"Ever since that kidnapping ten years ago, she's used death to manipulate me."

"Slitting her wrists, swallowing pills, standing on the ledge of the roof."

"I am so sick of Ariel's cheap tricks."

"She always comes home completely fine in the end, doesn't she?"

I froze in the air.

Kidnapping?

Slitting my wrists?

Pills?

I didn't remember doing any of that.

Did I somehow survive in this timeline, only to live another ten years as a deranged lunatic?

A pathetic parasite who used self-harm to beg for a man's attention?

Milly bit her lip, asking softly, "Then... shouldn't you at least call her back to check?"

Tristan looked down at his phone screen.

The screen was dark. The call had ended.

He stared at my name for a long, long time, his grip so tight his fingers turned pale.

Finally, he shoved the phone deep into his pocket with a ruthless finality.

"No."

"It's time she grew up."

Hearing those words, it felt like an invisible hand had carved a massive, gaping hole in my chest, letting the freezing wind howl through.

The digital clock on the wall outside the room clicked forward.

2:05 AM.

The exact minute I died.

The exact minute I was permanently erased from his life.

Tristan didn't go to sleep right away.

After the nurses moved Milly and the baby to a quieter private suite, he sat alone on a bench at the far end of the hallway.

The hospital was dead quiet in the middle of the night. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead.

He hunched forward, burying his hands in his hair. His shoulders sagged heavily, radiating the aura of a man crushed under an invisible weight.

The screen of the phone in his pocket lit up once. Then twice.

No new calls.

He finally pulled it out, opening his contacts and scrolling down to my name.

Ariel.

Underneath the name, there was a tiny sub-note.

Little Liar.

I drifted closer, watching his rough thumb gently trace over those two words again and again.

I had no idea what had happened between us over these past ten years.

But this older Tristan, who claimed to hate me to my core, still hadn't deleted my number. He still kept a nickname that sounded more helplessly frustrated than truly hateful.

2:17 AM.

Twelve minutes since my death.

As if he couldn't take the suffocating silence anymore, Tristan finally hit dial.

"The number you are trying to reach is currently unavailable."

The automated female voice was utterly devoid of warmth.

His brow furrowed deeply. He dialed again.

Same result.

A third time.

A fourth.

A fifth.

He finally let out a low, frustrated growl, slamming the phone face-down onto the empty seat beside him.

"Wow, Ariel. You're really good at this."

"You even timed your silent treatment perfectly."

I crouched in front of him, looking up into his bloodshot eyes.

"I'm not giving you the silent treatment."

"Tristan, I'm dead."

Of course, he couldn't hear me.

He just leaned his head against the cold hospital wall and closed his eyes.

I wanted to reach out, to smooth the deep crease between his brows just like I used to.

But my fingertips passed right through his skin.

Nothing but thin air.

Ten years ago, he stayed up all night with me in a hospital just like this.

I had a violently high fever and was delirious. Tristan sat by my bed, wiping the sweat from my forehead with a warm towel over and over again.

The doctor told him to get some sleep on the cot next door.

He stubbornly shook his head.

"If she wakes up and doesn't see me, she'll be scared."

Back then, his eyes held absolutely nothing but me.

And now?

Now, I was a cheap trick he was sick of seeing. An old, ugly scar he refused to look at.

3:00 AM.

The hallway was so quiet I could hear my own heartbeat, if I still had one.

A nurse rolled a cart into Milly's room to change her dressings.

Tristan practically shot up from the bench, following the nurse inside so fast he created a gust of wind.

I floated by the door, watching him.

The nurse was about to pick up the baby to weigh her, but Tristan stepped in front of her. With agonizing caution, he scooped the tiny, wrinkled bundle out of the bassinet.

He looked ridiculously awkward.

His arms were stiff, his back rigid. He held the infant like an active bomb rather than a fragile human being.

But beneath that clumsiness was an overwhelming, tender care.

Milly watched him from the bed, her eyes swimming with a gentle adoration I had never seen in her before.

"Tristan."

Her voice was barely a whisper.

"Give her a nickname."

