I first met Thomas through my father, which is to say I did not meet him at all. I met him the way you meet a weather report: through the effects it has on someone else.

My father came home from work one evening and sat at the kitchen table with a book that was not a book, its pages made of something that felt like paper but was heavier, denser, and he read it until his eyes were red and his hands were shaking, and I knew something was wrong.

Not wrong wrong. Just wrong in the way that things are wrong when they change the rules of the game you thought you were playing.

Thomas sat across from him, a young man with soft hands and a face that made him look younger than he was, and he talked about the future in a way that made it sound like a place you could visit if you had the right tickets and the right passport and the right kind of courage.

I listened from the doorway, half in, half out, like a cat deciding whether to come inside or stay outside. I was twenty, a junior editor at a small literary magazine in Manhattan, and I had spent my entire adult life trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted and whether either of those things mattered.

The book, whatever it was, contained a description of my life. Not my present—my future. It described the jobs I would take, the relationships I would have, the mistakes I would make, and the moments of clarity that would come like lightning strikes in the middle of a dark sky.

I read it when my father wasn't looking, in the quiet hours before dawn, and I felt something shift inside me, like a gear clicking into place.

You don't have to believe him, my father said when he caught me reading it. You don't have to believe any of it.

But I wanted to. God help me, I wanted to.

The thing about prophecy is that it offers certainty in a world that offers none. I had spent my life making choices without knowing the outcomes, taking steps into darkness and hoping my feet would find solid ground. The book promised that the ground would be there, or at least that I would know when it wasn't.

I didn't want that. Or maybe I did. I wasn't sure.

Thomas was not a prophet. I realized that quickly. He was just a guy who had read too much and believed too much and somehow ended up in my father's apartment with a book that described my future with unsettling accuracy. He was awkward, slightly nervous, and entirely sincere. He believed every word he said, and that belief was the most disarming thing about him.

What do you want from me? I asked him one evening, when we were sitting in my father's living room and the rain was falling on Manhattan like it had a personal vendetta against the city.

Nothing, he said. I just want you to know that you have a choice.

About what?

About how you live your life. The book shows you what might happen, but it doesn't tell you what to do. That's always up to you.

I thought about that for a long time. My father had spent his life making decisions for other people—clients at his law firm, colleagues at the bar, the city council members he occasionally advised. He had built a life on the belief that he knew what was best, and somewhere along the way, he had forgotten that knowing and wanting were two very different things.

I was not my father. I wanted to be someone who chose for herself, who made mistakes and learned from them and kept going, who lived a life that was hers and hers alone.

The book described a future in which I became a writer, not an editor. A future in which I fell in love with someone I shouldn't have and lost myself in the process. A future in which I found my voice, but only after spending years trying to mimic everyone else's.

It was not a happy future. It was not an unhappy one either. It was just a future, and futures are not happy or unhappy—they are just what happens.

I closed the book one morning and put it on my father's shelf and decided to live my life without reading ahead.

Thomas left a week later, the same way he had arrived: quietly, without ceremony, leaving behind only the memory of his words and the book that described a future I had chosen not to read.

My father asked me if I was sure.

I am sure of one thing, I said. That the eyes I see the world through are my own, and I want to keep them that way.

He nodded, and we sat in silence for a while, listening to the rain and the traffic and the sound of a city that never stopped moving.

I became an editor, not a writer. I fell in love with someone I shouldn't have, and I did not lose myself in the process. I found my voice, but not in the way the book described, and not at the time it predicted.

The book was wrong about some things. Or maybe it was right about everything and wrong about nothing. Maybe the future is not a single path but a thousand branching roads, and every choice you make creates a new one.

I don't know. And the beautiful thing is that I never will.

I see the world through my own eyes, and that is enough.

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