The book and I have been in a Mexican standoff for eleven minutes.
I haven’t turned the final page.
It hasn’t revealed its ending.
We’re both pretending not to care, but honestly, it drew first.
Secondhand books are the worst. They sit there with that unearned confidence, the kind of smug silence only something with nothing left to prove can pull off. This one has the energy of a retired assassin. Spine slightly too relaxed. Possibly armed. Knows things. Will not elaborate. And of course it knows I know that too.
I shift. It doesn’t. Tiny power move.
It’s not fear exactly, it’s that I can tell whatever waits on that last page has already happened to someone else. This isn’t invitation, it’s aftermath. Still faintly warm from another reader’s ending.
That’s why I hesitate. Turn the page too casually and I look naive. Turn it with reverence and I look like I care too much. Don’t turn it at all and it wins. There is no correct move. The book designed this trap centuries ago.
Except it hasn’t calculated one flaw. A book can only offer an ending, but I am the one who has to give it meaning. To make it ending by agreeing that it is.
So I lift the book, just slightly, and with one finger, I rest, not on the page, but exactly beside the final word. Close enough that I could make it real if I wanted to. I don’t.
I stop one breath before the ending becomes meaning. The possibility stays in the air, unspent.
And the book blinks first.
PS. If it apologises, I might finish it tomorrow. No promises.