Chapter 4

I didn't sleep for the next thirty-six hours.

Not couldn't. Didn't. Actively, deliberately stayed awake through two cycles of 3:33 by drinking enough coffee to make my hands shake and pacing my apartment like a caged animal.

The first night, I watched the clock tick past 3:33 from my kitchen, every light in the apartment blazing, a knife from my butcher block sitting on the counter within arm's reach. Nothing happened. No shift in reality, no glimpse of blue curtains, no sign of her. Just 3:33 becoming 3:34 becoming 3:35, ordinary and unremarkable.

The phenomenon only happened when I was asleep. That was useful information.

Or maybe she only came when I was asleep.

I tried not to think too hard about what that meant. About all those months of waking at 3:33, seeing the other room for seventeen seconds, and then falling back to sleep. All those hours between 3:33 and morning when I was unconscious and vulnerable and she could have been standing right there.

The notebook sat on my coffee table where I'd thrown it after finding her message. I couldn't bring myself to touch it again. Couldn't bring myself to throw it away either. It just sat there, open to that page, her handwriting staring up at the ceiling.

You shouldn't have looked.

The letters were neat. Careful. Almost pretty, with little flourishes on the capitals. Like she'd taken her time with it. Like she'd wanted it to look nice.

That was somehow worse than if it had been scrawled or messy. The care she'd put into it. The patience.

By the second morning, I was starting to hallucinate. Nothing dramatic. Just shadows moving wrong in my peripheral vision. Sounds that might have been footsteps or might have been my own heartbeat echoing in my skull. The coffee had stopped working hours ago, but I kept drinking it anyway, the ritual of lifting the cup to my mouth the only thing keeping me tethered.

I knew I couldn't stay awake forever. Eventually my body would override my brain and I'd collapse whether I wanted to or not. But I wasn't ready yet. I needed more information first. I needed to understand what I was dealing with before I let myself be vulnerable again.

So I did what I should have done from the beginning. I dug into the only concrete lead I had.

Eight months ago. The night this started. The night Sarah left.

I'd told myself nothing significant happened that day. And on the surface, that was true. Sarah had packed her things the week before, moved them to a storage unit while she figured out Seattle logistics. The day itself was quiet. We'd said our goodbyes already. She texted me when her flight landed, a simple "made it safe" that I'd responded to with a thumbs up emoji because I didn't know what else to say.

That was it. End of a two-year relationship, reduced to a thumbs up and a notification that someone who used to sleep next to me was now 2,500 miles away.

But when I really thought about it, when I pushed past the fog of exhaustion and forced myself to remember, there were gaps.

I remembered waking up the next morning feeling strange. Disoriented. Like I'd slept too long but also not long enough. My phone showed three missed calls from my sister, which was unusual because we never called each other. When I called her back, she sounded relieved but wouldn't tell me why she'd been trying to reach me.

"Just checking in," she'd said. "With everything going on. Wanted to make sure you were okay."

I'd assumed she meant Sarah. The breakup. She was being a concerned sibling in her distant, hands-off way.

But now I wasn't sure.

I pulled up my phone records. It took some digging through my account settings, but I found the detailed history going back over a year. I scrolled to that week eight months ago, my eyes burning from lack of sleep.

The day Sarah left, nothing unusual. A few texts. Her "made it safe" message. My thumbs up.

The next day, nothing. No calls, no texts. Not even spam.

The day after that, nothing.

The day after that, those three calls from my sister. Then my call back to her.

Three days of silence. In a world where I usually got at least a dozen notifications daily, three days of absolutely nothing.

I tried to remember those three days. Really tried. Closed my eyes and pushed through the exhaustion and the fear and searched for anything concrete.

I came up empty. Not vague memories. Not hazy impressions. Just nothing. A hole in my timeline where seventy-two hours should have been.

My hands were shaking worse now, and it wasn't from the coffee.

I called my sister.

She picked up on the fourth ring, her voice foggy with sleep. I'd forgotten about time zones. It was barely 6 AM where she was.

"Hello? What's wrong?"

"I need to ask you something," I said. "About eight months ago. When Sarah left."

A pause. I heard rustling, like she was sitting up in bed. "It's six in the morning."

"I know. I'm sorry. But I need to know why you called me. Three times in one day. You never call me three times in a year."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"What are you talking about?"

"After Sarah left. You called me three times and I didn't answer. When I called you back, you said you were checking in. What were you really checking on?"

"I..." She trailed off. I heard her husband mumble something in the background, and her muffled response telling him to go back to sleep. Then she was back, her voice lower. "Why are you asking about this now?"

"Just tell me. Please."

She sighed. The kind of sigh that carries years of complicated sibling history in it.

"You called me," she said finally. "The night after Sarah left. Really late, like 2 or 3 in the morning. You were... I don't know. You didn't make sense. You kept asking me if I remembered things that never happened. Talking about someone being in your apartment. I thought maybe you were drunk or high or having some kind of breakdown."

My blood went cold. "What did I say? Exactly?"

"I don't remember exactly. It was months ago and you were rambling. Something about waking up and someone being there. You kept asking if I could see her too. I thought you meant Sarah at first, but then you said..." She hesitated. "You said she was standing in the corner. Watching. And you asked me if she was real or if you'd made her up."

The room started to spin. I grabbed the edge of the counter.

