Chapter 5

I drove back to my apartment with the photograph on the passenger seat like it might bite me if I looked away for too long.

The rational part of my brain, the part that was barely hanging on after two days of no sleep and a mysterious stalker finding me at a cash-only motel, kept trying to explain it away. Old college friend I'd gotten drunk with once. Some party I didn't remember because of the aforementioned drinking. People forget people all the time. Brains are imperfect storage devices.

But I knew my own handwriting. I knew my own face. And the person in that photograph wasn't wearing an expression of "random party acquaintance." He was wearing the expression of someone comfortable. Someone who knew the woman next to him well enough to let her put her arm around his shoulders without tensing up.

I'd never been good at that. Letting people into my space. Sarah used to joke that I had an invisible force field, that getting close to me was like approaching a skittish cat. Two years of dating and I still flinched sometimes when she touched me unexpectedly.

But in this photo, I looked relaxed. Open. Like this woman belonged there.

And I had no idea who she was.

The apartment felt different when I got back. Nothing I could point to specifically. Just a charge in the air, a sense of occupation, like the space remembered her presence even if I couldn't see evidence of it.

I checked the closet first. Obviously. The dust I'd vacuumed away hadn't had time to resettle, so that particular barometer was useless now. The notebook still sat on the coffee table, open to her message. The handwriting really was pretty. Careful loops and precise spacing. The kind of penmanship that takes practice.

I set the photograph next to the notebook and stared at both of them for a long time.

You shouldn't have looked.

Remember me?

Two messages that didn't quite fit together. The first one felt like a threat. Or a warning. The second one felt almost plaintive. Like she wanted something from me beyond just fear.

What do you want from someone they don't remember you exist?

I thought about the three days I'd lost. Seventy-two hours of my life just gone, replaced with nothing. Not even false memories or vague impressions. Just a smooth blank space where time should have been.

People lose time for lots of reasons. Trauma. Drugs. Head injuries. Dissociative episodes. None of those felt right. I hadn't been traumatized before Sarah left. Wasn't on anything stronger than coffee. Hadn't hit my head. And dissociation usually leaves traces, a feeling of unreality, a sense that something isn't quite connected right.

I felt fine. That was the worst part. I felt completely normal right up until the 3:33 waking started showing me that I wasn't.

My laptop was still on the kitchen table where I'd left it before fleeing to the motel. I sat down and opened a browser, then hesitated with my fingers over the keyboard.

What do you search for when you don't know what you're looking for?

I started with the house in the photograph. Squinted at the details visible in the frame. Blue shutters. A specific style of porch railing. Trees in the background that looked like they might be oaks. Nothing distinctive enough to identify a location.

I tried reverse image search. Uploaded the photograph and let Google do its thing. It returned nothing useful. Similar houses. Porches that kind of matched. Nothing exact.

I zoomed in on the woman's face, trying to commit it to memory. Dark hair pulled back. Average features. A smile that seemed genuine. She was wearing a simple white blouse, the kind you'd wear to a casual brunch or a Sunday afternoon. Nothing that suggested a specific time or place.

She looked normal. That was the thing. She looked like someone you'd pass on the street without a second glance. No dramatic features, no unusual characteristics, nothing that would make you remember her.

Maybe that was the point.

I searched my own social media next. Went back through years of photos, tagged posts, check-ins. Looking for any mention of her, any evidence that we'd crossed paths in some documentable way.

Nothing. My social media presence was sparse to begin with. I wasn't the type to post every meal or location update. But I had photos going back to college, group shots from parties, graduation pictures, the occasional vacation snapshot.

She wasn't in any of them.

I tried searching for the three days specifically. Pulled up my email from that period. My calendar. My bank statements. Looking for any record of what I'd done during the time I couldn't remember.

The email was empty except for spam. The calendar showed no events. The bank statements showed no transactions.

For three days, according to every record I could find, I simply didn't exist.

That wasn't possible. You can't just vanish from the digital world for seventy-two hours unless you're deliberately trying to. Even if I'd stayed home and done nothing, there would be Netflix history. Amazon orders. An email from a mailing list I'd forgotten to unsubscribe from.

But there was nothing. Like someone had carefully erased every trace of those three days from every system that might have recorded them.

Or like I'd never lived them in the first place.

