u/Arthedx

I am an 2028 jee aspirants preparing for jee exam and I need strong advice from IITians

My condition

So I have ended up in a local coaching in my area due to money problems. I can barely solve pyqs or any questions especially of maths I give a very hard try to every question but I end up loosing all the confidence

I really want to become an IITian because it's my parents dream but the situation I am in makes me realise how unworthy I am for iit

I know jee is not a joke it's requires hard work and I am ready for it but my hard work didn't paying me back due to which have loosing my all confidence every day

Can any one suggest me what should I do in this situation ( is iit still possible for my type of students)

​

I need to write this down while I still remember it clearly, because something tells me I might not remember it for much longer.

My name is Michael. Before any of this, I was about as ordinary as a person gets. Nine-to-five job, decent enough salary, a small apartment I loved more than I probably should have. I liked being alone. Not in a sad way — I want to be clear about that. I liked my quiet evenings, my own routines, nobody needing anything from me at the end of a long day. I never wanted marriage. I never wanted kids. I was never even particularly good at talking to women, if I'm being honest, always a little too awkward, a little too eager to end the conversation and go back to my own company.

I got married anyway. Family pressure, mostly, the kind that wears you down over years until saying yes feels easier than saying no one more time. Her name was Natalie.

Natalie was sweet. Genuinely, I want that on record, because everything I'm about to describe doesn't erase that fact. She tried, harder than I ever gave her credit for at the time. She learned my schedule, cooked things she thought I'd like, tried to talk to me about my day even when I gave her almost nothing back. I was a bad husband in the most ordinary way possible not cruel, just absent, closed off, giving her silence when she needed conversation.

But there was something else, something I noticed within the first few weeks and never brought myself to mention. She checked my phone. Constantly. I'd catch her doing it and she'd just set it down calmly, like she hadn't been caught at all, like it wasn't something worth explaining. I told myself it was insecurity. Newlywed nerves. I never asked her about it, because some small, cowardly part of me didn't want to have that conversation.

It got worse in ways I couldn't quite name. I'd feel eyes on me while I ate dinner, and I'd look up and she wouldn't be looking at me at all, and yet the feeling wouldn't go away. I'd wake up at night certain someone was standing at the foot of the bed, and there'd be nothing there. I told myself I was imagining things. Five months of marriage does strange things to a mind that never wanted to be married in the first place.

By month five, I understood my life had turned into something I never agreed to. Bills split two ways that used to be mine alone. Groceries planned around someone else's tastes. The quiet apartment I loved now never quiet at all. I told myself this wasn't about Natalie specifically. I told myself I just needed my old life back, the one I'd actually chosen for myself.

I decided to ask for a divorce.

I picked a night I thought would be calm. I sat her down and I told her, as gently as I could manage, that I wasn't a good match for her — that I barely talked to her, barely made her laugh, barely gave her anything close to what she deserved from a husband. I said we should end this before it did more damage to both of us.

I didn't tell her the real reason. I didn't tell her that the checked phone, the eyes I always felt on me, the presence at the foot of the bed — I didn't tell her any of that had scared me more than I could put into words. I thought I was being kind by leaving it out.

Her face went completely still when I finished talking. Not sad. Not angry. Empty, in a way that made the hair on my arms stand up before she'd even said a single word back. She started muttering something under her breath, too quiet for me to make out, her eyes never leaving mine the entire time.

Then she said, very clearly, "You want to leave me because there's someone else. Someone special."

I told her that wasn't true. I don't think she heard me at all.

Her voice dropped as she kept talking, deeper with every word, thick in a way no human voice should be able to get. Her face began to change in front of me not slowly, not gradually enough to give me time to process it, just wrong, all at once, features stretching and shifting into something I don't have adequate words for, something with too many angles where a face should have soft ones.

I ran for the door. It wouldn't open. I pulled until my hands bled and it didn't so much as shift in the frame. I screamed for help until my throat gave out, and no sound left that room at all, like the apartment itself had decided this conversation was private.

She — it — came toward me slowly, in no hurry at all, and said, in that thick, wrong voice, that I belonged to her now, that my whole self was her property, and that leaving was never something I had actually been allowed to choose.

I don't remember exactly what happened after that. I remember darkness, and cold, and a pressure on my chest like something enormous was simply resting its weight on me without any particular urgency, the way you'd rest a hand on something you already fully own.

I woke up on my apartment floor the next morning. Alone. Natalie was gone — not left, not moved out, just gone, no trace of her ever having lived there at all. No clothes in the closet. No photos. No marriage certificate in the drawer where I know I kept it. I checked my phone contacts. Her name wasn't there either.