"Then what happened?"

"You hung up. I tried calling back but you didn't answer. I was worried enough that I almost drove over, but it was the middle of the night and you live two hours away. I figured I'd check on you in the morning."

"And when you finally reached me?"

"You didn't remember any of it. You sounded completely normal. Said you'd just had a rough night after Sarah left, that you were fine, that I shouldn't worry." Her voice sharpened. "What's going on? Why are you asking about this now? Are you okay?"

I wasn't okay. I was about as far from okay as I'd ever been. But I couldn't tell her that. Couldn't explain the 3:33 waking or the other room or the woman in the gray coat who might or might not be standing in my apartment at this very moment, waiting for me to fall asleep.

"I'm fine," I lied. "Just trying to make sense of some stuff. Thank you for telling me."

"You're scaring me."

"I'm sorry. Really. I'll call you later, okay? At a reasonable hour. I promise."

I hung up before she could push harder.

So this wasn't new. Whatever was happening had started eight months ago, in those three days I couldn't remember. I'd seen her then. Called my sister in the middle of the night, terrified, asking if she was real.

Then I'd forgotten.

How do you forget something like that? How do you lose three days and not notice the hole they left behind?

Unless someone made you forget.

Unless forgetting was the point.

The exhaustion hit me like a wave then. Thirty-six hours of artificial alertness crashing down all at once. My legs felt like they belonged to someone else. My thoughts were moving through syrup.

I couldn't stay awake anymore. Whatever consequences came with sleeping, I was going to have to face them.

But I wasn't going to do it here.

I packed a bag. Threw in clothes, toiletries, my phone charger. The notebook stayed on the coffee table. I didn't want it near me.

I drove to a motel fifteen miles outside the city. The kind of place that rented rooms by the hour and didn't ask questions. Paid cash. Gave a fake name. Took a room on the second floor at the end of the hallway, as far from the office as possible.

The room smelled like industrial cleaner and old cigarettes. The bedspread was the kind of pattern designed to hide stains. But it had a lock on the door and blackout curtains and no closet, just an open rack for hanging clothes.

No closet. I almost laughed at how much that small detail comforted me.

I checked every corner of the room anyway. Under the bed. Behind the shower curtain. Inside the tiny bathroom cabinet that couldn't have hidden a cat, let alone a person.

Empty. All of it.

I set my phone alarm for 3:30 AM, wanting to be awake before the window opened. Then I lay down on that questionable bedspread and let the exhaustion take me.

I dreamed of blue curtains.

The alarm woke me at 3:30 on the dot. I sat up in the unfamiliar darkness, heart already pounding, and stared at my phone.

3:30. 3:31. 3:32.

3:33.

The room didn't change.

I looked around, waiting for the shift, the blue curtains, the other bedroom. But the motel room stayed exactly as it was. Ugly bedspread. Chemical smell. Blackout curtains blocking the parking lot lights.

The seventeen seconds came and went. Nothing.

I waited until 3:35 just to be sure. Still nothing.

Something unknotted in my chest. It was tied to my apartment. Had to be. Whatever connection existed between me and the other room, it ran through that specific space. Here, fifteen miles away, I was just a person sleeping in a bad motel.

I could leave. Pack up. Move somewhere new, somewhere she couldn't find me. Start over in a city where no one knew my name and no one stood in my closet watching me sleep.

The thought was intoxicating. Freedom. Safety. An escape route I hadn't known I had.

I was still savoring it when I heard the knock.

Three soft taps on the motel room door.

I froze. It was 3:36 in the morning. No one knew I was here. I'd paid cash, given a fake name. There was no reason for anyone to be knocking on this door.

Three more taps. Patient. Unhurried.

I didn't move. Didn't breathe.

A voice came through the door. Soft. Female.

"I know you're awake."

Every hair on my body stood up.

"You can run if you want," she said. Her voice was calm. Almost gentle. Like she was talking to a scared child. "But it won't change anything. You already looked. You already saw. Some doors don't close just because you walk away from them."

I grabbed my phone. Started dialing 911. Got two numbers in before I heard her laugh. Quiet. Almost sad.

"They won't find anything. They never do."

Silence. I strained to hear footsteps, movement, anything that would tell me she was still there or that she'd left.

Nothing.

I sat in that motel room until dawn, phone clutched in my hand, eyes locked on the door.

When the sun came up, I finally looked through the peephole.

The hallway was empty.

I opened the door and taped to the outside was a photograph.

The photo was old, slightly faded, with that particular color quality of pictures from the early 2000s.

It showed a house I didn't recognize. A modest suburban home with a neat lawn and a wooden porch. Standing on that porch were two people.

One of them was me. Younger, maybe college-aged, smiling at the camera like I didn't have a care in the world.

The other was a woman. Dark hair. Average build.

She had her arm around my shoulders like we'd known each other for years.

I turned the photo over.

On the back, in that same careful handwriting from my notebook, were two words:

"Remember me?"

I stared at that photo until my eyes watered.

I had no memory of this house. No memory of taking this picture. No memory of the woman standing next to me with her arm around my shoulders like she belonged there.

But there I was. Smiling. Happy.

Standing next to someone I'd apparently known well enough to pose with.

Someone I'd completely forgotten.

Someone who, judging by the last three days, had not forgotten me.