The exhaustion was creeping back in. Two days of no sleep didn't just disappear because I'd caught a few hours in a sketchy motel. My body was running on fumes, and my brain was starting to do that thing where thoughts slipped sideways into weird territory.

I needed to sleep. Real sleep, not fear-naps or chemical knockouts.

But I also needed answers. And the only source of answers I had access to appeared for seventeen seconds once a day, in a room that didn't exist, through a window I didn't understand.

I looked at the clock. 2:47 PM. Almost thirteen hours until 3:33.

Thirteen hours of waiting. Thirteen hours of jumping at shadows and checking the closet and wondering if she was going to knock on this door like she'd knocked on the motel door.

I decided to make the time useful.

I went through my apartment systematically. Not just checking for intruders this time. Looking for anything out of place. Anything that didn't belong. Anything that might have been left behind by someone who apparently had access to my space whenever she wanted.

It took four hours. I checked every drawer, every cabinet, every box of old stuff I'd shoved in the back of the closet when I moved in. I looked under furniture, behind picture frames, inside books I hadn't opened in years.

I found three things.

The first was a receipt crumpled in the pocket of a jacket I rarely wore. It was from a restaurant I didn't recognize, dated eight months ago, during my missing three days. Two entrees. Two drinks. A total that suggested a nice dinner rather than a quick meal.

The second was a business card wedged between my mattress and box spring. Plain white, good cardstock. No name. No phone number. Just an address in a part of town I'd never been to.

The third was a photograph.

Different from the one she'd left at the motel. This one was tucked inside a book on my shelf, a novel I'd started reading years ago and never finished. It showed me and the woman again, but in a different location. A beach this time. We were both laughing at something outside the frame. Her head was tilted toward mine like she was sharing a secret.

On the back, in the same careful handwriting: "You were happy."

I sat on my bed with all three objects laid out in front of me. Receipt. Business card. Photograph.

Evidence of a life I didn't remember living. A relationship I didn't remember having. Someone who apparently knew me well enough to take me to nice dinners and beach vacations, to be photographed laughing with me, to write notes about my happiness like she'd been there to witness it.

And then I'd forgotten her completely. Forgotten the dinners and the beach and whatever else we'd shared during those three days and probably before.

Why?

People don't just forget other people. Not like this. Not without some kind of trauma or intervention.

Unless the forgetting was the intervention.

I thought about the other me. The version in the blue-curtained room who'd spent eight months watching me sleep, who'd finally woken up and tried to warn me. Don't trust her. She's behind you.

They knew about her. They were scared of her. Scared enough to break eight months of silence just to get a message through.

What did they know that I didn't?

What had they seen that I'd been made to forget?

The sun was going down. Long shadows stretched across my apartment, reaching toward me like fingers. I got up and turned on every light, then sat back down on my bed and waited.

Nine hours until 3:33.

I tried to eat something. Made toast because it was easy and required minimal attention. The bread tasted like cardboard but I forced it down anyway. My body needed fuel even if my brain was too occupied to appreciate it.

I took a shower. Stood under the hot water until it ran cold, letting the white noise fill my head for a few minutes. Tried not to think about how vulnerable I was in there, naked and blinded by steam, completely unable to see if someone came through the bathroom door.

I got out faster than I'd planned to.

By 10 PM I was in bed, not because I expected to sleep but because lying down felt marginally less exhausting than sitting up. I'd prepared new signs for the other me. More questions. WHAT HAPPENED TO ME. WHAT DID I FORGET. WHO IS SHE.

And one I wasn't sure I wanted an answer to: WHAT AM I.

That question had been building in my head all day. The missing three days. The complete erasure of any record. The way she spoke to me like we had history, important history, the kind you don't just misplace.

What if I wasn't who I thought I was?

The thought was ridiculous. Of course I was me. I had memories going back to childhood. Parents who recognized me. A sister who'd known me my whole life. You can't just become someone without all the people around you noticing.

But you could lose pieces of yourself. Forget chunks of your history. Wake up one day and realize that the person you thought you were had gaps in them. Holes where other versions used to be.

Maybe I wasn't asking the right question. Maybe the question wasn't what am I.

Maybe it was what am I now.

I must have drifted off at some point. I don't remember the transition, just one moment of staring at my ceiling and then suddenly being somewhere else.

Dreaming. I knew I was dreaming, which was unusual for me. The kind of thing that happens when you're so exhausted your brain doesn't bother maintaining the illusion.