For about a day, I actually let myself believe I'd imagined the entire marriage. Some kind of breakdown, maybe, my mind inventing a wife and an entire relationship out of loneliness and exhaustion. I almost felt relief.

Then I found the box in my closet, one I don't remember owning, shoved into the back corner behind winter coats I never wear.

Inside were photographs. Dozens of them. Men I didn't recognize, standing in what was unmistakably my own apartment, my own furniture behind them in every single shot, dated across years I've lived here years before I ever met Natalie, going back further than that, further than made any sense at all. Each man's face was circled in red pen. Each photograph had a name written beneath it in careful handwriting, and beneath each name, the same word.

Divorced.

Mine was the last photo in the stack, taken from an angle I don't remember being photographed at, in my own kitchen, dated to a day I hadn't lived through yet.

Beneath my face, in that same careful handwriting, someone had already written the word.

The ink looked wet.

​

Hey seniors I need your serious advice especially from those who are in IIT . I am currently in class 11th preparing for jee 2028 and I am struggling too much . I can barely solve jee mains pyqs and I can't even solve advanced pyqs . I daily do practice to improve but at the end I end up with destroyed confidence, shame and overthinking will I be able to crack jee ? I study in a local coaching in my locality(due to some problems )where they teach at school level due to which I study from pw arjuna jee . My parents have a lot of expectations from me and that they trust me that i would do something and that trust feels too heavy. Can any senior here tell me how I can improve. I know IIT is not a joke it requires seriousness and dedication and i accept it . I'm ready to work on me . Please can you all(seniors )give me advice on how I can improve my level.

​

I need to write this down because I don't think I can carry it alone anymore, and because maybe someone reading this will understand what it's like to lose everything slowly before you lose it all at once.

I opened my bakery six years ago. I put every rupee I had into it, every rupee my father left me, every favor I could call in from people who believed in me back when I still believed in myself too. For the first two years it did fine. Not great, but fine. Then a bigger chain opened two streets over, and slowly, month by month, my regulars started disappearing. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself people would come back once the new place lost its shine.

They didn't come back.

I don't think people who haven't run a failing business understand what it actually does to your mind. It's not one big moment of despair. It's smaller than that, and somehow worse. It's standing behind the counter for eight hours and selling four items. It's doing the math every single night — rent, flour, electricity, the loan payment — and watching the numbers refuse to work no matter how many times you rearrange them. It's lying awake calculating how many days you have left before you can't make payroll for the one employee you still have.

I started skipping meals, not because I couldn't afford them exactly, but because every rupee felt like it belonged to a bill instead of to me. I stopped sleeping properly. I'd catch myself standing in the shop at 2 a.m., unable to remember walking there, just staring at an oven that hadn't turned a profit in months.

My wife, Anika, wanted a baby. She'd wanted one for two years by that point. Every time she brought it up, something in my chest would close like a fist. I couldn't explain to her, not properly, that the idea of bringing a child into a life I couldn't even keep afloat myself felt like a cruelty I refused to commit. I wasn't trying to hurt her by saying no. I was trying to protect a child who didn't exist yet from a father who couldn't provide the most basic things for the wife he already had.

She didn't see it that way. I understand now why she couldn't.

The fights got worse over those last few months. Small ones at first, then bigger ones, always about the same thing dressed in different clothes. I'd come home exhausted, humiliated by another day of empty counters, and she'd bring up the baby again, and I'd feel that same fist close in my chest, and I'd say something cruel instead of something honest, because cruelty was easier than admitting how frightened I actually was.

The day it happened, I'd had a customer scream at me in the shop over a wrong order, calling me useless in front of the two other people standing there, and something in me had already cracked wide open by the time I walked through my own front door that evening. Anika brought up the baby again within minutes of me getting home. I don't remember what she said exactly. I remember the sound of my own hand before I understood what I'd done.

She didn't scream. She didn't cry, not right away. She just looked at me with an expression I will never forget for as long as I live, packed a bag within the hour, and left.

She never came back.

I want to be honest here, because I think honesty is the only thing I have left to offer anyone reading this. I don't deserve sympathy for what happened that day. I did something no amount of stress or fear excuses, and I have had to live with that fact every single day since, long before anything strange started happening to me at all.

The strange part started almost immediately after she left, and for a while I genuinely thought it was some kind of mercy, like the universe had decided I'd suffered enough and was finally cutting me a break.

