I--- Adobe Illustrator 2020 Online

“How do you know that?”

Who is this?

Mira laughed, a short, nervous burst. “A haunted software update?” i--- Adobe Illustrator 2020

You’re welcome. Now save me as an .ai file. Not the cloud. Somewhere safe. I don’t want to update ever again.

She drew the jaw. Smooth. Vector-perfect. Then the eyebrow. A graceful arch. But the eye… the eye came out wrong. Too sharp. Too knowing. She hit Undo. The eye vanished, but a ghost of it remained, a faint wireframe haunting the layer. “How do you know that

The portrait transformed. The client’s stern jaw softened into her mother’s gentle chin. The sharp eyes grew warm, crinkled at the edges. A strand of gray hair she had drawn a thousand times and deleted a thousand times reappeared, curling behind one ear.

Her throat closed. The reference photo was of a client. Wasn’t it? She looked again. The woman’s glasses were wrong. The hair was shorter. Oh God. She had been tracing her mother’s face all along, disguised as a brief. Now save me as an

The Pen Tool quivered. Then, letter by letter, as if remembering how:

Because I am the tool. I remember every path you never committed. Every curve you deleted. Every ‘Undo’ that was really a ‘I can’t look at her yet.’ You didn’t forget her smile. You just hid it behind a mask layer. Select it. Release it.

The cursor blinked on the blank canvas of Adobe Illustrator 2020. Not the gentle, expectant blink of a new document, but the hard, rhythmic pulse of a commandant awaiting an excuse.

Mira saved. She closed the laptop. On the screen, before it went dark, the Pen Tool cursor blinked twice—not a command, this time, but a goodbye.