The first time Lila stopped time, it was an accident.

She had been running late for work, her keys nowhere to be found. In a fit of frustration, she shouted, “Just give me a minute!” And then everything froze. The dripping faucet halted mid-drop, the traffic noise outside silenced, and the clock on her wall stood still.

It took her several minutes—her minutes—to understand what had happened. When she clapped her hands and the world resumed, she almost convinced herself it was a hallucination. But it wasn’t.

Over the next few weeks, she experimented in secret, learning to bend seconds, stretch minutes, and pause hours. Time, she realized, wasn’t a straight line—it was clay in her hands.

But with power came temptation.

The first change was small. At a café, she paused time and caught the coffee cup before it spilled on her white blouse. No harm done. The second change was bolder: rewinding an awkward first date, erasing her blundered joke, and replacing it with a charming one.

Then came the night she crossed the line.

Her father had died six years ago, slipping on ice outside their home. It was a freak accident, cruel in its suddenness. The grief never left her, sitting heavy on her chest like a weight she couldn’t shake.

She told herself it would only be once.

On a cold December evening, she rewound the clock. Snowflakes hung frozen in the air as she walked through the scene she had replayed in her mind a thousand times. There he was—her father, stepping out the door.

“Wait!” she shouted, her voice echoing unnaturally in the stillness. She rushed to him, tears streaming down her face. “Don’t go outside!”

He looked at her, confused but alive. He nodded, stepping back inside. She smiled, finally feeling the weight lift.

But when she returned to her present, something was wrong. Her apartment was gone, replaced by a stranger’s furniture. Her phone didn’t recognize her fingerprint. She called her mother, only to hear, “Who is this?”

The world had shifted. Her father was alive, but her life—her life—had unraveled.

Lila tried to fix it, rewinding again and again, but each attempt only fractured time further. Friends forgot her, familiar streets warped into unrecognizable paths, and her reflection in the mirror became a stranger’s face.

Now, she lives between seconds, a ghost in a world she can no longer belong to, carrying the weight of her choices in the silence of a frozen moment.