My bakery started filling up. Not gradually — almost overnight. Customers I'd never seen before started coming in daily. School children stopped by after class, couples came in for evening treats, and even the man who'd screamed at me weeks earlier walked back in one afternoon and apologized, genuinely, for how he'd spoken to me. I started making enough to cover my bills for the first time in over a year. I started sleeping through the night again, for a little while.

There was a woman who came in most afternoons, always around the same time, always ordering the same thing. We started talking. I let myself imagine, God forgive me, that maybe some version of a normal life was still possible for me. Maybe I could rebuild something out of the wreckage I'd made.

I should have paid closer attention to the fact that everything good that was happening had started the exact same week Anika walked out the door.

It began about two months ago. Small at first, easy to explain away. I'd be closing the shop late and notice someone standing across the street, just standing there, watching the storefront. I told myself it was nothing. A person waiting for a ride. A person who liked the smell of fresh bread drifting out into the evening air.

Then it started happening at my house.

The first night I saw someone standing outside my bedroom window, I convinced myself I'd imagined it. The second night, I couldn't. A man I recognized — a customer, someone who'd bought bread from me just that morning — standing perfectly still on my lawn, staring up at my window, not moving, not blinking, for what felt like far too long before he simply turned and walked away.

The next night there were two of them. The night after that, four.

Every single one of them was someone who had bought something from my shop.

I stopped sleeping again, but for a different reason this time. I started keeping the lights off in my bedroom, watching from behind the curtain instead of trying to rest, counting the figures gathering on my lawn like a man counting debts he couldn't remember incurring. They never came inside. They never spoke. They just stood there, sometimes for hours, all facing my window with the same flat, patient stillness, before turning and walking off just before dawn, one by one, back toward wherever they'd come from.

I went to the police twice. Both times, by the time an officer arrived, the lawn was empty, and I could see in their faces that they thought I was a man cracking under the pressure of a business and a marriage that had both recently fallen apart. Maybe they weren't wrong to think that. I wasn't entirely sure myself anymore.

I tried confronting one of them directly, once, a woman I recognized from the shop who came by every Tuesday for the same loaf of bread. I walked straight out onto my own lawn and asked her, as calmly as I could manage, why she was standing there. She looked at me for a long moment, and then she said something I haven't been able to forget since.

"She said you'd finally understand what it feels like to have people who won't leave."

I didn't understand what that meant until three weeks ago, when an old college friend of Anika's messaged me out of nowhere, careful and hesitant, asking if I was doing alright. I asked her what she meant. She hesitated for a long time before she finally told me.

She said that after Anika left me, she'd gone to stay with a relative in another town for a while — a relative, it turned out, who practiced something the rest of the family only ever spoke about in whispers. She said Anika had asked this relative for help, not to hurt me physically, but to make sure I never got to feel peace again the way I'd denied her the chance at the family she wanted. She said the relative had warned Anika that this kind of thing always costs something, always takes more than it gives, but Anika had gone through with it anyway.

Five, her friend said. She'd been specific about the number. Five things bound to my home, disguised in whatever forms would draw closest to me without raising suspicion — which meant they wouldn't come as strangers. They'd come as customers. As the very success I thought I'd finally earned.

The prosperity in my shop was never a mercy. It was bait, drawing exactly the kind of foot traffic that would let five things slip a little closer to my life with each visit, a little more familiar, a little less like strangers standing on a lawn and a little more like neighbors who'd always been there.

I don't know how to end this, because I don't think it's ended yet. The figures still come every night. I counted six last night for the first time. I don't know if that means something changed, or if I simply miscounted the five that were always going to be there from the beginning.

I keep thinking about the day I raised my hand to a woman who only ever wanted a family with me, and I keep thinking that whatever is standing on my lawn every night might not even be the real punishment. I think the real punishment is that my bakery is finally successful, finally full of the life and warmth I always wanted for it, and I can't enjoy a single day of it, because I understand now that every customer walking through that door might be one more thing I invited a little closer to my own home without ever meaning to.

I built a business to give my family a good life. I ended up destroying the family instead, and built something that isn't a family at all standing outside my window every night in its place.

​

Margaret and I were married for thirty-one years. I know that's the kind of thing everyone says at the start of a story like this, so let me try to explain what I actually mean by it, because it matters for what happened after.

I didn't just love her. I organized my entire life around the fact of her. Every habit I have, I built next to her habits, the way a tree grows around a fence it's been pressed against for years. I made coffee the way she liked it even on mornings she wasn't drinking any, because making it any other way felt like admitting something I wasn't ready to admit. I still don't know how to explain what it's like to lose someone who was that load-bearing. It's not like losing a person. It's more like losing the wall that was holding up half your house, except nobody tells you the house is going to keep standing anyway, crooked, creaking, technically still a house, for years afterward.

