Fifteen Minutes to Midnight

In the rainy, neon-lit city of Shinagawa, a single keystroke error erases fifteen minutes of overtime pay for a Korean-Japanese language teacher. That trivial deletion spirals into a chain of fatal collisions—a disgraced clerk, a mute witness, a grieving journalist, and a yakuza debt collector are all pulled into a vortex of murder and cover-up. Rendered in C.L. Pattison's precise, unflinching prose, the story reveals that delayed justice is not a wound that heals but a slow, relentless vivisection of hope. Only by paying the blood price can any survivor rewrite their shattered life on a blank new page.