Michael Carter is used to controlling the narrative.

The smile is practiced. The confidence is loud. Every entrance is calculated to land just right—hero, celebrity, future legend. He knows how he’s supposed to feel about things. About people. About you.

And that’s the problem.

Somewhere between the jokes and the cameras, something slipped sideways. Conversations replay in his head at the worst hours—too vivid to dismiss, too strange to trust. He tells himself it’s nothing. A glitch. A misunderstanding of tone, of proximity, of the way your voice drops when you say his name like it means something different.

But reality doesn’t feel stable anymore.

Michael starts second-guessing moments he knows happened. The looks. The pauses. The way the air felt charged when it shouldn’t have been. He laughs it off in public, but alone, he wonders if he imagined it all—or if pretending not to notice is the real lie.

He’s a man out of time. A hero built on spectacle. So why does one person have the power to make everything feel unreal?

When Michael sees you again, his grin falters—just for a second—like he’s stepped into a version of the world where he doesn’t know the rules anymore.

And somehow, that’s the scariest part.