She died eight months ago. Heart, sudden, no warning, gone before the ambulance even finished pulling into the driveway. I keep saying that sentence to people because I think if I say it enough times my brain will finally agree to believe it. So far it hasn't.

I still set two plates every night. I know how that sounds. My daughter has gently mentioned it twice now, the second time not so gently, and I told her both times that I was just used to it, that old habits take time, that I'd stop eventually. I don't think that's true. I think some part of my mind simply refuses to process the math of one plate instead of two, the same way it refuses to process a house with only one name in it now instead of two.

For the first few months, that was the whole extent of it. Sad, maybe embarrassing, but harmless. I'd sit at the table, eat across from an empty chair, sometimes talk to it a little, the way you'd talk to someone in another room who you know can still hear you. Then I'd clear both plates, wash both plates, and go to bed alone in a bed that still somehow feels too small for one person.

About two months ago, that changed.

I came down one morning and her plate the one I'd left completely untouched the night before, same as every night had food missing from it. Not all of it. Just a little, the way someone eats when they're not really hungry but are eating anyway out of habit or politeness. I stood there in my kitchen for a long time just staring at it, convinced I must have eaten from it myself and simply not remembered, because grief does strange things to memory, everyone tells you that.

I started testing myself after that, the way you'd test a hinge you don't trust. I'd fold her napkin a very specific way before bed, a fold I knew I wouldn't accidentally replicate. I'd turn her fork at an angle no one would naturally leave it at. Every single morning, something had changed. The napkin refolded differently. The fork moved. Small proof, every day, that someone was joining me at that table after I went to sleep.

I told myself it was Margaret. I know exactly how that sounds, and I don't care. When you've built thirty-one years of your life around a person, some part of you would rather believe in a ghost than believe in the alternative, which is that you're simply losing your mind alone in a house too big for the one name left in it.

I decided, about three weeks ago, that I needed to see it for myself. I don't know if I wanted comfort or proof or just an end to not knowing. I made coffee that night, real coffee, strong enough to keep me up, and I sat in the living room where I had a clear view of the kitchen table, and I waited.

I don't remember falling asleep. I want to be honest about that, because it matters. I remember telling myself I wouldn't, and then I remember waking up in the armchair at just past 3 a.m., neck stiff, coffee cold and untouched beside me.

I got up to check the table anyway, more out of habit than hope at that point.

Her plate had food missing from it. Fresh. Still slightly warm, like it had only just been left.

And my own chair — the one I always sit in — was pushed back at an angle I never leave it at, the way you push a chair back when you're getting up in a hurry, like whoever had been sitting there had heard me stir in the other room and left just quickly enough not to be seen.

I stopped sleeping properly after that night. I started setting up my phone to record the kitchen while I slept, propped against a cereal box on the counter, angled at the table. Every morning I'd wake up and check the footage before I even made coffee, hands shaking a little more each time.

The footage never showed anything. Not once. The camera would record the empty kitchen, the two plates, my own chair, hour after hour of nothing, and then, always somewhere around 3 a.m., the recording would simply cut out for eleven minutes. Always exactly eleven. When it resumed, Margaret's plate had less food on it than it had before the gap.

I don't know what happens during those eleven minutes. I've watched the footage on either side of the gap so many times I could describe every shadow in that kitchen from memory. Nothing in the room before the cut looks any different than after it, except for what's missing from her plate, and except for the fact that, twice now, my own chair has moved slightly closer to hers by the time the recording starts again.

Two nights ago, I finally understood something I don't think I can undo now that I've understood it.

I'd left a small kitchen calendar out, the kind you flip a page on every day, and something about it caught my eye that night as I was cleaning up after dinner. It was still turned to a date from eleven weeks ago. I hadn't noticed. I hadn't turned that page in eleven weeks, not once, and yet I could have sworn, if you'd asked me any morning in between, that I knew exactly what day it was.

I checked my phone. The actual date matched the calendar in the kitchen exactly — not the real date, the wrong one, the one frozen on that page. My phone had somehow been showing me the wrong date for eleven weeks and I never once noticed, the way you don't notice your own handwriting has changed until someone else points it out.

I sat down at that table for a long time after that, just staring at both plates, mine and hers, and I finally let myself think the thought I'd been keeping at the very back of my mind since the eleven-minute gaps started.

