He walked to his real front door and opened it. The porch was empty, but as he turned to go back inside, he noticed a small, weathered wooden box tucked behind the potted plant.

Inside wasn't a spreadsheet or a term paper. Instead, it was a single text file and a series of low-resolution images. The text file was dated midnight, seven years ago. It contained only one line: "If you are reading this, you finally stopped running."

The images were of places he knew but had never visited—a bridge in a city he’d only seen in dreams, a cafe with a blue door, and a park bench where a single red glove sat abandoned. As he scrolled, he realized the "homework" wasn't a school assignment. It was a scavenger hunt he had set for his future self during a feverish, sleepless week he had completely blocked out.

Leo found it in the deepest corner of an old hard drive, buried under folders titled "Old_Laptop_Backup" and "Misc_2018." It was a simple, compressed file: .

Leo looked at the last image: a photo of his own front door, taken from the street. On the porch in the photo sat a small, wooden box.