Before the End

Oren Hale discovers a memorial page for a boy who died four years ago and cannot explain why the photo looks exactly like him. After that, ordinary life starts to feel staged, like he is walking through a story someone else wrote.

His tutor, Ayara, is smart, guarded, and dangerously easy to talk to. Their sessions shift into something riskier: honesty, which only makes the rest of the world feel stranger by comparison.

As Oren tries to understand where the dead boy ends and he begins, the people closest to him keep steering him away from the truth. But the more he looks, the clearer it becomes: one of these lives is real, and the other is a mistake.
He just doesn't know which one.