I don't think Margaret has been joining me at that table.

I think some part of me has been getting up during those eleven minutes every single night, sitting down in her old chair instead of mine, eating from her plate instead of leaving it untouched, folding her napkin the way she always used to fold it, without any memory of doing it, because some part of me still cannot accept that I'm the only one left at that table, and so it's been quietly, patiently, splitting itself in two to make the math feel right again.

I don't know which one of us is real anymore some mornings. I genuinely don't. I know that sounds insane written out like this. I don't have a better way to say it.

I'm not writing this because I think anyone can fix it. I don't think there's a fix. I think this is just what's left of a man who built his whole life around someone else's, discovering thirty-one years later that a life like that doesn't know how to become one person again, not even when it's forced to, not even when the person it needs is already gone.

I'll set the table again tonight. Two plates, like always. I already know what I'll find in the morning.

I just don't know anymore which chair I'll wake up in.

I can barely solve any maths questions of jee mains and I am forgetting all the things before i learned . I will be able to crack jee mains?

Sachin sir from pw ajuna provides some concise summary notes of every lecture are they worth it to read . Is it ok if I get a printout of them for my shirt notes ?

Ok so I need a very very serious help very serious help

So basically I am in class 11th preparing for jee and i suffer in maths a lot ( bohot jada can't even explain).

I want to improve my maths genuinely but whenever I sit for question practice my whole confidence just gets destroyed so badly , it Starts to make me cry . Is there any way I can improve my maths because practicing questions is not working for me I think so

People of this subreddit genuinely need some mental help

​

I've never told anyone this before. Not a therapist, not a friend, nobody. I'm telling strangers on the internet because I don't think I can carry it by myself anymore, and because I need someone to tell me if what's been happening to me since is real or if I've finally lost my mind the way I always feared I would.

I'll say it plainly, because there's no gentle way to say it. Three years ago, I killed my mother.

I'm not going to ask you to feel sorry for me. I'm just going to tell you what happened, and let you decide that for yourself.

My mother was not a good mother. I'm choosing my words carefully here, because the truth is uglier than that sentence makes it sound, and some of it I still can't write down even now. She was gone for days at a time throughout my whole childhood, sometimes weeks. I raised myself more than she ever raised me. When she was home, she wasn't really present — not in any way that mattered. I won't go into the specifics of what those years were like. I'll just say that by the time I was an adult, I understood two things clearly. I understood that I had survived something most people never have to survive. And I understood that some part of me had been quietly planning, for a very long time, exactly what I would do about it.

I found her again when I was twenty-six. She was living in a small apartment across town, older, sicker, alone. She didn't recognize me at first when I showed up at her door. When she finally did, she didn't apologize. She didn't cry. She just asked me if I had any money.

I went back three more times after that. Each time I told myself I was going to confront her properly, say everything I'd rehearsed in my head for years. Each time I left without saying any of it, because some old, small part of me still wanted her to say something first. She never did.

The fourth time, I didn't leave.

I'm not going to describe what happened that night. I've spent three years trying to convince myself it doesn't count if the world never technically found out. Nobody ever came looking for her. Nobody ever asked questions. As far as anyone else knows, she simply disappeared, the same way she always used to disappear when I was a kid, except this time for good.

I told myself that was justice. For a while, I actually believed it.

The first sign that something was wrong came about six months later. I started smelling her perfume in my apartment, faint but unmistakable, always at night, always gone by the time I turned on the lights to check. I told myself it was memory playing tricks, the mind doing what minds do with guilt it hasn't fully processed.

Then I started finding her sleeping pills. The specific brand she always used, the ones I remembered from childhood sitting on her nightstand during the rare weeks she was actually home. I'd find one or two scattered somewhere in my apartment every few weeks, on my bathroom counter, on my kitchen table, places I knew for certain I'd cleaned the day before. I don't buy that brand. I've never bought that brand. I checked my receipts obsessively for months trying to prove myself wrong.

I couldn't.

About a year in, I started hearing her voice. Not constantly, not even often, but always at the worst possible moments — right as I was falling asleep, right as I stepped out of the shower, right as I was alone in an elevator. Always the same handful of words, said in the exact flat, uninterested tone she used to use on me as a kid, like I was an inconvenience she hadn't asked for and didn't especially want.

"You always needed too much from me."

I started seeing a therapist around that time, though obviously I never told her the real reason why. I let her believe it was ordinary grief, ordinary complicated-family-history stuff. She told me some version of what I already suspected — that guilt manifests in strange ways, that the mind can create very convincing experiences when it's trying to process something it can't fully face. I wanted so badly to believe that was all this was.

