3:00 a.m. Magic

Imagine finding a message from someone you cared deeply about who's been gone—physically or maybe just emotionally—for twenty-five years. No letters. No photographs. Nothing that carries their actual voice that you’ve been waiting to hear all this time. What would that do to your heart?

Early one morning around 3:00 a.m., I woke up with the epilogue, the ending of the final book in The Vanishing Series, in my head. Not a rough idea. Not a whisper. The actual fully formed resolution to the final question, as if it had been there all along, just waiting to drop into my waking mind like a stone into still water. For a few minutes, I just lay there. Stunned.

What made it feel whole (and kind of holy) was that it reached all the way back to the first book—to a detail near the beginning that I have only a vague memory of writing two years ago; something barely mentioned at all. There are many things the characters in the books say and do that surprise me. So, I didn't know why I'd included it at the time. But in the dark on this particular morning, I suddenly understood: That forgotten moment had been holding space for this ending the whole time.

Intention, ignorance, and a (what we’d call ancient) bit of technology were the epilogue's complex building blocks. Sleep? Gone. I got up and spent two hours researching what was and wasn't possible back in the mid 1990s. I was so excited, and intrigued, I turned the coffee pot on and forgot to pour myself a cup. And that is saying some shit!

Shouldn’t be a surprise, but—spoiler—the infrastructure that would make this ending possible existed, but just barely. By something like 45 seconds. Which somehow makes it even more perfect.

I can't take credit because I did NOT plan this. Sometimes characters carry secrets even their authors don't know about. Sometimes a detail that slips from instinct onto the page becomes the key to everything years later. That's the part of storytelling that feels less like writing and more like meditation and intuition woven into magic. Or, at the very least, a kind of spiritual archaeology. For two hours, I had to remind myself to breathe. Relax my shoulders. Brush the dust off carefully lest I bugger something up.

The revelation comes unexpectedly. Time doing what time does, weakening seams that hold back the past so that simply snagging a doorknob tears history open, spills everything into the world, and reveals the gift of a voice Mia never imagined she'd hear.

Like life, we can't always understand in the moment why we do what we do, say what we say, or write the things we write. Because sometimes life knows what's needed before we do. And when she finally lets us in on it, when the meaning shows up, it’s like a message in a bottle—a genie ready to grant us something priceless.

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