Tristan looked down at the tiny, featureless face bundled in the blankets.

He stayed silent for a long time.

Long enough that I thought he would refuse.

"Hope," he finally said.

"So she stays safe. Always."

My soul shuddered violently.

It felt like someone had nailed me to the floor.

A memory from a distant summer afternoon flashed through my mind, back by the bleachers of the old high school track.

I was swinging my legs off the metal railing, looking down at Tristan as he filled out a calculus worksheet.

"Tristan, if we ever have a baby, what would you name her?"

His pen didn't stop moving.

"Hope."

"Why?"

He finally looked up at me. The afternoon sun caught in his eyes, making them shine impossibly bright.

"Because you're always getting into trouble."

"I want you to be safe. I want to have hope."

He never forgot the name.

He just gave it to someone else.

When the sky began to lighten, Tristan finally went home.

I followed him like a shadow, listening to the lock click open.

A stagnant smell of stale air, prescription meds, and old takeout hit my face.

The living room looked like it had been ransacked.

The coffee table was cluttered with colorful pill bottles. Antidepressants, sleeping pills, and heavy sedatives I couldn't even pronounce.

Shattered glass glittered dangerously on the rug.

Out on the balcony, the wind chime I had personally hung up was missing its longest string. The breeze slipping through the cracked window made it clank together in a discordant, broken melody.

Our framed photo still hung on the wall.

In the picture, I was wearing a pristine white sundress, smiling so hard my eyes were crescent moons.

Tristan stood behind me, his hands resting awkwardly on my shoulders. He was trying to smile, but he looked completely out of his element.

I forced him to take that picture on my seventeenth birthday.

He said taking photos was stupid.

But he still played along with my stupidity.

The moment Tristan walked in, he dumped his jacket on the sofa, loosened his tie, and called out to the empty apartment.

"Ariel."

Silence.

He stopped taking off his shoes, his expression darkening inch by inch.

"Stop hiding."

"I am not in the mood for your games today."

The apartment remained dead silent.

Only the broken wind chime clanked stubbornly in the background.

He frowned, striding aggressively into the master bedroom.

The bed was perfectly made.

The sheets were tucked in tightly without a single wrinkle. It looked like no one had slept in it at all.

The closet door was slightly ajar. My half of the wardrobe was completely empty.

The desk was wiped clean, save for a single, baby-pink notebook.

My diary.

Tristan stood frozen, staring at that diary for a long, long time.

His back was as rigid as stone.

Eventually, he reached out and flipped the cover open.

Page one.

The handwriting was mine, neat but slightly rushed.

March 6th.

Tristan didn't come home for dinner again.

I made his favorite beef stew. I waited from 6 PM to 11 PM. The food is ice cold.

Milly posted a picture online. The caption said, "Late nights at the office are the hardest!" In the corner of the photo, there was a man's hand. He was wearing the watch I bought Tristan for his birthday.

He told me they were just coworkers.

I believe him.

But I still cried so hard I couldn't sleep.

Page two.

April 12th.

The psychiatrist says my PTSD is getting worse.

I hallucinate. I constantly hear the deafening roar of a freight train right next to my ear.

I have nightmares about the freezing steel tracks and the kidnapper's sick laughter.

I wake up screaming in the middle of the night, drenched in cold sweat.

Tristan held me today and told me he was tired.

Of course he's tired.

If he hadn't given up everything to save me, he would be at Yale right now. He would be at the very top, living the dream everyone expected of him.

Page three.

May 20th.

Milly is pregnant.

She came to the apartment crying, begging me to let them be together. She said her baby couldn't grow up without a father.

I screamed at her to get out. I called her a homewrecker.

But later, when I took the trash down, I saw Tristan gently guiding her into his car, hovering over her like she was made of glass.

He looked up and saw me. His eyes were full of nothing but disappointment.

Did I do something wrong again?

Page four.

June 1st.

I asked for a divorce.

Tristan's eyes went red. He asked if I was trying to drive him into an early grave.

He said, "Ariel, you owe me a life."

I finally understand. To him, I'm not his wife.

I'm his unpaid debt.