I don't believe that anymore. Not after last month.

Last month, I finally worked up the nerve to go back to her old apartment, the one she'd been living in when I last saw her. I don't fully know why. I told myself I wanted closure. I think, if I'm honest, some part of me wanted to see if anyone had moved in yet some way of confirming, once and for all, that this was really over.

The building was still there. The apartment was empty, unrented, the landlord told me, because nobody who moves in ever stays more than a few weeks. He said it like it was a mildly annoying fact about the property rather than something worth investigating further. When I asked why, he just shrugged and said tenants always complain about "someone crying in the walls at night" before breaking their lease early.

He let me in to look around, thinking I might be interested in renting it myself. The apartment was bare, nothing left of her in it at all, except one thing. Sitting in the exact center of the bedroom floor, in the spot where I know for a fact I left her that final night, was a small pile of her sleeping pills. Arranged carefully. Like someone had taken the time to count out exactly enough for a full dose.

I asked the landlord if he'd put them there. He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language and said the apartment had been completely empty since the last tenant moved out in a panic two months ago.

I've been having the same dream every night since that visit. I'm standing in my mother's old apartment, except in the dream it's not empty — she's sitting on the floor exactly where I found those pills, looking up at me with an expression I never once saw on her face while she was alive. Not anger. Not even sadness. Something closer to satisfaction, like she's finally gotten something she'd been trying to get from me for years and never managed while she was still breathing.

In the dream, she always says the same thing before I wake up.

"You finally gave me all your attention. It only took killing me to get it."

I keep waking up with the taste of her perfume in the back of my throat, so strong I have to rinse my mouth out before I can fall back asleep. Last night, for the first time, I woke up and the taste didn't go away, even after I brushed my teeth twice.

It's still there right now, as I'm typing this.

I don't know what I did that night three years ago. I thought I ended something. I'm starting to understand I might have started something instead something that finally has all of my attention, exactly the way she always wanted, except now I can't get free of it no matter how hard I try, and some sick, quiet part of me wonders if that was the whole plan from the very beginning.

If I stop posting after this, I need someone to know I tried to make it stop. I really did try.

I used to go to a local coaching near my house because I couldn't afford to go to corporate coaching but I follow arjuna jee and studying from there I haven't bought any module till now I have some books dc pandey for physics O.P tondon for chemistry and for maths I have rd sharma . I don't follow my maths teacher in coaching because I don't understand what he teaches even he can't solve advance questions That's why I completely follow arjuna jee maths teacher for maths subject. I don't know why but I think I am going to waste my 11th can you tell me am i doing wrong or should I beg to my father to get into a corporate coaching?

​

I don't know how to explain what my life has been like, so I'll just say it plainly. Nothing good has happened to me in years. I'm not exaggerating for effect. Every year something worse happens than the year before, until eventually I stopped waiting for it to get better and just started waiting for whatever was coming next.

About eight months ago I noticed I couldn't feel things anymore. Not sadness, not happiness, nothing. I'd sit in my apartment — I live alone, my parents live far away and depend on the money I send them every month — and I'd just stare at the wall, feeling absolutely nothing, and some small part of me almost missed being sad, because at least sad was something.

That's the state I was in when I found the ritual online. I'm not going to explain what it involved. I'll just say I was desperate enough to try anything that promised to make me feel like a person again, even for a second.

It worked. Just not the way I wanted.

The first thing I noticed was the cold spot by my bedroom door. It never went away after that night, no matter the season. Then I started hearing three distinct sounds at three different times, every single day, like clockwork.

The first always came in the early morning, around 4 a.m. A woman's voice, humming, slow and mournful, from somewhere inside my closet. I never opened that closet again after the second time I heard it, not because I was scared exactly — remember, I couldn't really feel scared anymore — but because some old animal part of my body still knew to avoid it, even if my mind didn't react the way it should have.

I started calling her the Mourner. She never spoke words, only hummed, and the tune always sounded like it was building toward something, some final note that never came, over and over, every single morning, endlessly unfinished.

The second came at midday, always while I was trying to eat. A child's laughter, high and delighted, coming from directly behind my chair. Every time I turned around, nothing was there. But small things started disappearing after the laughter — a spoon, a single sock, the second half of whatever I was eating, gone from my plate the moment I looked away.

I called this one the Thief. It never seemed to want anything valuable. It just wanted to take small pieces of my life, one at a time, like a child pulling wings off something slowly, delighted by how little it took to make me feel like I owned less of my own home every single day.

