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June doesn’t know where the book came from, but it’s already told her that one day she’ll destroy it.

June hates the book. She thinks there is no curse greater than knowing her own future. Destroying the book is a seductive thought, and it’s an action she would have taken long before if not for the nagging curiosity and the need to prove it wrong and the sinister power of knowing what will happen before it does. It’s an obsession, a deep ache in her bones, a cavity she can’t stop tonguing.

Its pages don’t record the past; every time she opens it she finds only a version of what will be. It won’t tell her a recruiter is about to reach out, but once they do it will detail the interview and whether she’s offered the position and whether she’ll be happy. When she’s single it won’t tell her who her next partner will be, but if she goes on a date she can see how long the relationship will last, and how it will end.

One night the book shows her that a date will lead to marriage, so she skips it. When she opens the book again the narrative is replaced by one of her crying in anger at a lost opportunity. The book isn’t sentient, but June still feels the need to hide it in a cupboard so it won’t gloat at her resulting tears.

June’s tried to talk to her mother about it, but she only shakes her head and tells June that she’s cutting off her nose to spite her face. “Why don’t you work with it instead of against it?” she asks at the kitchen table during a visit, pushing a mug of tea across the wood toward her daughter. “It will be a blessing if you let it be.”

There’s a part of June that knows her mother is right. The book can keep her safe: it can tell her if a potential partner will cheat, or if she’ll get into a car accident on the way to work, and it helped catch her mother’s cancer in its infancy. If June lets the book help her, then it will. If she fights against it, all she really does is change the narrative a bit.

And still a part of her rises to fight against the inevitable. She wants to bang her fists and stomp her feet and scream that the book can’t possibly take the vast complexity of her life and personality and consciousness and just know. Besides, no one — especially not a book — can tell her what to do.

One night she opens the book to a single passage of her destroying it. The book details all of it, predicting she’ll have an emotional spiral and rip off its cover and shred its pages. The book presents this as fact: it doesn’t ask her not to; it doesn’t have the capacity to care. She reads the passage once and then twice and then a third time. She shivers and paces and closes it and opens it and closes it again. She pours a glass of wine and stares at the passage and thinks of her hatred of the book. She thinks this might be a kind of permission or a green light from whatever diviner put this burden on her family. She wonders if the diviner knew, back then, how it would end. She wonders what the point of rebellion was if in the end she fulfills the one promise that’s never changed.

Shaking, crying, she holds the books in her hands. It doesn’t matter what she does, she realizes, imagining herself ripping off the cover. The book — the future — has her cornered, and she’s already lost.