The plates were empty before Jake realized he had finished eating.
His body moved on its own. He pushed back his chair.
Marla noticed instantly.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
The room quieted — not suddenly, not dramatically — just enough for him to feel the weight of eyes turning toward him.
"I… I don't know," he said. "I just need air."
She frowned. "Since when do you leave before the stories? We haven't even started arguing about whose harvest was worse."
A few people chuckled.
"Sit, Iratus," someone said from the end of the table. "Your uncle hasn't embarrassed himself yet."
The name landed wrong.
Iratus.
It wasn't a nickname. It wasn't a joke.
It was his.
He sat back down slowly.
They started talking to him like nothing was broken.
"Still chasing the miller's daughter?""You going to race the river again this year?""Your father says you'll ruin your boots before winter."
Jake opened his mouth to answer — and nothing came out.
He nodded when he should've laughed. Smiled when he should've known the memory. Every question felt like a test he had never studied for.
Jake.
That was the name echoing in his head.
But they kept calling him Iratus, over and over, until it began to feel heavier than his old one.
Iratus had friends.Iratus had stories.Iratus had a place at this table.
Jake had… twelve failed job applications and a room that didn't want him.
He pressed his thumb into the scar on his left hand, grounding himself in the pain. But even that wasn't the same scar.
Different body.Different life.
Same emptiness.
Someone laughed at something he said.
He didn't remember saying it.
And the worst part wasn't that he was lying to them.
It was that he was starting to forget which name belonged to him.
The stories went on until the lamps burned low and the room thinned with yawns.
Jake—no, Iratus—slipped out while they were arguing about whose harvest had been cursed last winter. No one stopped him this time.
Outside, the night lay clean over the fields. No engines. No sirens. Just insects whispering secrets to the dark.
He walked barefoot across the soil.
The earth was cool, forgiving. It didn't care who he had been before today.
He stopped near the fence and looked back at the farmhouse. Light spilled from the windows in crooked golden lines, warm and careless, like it expected him to return.
For the first time since he could remember, there was no schedule waiting to strangle him in the morning.
No rent app.No unread emails.No locked doors.
A second life.
Not a reset — a permission.
He pressed his hand against his chest, feeling a heartbeat that belonged to someone else and somehow to him at the same time.
I don't have to become who I was, he thought.I can become who I decide.
The idea settled into him slowly, dangerously.
Not hope.
Opportunity.
And standing there under a sky untouched by his old failures, he didn't realize it yet—
But the world had just handed him the one thing he'd never had before:
A chance to choose who he would be… before something else chose for him.