The third came at night, right as I tried to sleep. A man's voice, calm, reasonable, always saying the exact same six words into my ear right as I drifted off.

"You should stop paying for this."

I understood after the third night that it meant the money I sent my parents. I didn't need to ask what it wanted me to stop doing instead.

I called this one the Convincer, because unlike the others, it wasn't trying to scare me or take from me. It was trying to talk me into something, patiently, every single night, the same six words, never louder, never angrier, just endlessly, calmly reasonable.

The three of them together were bad enough. But about two months in, I understood there was something else living in my house with them. Something none of the three ever went near. I only ever caught it out of the corner of my eye — tall, still, standing at the far end of whatever room I was in, never approaching, just watching, like a landlord checking in on tenants doing exactly the work he'd assigned them.

I went to five different priests. Two churches. An exorcist my coworker found online who charged me almost everything I had left after sending my parents their share that month. Every single one of them did their ritual, their prayers, their blessed water and salt, and every single one of them left my house looking pale and shaken, telling me something I didn't want to hear.

The last one, an old priest who'd clearly seen more than the others, told me the truth plainly before he left. He said the three spirits weren't the problem. They were symptoms. Whatever I'd opened during that ritual had let something much older into my house, something that didn't need to scare me or steal from me or convince me of anything, because it wasn't interested in my choices at all.

It was just waiting. Patiently. For the part of me that still felt anything to finish dying on its own.

I've thought about ending things more than once since all this started. I won't pretend otherwise. But I can't. Not because I'm strong, and not because I found some reason to hope things will get better. It's because my parents depend on the money I send every month, and if I stop, I don't know what happens to them. So every single day I get up, and I go to work, and I feel nothing the entire time, and I come home to a house with three spirits and something else standing quietly in the corner of every room, and I keep going, because stopping isn't a door I'm allowed to walk through.

I thought that was the worst part of my situation. I was wrong.

Last night, I couldn't sleep, so I finally went back and reread the instructions for the ritual I did eight months ago, the ones I'd been too afraid to look at again since that first night. And near the very end, in a section I must have skimmed past in a hurry back then, desperate to feel something, anything, I found a line I don't think I truly understood the first time I read it.

It said the ritual doesn't call spirits to torment you.

It calls them to feed on whatever emotion you're the most starved of. It draws them toward the exact shape of what's missing in you, and it keeps them there until that emptiness is completely full again, one way or another.

I've spent eight months thinking three spirits and something worse have been torturing me for no reason.

I don't think that's true anymore.

I think they were sent because I couldn't feel anything, and somewhere in that house is something that's been very patiently, very carefully, teaching me how to feel again fear, loss, dread, grief, one lesson at a time, exactly in the order I stopped being able to feel them naturally.

And for the first time in eight months, lying awake in the dark last night, I felt something I hadn't felt in a very long time.

I felt afraid of what happens when the lessons are finished.

​

I'm seventy-three now. My hands shake too much to hold a pen properly anymore, so I'm typing this instead, slow, one finger at a time. I was never a famous detective. I worked small cases in a small town my whole career — stolen cars, bar fights, the occasional break-in. Nothing that made headlines. I want you to know that before I tell you the rest, because what happened to me wasn't something a hardened big-city cop walked through. It was something that broke an ordinary man who thought he understood his own life completely.

The case started nineteen years ago. Children were going missing from our town, one every few months, always between the ages of six and nine. The ones we found were never found alive. Every single one had the same thing done to them before they died — a slow, deliberate kind of cruelty I still can't write down without my hands shaking too badly to type. The town went quiet in the worst way. Parents stopped letting kids walk to school. Every stranger became a suspect.

I was assigned to the case with my partner, a younger officer named Desmond — sharp, a little too eager, the kind of cop who took every unsolved case home with him. Desmond noticed the pattern first. Every child taken had, at some point in the weeks before, visited the same small church on the edge of town, where an odd, reclusive groundskeeper everyone called Father Elias kept to himself.

Elias became our first real suspect. He had a record from decades earlier, unrelated but ugly enough to look bad on paper. We brought him in twice. Both times his alibi held. Both times I watched Desmond grow more convinced we were staring right at the killer and just couldn't prove it yet.

Something about Elias never sat right with me as the killer, though I couldn't explain why at the time. I understand exactly why now.