Tristan's hand shook violently as he turned to the next page.

Page five.

July 8th.

I dreamed about ten years ago again.

If only I hadn't made that phone call.

If I had just died on those tracks, Tristan wouldn't have missed his interview looking for me.

He would have gone to Yale.

He would be standing in the brightest, highest place in the world.

He would have met someone who made him smile, someone who wasn't a broken burden.

If time could rewind.

I would give my life back to him.

The diary ended there.

The last few lines were severely blurred by large, dried water stains.

Like someone had been sobbing so uncontrollably they could barely grip the pen.

Standing over the desk, the color drained completely from Tristan's face.

His Adam's apple bobbed sharply. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

After what felt like an eternity, he let out a low, venomous curse.

It was quiet and cruel, squeezed through gritted teeth.

"Ariel."

"Are you really trying to use this garbage to make me feel sorry for you?"

"When are you finally going to let me go?"

I floated behind him, watching his broad shoulders tremble. In a voice only I could hear, I whispered.

"I already let you go."

"Tristan, I'm already dead."

The clock on the wall struck exactly 7:00 AM.

It had been four hours and fifty-five minutes since my actual death.

A bizarre, terrifying realization dawned on me.

The world of ten years ago was actively devouring all traces of my existence in this timeline.

As if on cue, the edges of the diary under Tristan's hands began to blur, turning transparent.

The first line of text vanished.

Then the second.

Tristan's pupils shrank to pinpricks.

As if the paper had caught fire, he clawed at the pages, trying desperately to physically grab the fading ink.

But the words dissolved like sand slipping through his fingers, leaving behind nothing but blank, empty paper.

Panic finally hit him.

A raw, visceral terror I had never seen on his face before.

"Ariel!"

Tristan spun around like a trapped, feral animal, tearing through the small apartment.

"Come out!"

"I know you're here!"

"Ariel, stop! This isn't funny anymore!"

He violently yanked open every closet door, kicked open the bathroom, and even tore through the storage bins on the balcony.

Nothing.

Every single object in the apartment that belonged to me was vanishing right before his eyes.

My pink toothbrush by the bathroom sink faded into thin air.

My fluffy bunny slippers by the front door vanished.

The pink umbrella he always stole from me on rainy days was gone.

Tristan stumbled backward, hitting the wall. He looked up at our framed photo.

The girl in the white sundress had disappeared.

Only he remained, standing awkwardly in front of a blank background, looking totally alone.

"Impossible..."

He muttered, his face ashen.

His hands shook uncontrollably as he unlocked his phone and opened the gallery.

The photo of us watching the sunrise at the beach was gone.

The picture of me laughing in front of the ugly birthday cake he baked me was gone.

The candid shot he secretly took when I fell asleep on his shoulder was gone.

He scrolled frantically. Out of thousands of pictures, every single image containing my face had either turned blank or altered to show him entirely alone.

Finally, at the very bottom, there was only a single, ten-year-old news screenshot.

The headline was glaring and absolute.

"Local 17-Year-Old High School Girl Killed in Kidnapping Incident."

Tristan's phone nearly slipped from his trembling hands.

He tapped the image, his eyes locking onto the date of publication.

Ten years ago. July 8th.

The article detailed the tragedy clearly.

The victim, Ariel, age 17.

Police reports confirmed her final, desperate call for help was dialed to her classmate, Tristan.

The call status: Unconnected.

By the time authorities arrived, they found nothing but bloody scraps of clothing and a shattered cell phone by the tracks.

Tristan stared at the word "Unconnected," his breathing turning into jagged, violent gasps.

"No."

"I answered it."

"I know I answered it..."

His mind was spiraling into chaos as the memory of last night's call hit him with the force of a physical blow.

My voice, trembling against the howling wind.

"Tristan, help me..."

"The train is coming..."

What did he say to me?

He told me I disgusted him.

He told me to stop acting.

He asked if I was trying to ruin the life he had now because ruining his past wasn't enough.

The horrifying truth finally snapped into place.

My final wish, after ten years of agony, was to die on those tracks so I wouldn't ruin his future.

And now.

My wish came true.