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Ending B – Delete the App

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The screen flashes.

Autoplay Next in… 2… 1…

Leah swipes the app closed. Her hands move faster than her thoughts—she opens her settings, deletes HysteriaCast from her library. Force quits everything. Still, the countdown pulses behind her eyes.

Episode 59 – You

She doesn’t wait for the countdown to finish. She opens the settings menu.

Factory Reset.
Erase All Content.
Uninstall OS.

The screen goes black. No vibration. No notification. The phone is just a rectangle now. Glass and silence. 

She places it screen-down on the floor, like it might still be listening. Outside, the rain has stopped. The apartment is quiet—honest quiet, not the kind that hums beneath static. No footsteps. No whispers. No voice curling her name.

Leah exhales, slowly, like she’s been holding her breath for years.

She doesn’t sleep that night. Not from fear, but From caution. Just in case.

She wears earplugs now—every night. She stopped listening to podcasts. Threw away her backup phone. Deleted her laptop's media apps. Smashed the Bluetooth speaker.

The walls of her apartment are still red. The mug still chipped. The candle mark still there. Scissors never came home.

Weeks pass. She speaks less and less. Not because she’s afraid of being heard—
but because she’s not sure if she’s still the one narrating. The podcast or her own life.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she thinks she hears a buzz from the drawer where she buried the old SIM card. Sometimes, she dreams in second person.

But the podcast feed is gone. No new episodes. No metadata. No autoplay.

She won. Didn’t she? 

Then, she looks… she notices…

She didn’t beat the story. 

She just left the episode on pause.