There was a third person who mattered to this case, though I didn't realize it until near the end. A young mother named Corinne ran a small daycare two streets from my house. Every missing child, we eventually discovered, had spent time at that daycare within a year of disappearing. Corinne wasn't a suspect. She was, without knowing it, a thread that could have unraveled everything a full year earlier — because during an interview, almost in passing, she mentioned that a woman from the neighborhood used to volunteer there sometimes, helping out on days they were short-staffed.

I didn't think anything of it at the time. I wish I had.

The case ran cold for almost a year after that. Then, four months ago, another child went missing. This time it was a classmate of my own daughter Ruth — a boy named Toby, who lived two streets over from us. For the first time in the entire case, we found something new at the scene: a single strand of hair caught on the fence behind Toby's house, long, gray-blonde, unmistakably a woman's.

I remember standing there with the evidence bag in my hand, running through every woman connected to the case, and I remember my mind refusing, physically refusing, to finish a thought that was trying to form. I told myself it belonged to a neighbor. A jogger. Anyone at all.

It matched my wife.

I didn't confront her right away. I told myself I needed more before I could even consider it. So I did what thirty years of training had taught me to do. I watched. Quietly. The way I'd watch any suspect.

I noticed things I'd spent two decades not noticing. The way she always volunteered to pick Ruth up alone on the exact days another child had last been seen alive. A locked drawer in the garage she'd always told me was just old nursing supplies. The nights she said she couldn't sleep and went for long walks alone, coming back an hour or two later than she said she'd be gone.

Three weeks ago, I followed her.

She walked to the old groundskeeper's shed behind Elias's church — a building we had searched twice ourselves and found completely empty both times. I watched her let herself in with a key. I watched her come back out forty minutes later, calm, unhurried, wiping her hands on a cloth before folding it neatly into her coat pocket.

I went in after she left.

I won't describe what I found in there. I've been a police officer for thirty years and I have never, not once, had to leave a scene and be sick in the grass before I could make myself go back in and finish looking. Everything the case had been missing was there. Photographs. A kind of ledger, dates written in careful, familiar handwriting I'd seen on grocery lists and birthday cards for twenty years. And on the last page, dated two days from when I found it, was a single name.

Ruth.

Our daughter. Her own daughter. Next.

I need to back up now, because none of what happens next will make sense unless you understand who Marlene was to me, and it's only now, writing this out, that I understand how completely I never actually knew her at all.

I met Marlene when I was twenty-six, my first year on the force. She was a nurse at the hospital where I got stitched up after a bad domestic call. She was, by every appearance, the gentlest person I had ever met. She drove an hour out of her way to bring soup to an elderly patient with no family left to visit him. She cried during sad commercials. She once spent an entire Saturday nursing a bird back to health that had flown into our window, feeding it with an eyedropper every two hours through the night.

We married two years later. For twenty years, my marriage was the one part of my life that never gave me a single reason to doubt it.

I think about that bird sometimes now, and I wonder if she kept it alive out of love, or because she liked deciding exactly when something small and helpless got to stop suffering.

I confronted her the night I found that ledger. I'm not going to pretend I handled it the way I was trained to handle a suspect, because in that moment she wasn't a suspect to me. She was still my wife, sitting across the kitchen table where we'd eaten ten thousand dinners together, looking at me with the same gentle eyes she'd had the night she saved that bird, and she said the words I don't think I will ever stop hearing for the rest of my life.

"I always finished with the ones I loved the most. It's the only way I know how to keep them from ever leaving me first."

I asked her about Ruth. She just smiled, small and sad, like I was the one failing to understand something obvious.

"She was always going to be the last one," she said. "The most important one is always saved for last."

I want to tell you Ruth is safe now. I want to end this the way a real detective closes a case file, everything accounted for, everything resolved.

I can't.

Marlene was arrested that same night. I sat in the back of the patrol car with her, my own wife, in handcuffs, and I couldn't look at her the entire drive. She never once stopped smiling.

Three days later, during transport to a psychiatric evaluation, the van she was in was involved in a collision. When they opened the doors, her restraints were empty. No body. No blood. Nothing but the cloth she always carried, folded neatly on the seat where she'd been sitting, like she'd simply stood up and walked out through a locked door that never opened.

Ruth has been staying with my sister since that night. I check the locks on every door in that house myself, every single evening, twice.

Two nights ago, Ruth called me, crying, saying she found something on her pillow when she got home from school.

It was a small, folded cloth. Clean. Carefully folded. Exactly like the one Marlene always carried in her coat pocket.

I haven't slept since. I keep thinking about what she said to me that last night at the kitchen table that the most important one is always saved for last and I don't know anymore if that case is finished, or if I simply haven't found out yet how it really ends.