Chapter 17 — The Last Page

If you read it aloud, you'll vanish between the lines.

Blue fire burns selectively.

It consumed the Mayor entirely—no drama, no last words, just the steady blue erasure of something that had been false for a very long time. It reduced Miss Wicker to a whisper caught between the pages of a library wall, where she might persist indefinitely as a draft that nobody needs to finish.

But it left Mom and Dad.

Changed. Damaged. There.

Dad came back to solid—mostly. His edges stayed blurred, like a photograph taken through glass. Mom's manuscript arm was gone, the real skin beneath it mapped with scars in the shape of words.

Among the charred remains of the Press, one page still glowed.

The last page.

Dad caught my wrist before I could reach it. "That's the only copy of how this ends. Once you read it, it's set."

Mom touched my face with her scarred hand. "We have to choose. Remember everything—or live, without it following us."

The page showed three endings in the Press's last light:

Sign the contract. Forget. The town resets and everyone is safe and nothing was ever wrong.

Burn the last page. Become unwritten. Free, but gone.

Write something new—but the page doesn't say what. That part is blank.

Outside, through the crumbling walls of the Press, Pigeon Hollow was waking up.

Mr. Donahue clutched his head: I remember—I was supposed to be a teacher!

Mrs. Peabody's eyes cleared, real sight flooding back in: They overwrote my daughter.

People finding the edges of what had been done to them, not all the way back yet but moving in the right direction. Blinking. Breathing. Becoming themselves again.

Dad's hand on my shoulder. "Some stories should end."

Mom's hand in mine. "And some deserve better ones."

I picked up the pen.

And wrote in the margin of the last page.