I was standing in the house from the photograph. The one with the blue shutters and the wooden porch. Inside this time, in a living room I didn't recognize but that felt somehow familiar. Comfortable furniture, warm lighting, pictures on the walls that I couldn't quite focus on.

She was there. Sitting on a couch, watching me with that patient expression I'd seen in the park. The gray coat was gone. She was wearing the white blouse from the beach photograph, her hair loose around her shoulders instead of pulled back.

She looked sad. Not threatening. Not scary. Just deeply, profoundly sad.

"You used to remember," she said. Her voice was the same as it had been through the motel door. Soft. Almost gentle. "Before they changed you. You used to remember everything."

"Who changed me?" I asked.

She smiled. The kind of smile that doesn't reach the eyes.

"You did. You just don't remember that either."

I woke up at 3:33.

Not gradually. Not gently. One second I was in that living room watching her sad smile, and the next I was bolt upright in my own bed with my heart slamming against my ribs.

The room shifted. Blue curtains. The plant. The wooden headboard.

The other me was waiting.

They looked worse than before. Much worse. Gaunt in a way that went beyond missed sleep, with hollows under their eyes and a grayish cast to their skin that made me think of sickness. Of death.

They were holding a sign. Different from the others. More words this time, crammed onto the paper in letters small enough to fit.

I grabbed my flashlight and aimed it at their message.

"SHE'S NOT WHAT SHE LOOKS LIKE. DON'T BELIEVE WHAT SHE SHOWS YOU. THE MEMORIES ARE BAIT."

I fumbled for my own sign. WHAT HAPPENED TO ME.

They dropped their first sign. Grabbed another one they'd apparently prepared.

"YOU WENT LOOKING FOR SOMETHING 8 MONTHS AGO."

Another sign.

"YOU FOUND IT."

Another.

"NOW IT'S WEARING YOUR LIFE."

The seventeen seconds were almost up. I could feel them running out, the window starting to close. I grabbed my final sign, the one I'd been afraid to ask. Held it up.

WHAT AM I.

They looked at my question. Their face crumpled. The same grief I'd seen before, but deeper now. More desperate.

They raised one final sign. Two words.

"I'M SORRY."

The room snapped back.

I sat in the darkness, flashlight still clutched in my hand, trying to parse what they'd told me.

You went looking for something eight months ago. You found it. Now it's wearing your life.

The memories are bait.

I'm sorry.

What does "I'm sorry" mean when it comes from yourself? What are you apologizing for? What could you have done that warrants that level of grief from your own reflection?

I thought about the three missing days. The erasure of every record. The woman who knew me but I didn't remember. The photograph of us laughing on a beach, happy, comfortable, together.

The memories are bait.

She'd been showing me evidence of a relationship. A life we'd shared. Photographs and receipts and business cards hidden around my apartment like breadcrumbs. Trying to trigger something. Trying to make me remember.

But what if the memories she was offering weren't real?

What if they'd never happened?

What if they were bait for something else entirely?

I got out of bed and turned on the lights. Went to the coffee table where I'd left the evidence I'd collected. The receipt. The business card. The photographs.

I looked at them differently now. Not as proof of a forgotten past, but as objects placed deliberately in my path. Props in a story someone wanted me to believe.

The receipt was crumpled just right. Worn in a way that suggested it had been in that jacket pocket for months. But had I ever worn that jacket in the past eight months? I couldn't remember putting it on since before Sarah left.

The business card was slightly dusty, wedged far enough under the mattress that I wouldn't have found it unless I was looking for something. But how long had it really been there? How hard would it be to slide something under someone's mattress?

The photographs looked genuinely old. The color quality. The slight fading. But photo editing software could age new images. Make them look like they came from years ago.

What if none of this was real?

What if she was building a narrative from scratch, planting evidence, waiting for me to discover it and fill in the gaps with assumptions?

The memories are bait.

For what? What was she trying to catch?

I looked at the photograph of us on the beach. The happy version of me, laughing at something I couldn't see. Real or fake, staged or authentic, this image was supposed to make me feel something. Trust her. Want to remember her. Open myself up to whatever came next.

I put the photograph face down on the table.

Whatever she was selling, I wasn't buying. Not anymore.

But even as I thought it, a small voice in the back of my head whispered something I didn't want to hear.

If the memories are bait, why is the other you so scared?

What does she actually want?

And if I'm not really me anymore...

What does that make her?