Chapter 7

The hammer felt good in my hand. The solid thunk of nails biting into wood felt even better. Three nails across the top, three across the bottom, and one right through the latch mechanism for good measure.

It wouldn't stop her. I knew that. Whatever she was, whatever rules she operated by, a few nails in a closet door weren't going to make a difference. But it made me feel like I was doing something. Taking action. Refusing to just lie there and let whatever was happening happen.

The business card was still on my coffee table. Plain white. No name. Just an address.

I'd been avoiding it. Treating it like everything else she'd planted around my apartment, evidence of a fake past designed to manipulate me. But the other me had said I went looking for something eight months ago. Something I found. Something that was now wearing my life.

Maybe the address would tell me what I'd been looking for.

I typed it into my phone. A neighborhood on the east side of the city, about twenty minutes away. The street view showed a row of old brick buildings, the kind that used to be factories or warehouses before the area got gentrified. Now they were art studios and boutique offices and overpriced loft apartments.

Nothing sinister about the image. Nothing that screamed "this is where your life went wrong."

But I was going anyway.

I showered. Changed into clean clothes for the first time in days. Made myself eat something more substantial than toast. If I was going to walk into whatever trap she'd laid for me, I was going to do it fed and functional.

The drive took longer than expected. I spent the extra time thinking about what I might find. A building full of answers. An empty lot where answers used to be. Her, standing in the doorway, waiting for me to finally show up.

The address turned out to be a brick building just like all the others on the block. Three stories. Big industrial windows. A metal door with no signage and no indication of what might be inside.

I parked across the street and sat there for a while, watching. Looking for movement in the windows. Looking for gray coats and dark hair. Looking for any sign that this was a mistake.

Nothing moved. The building sat there, inert and patient, waiting to see what I'd do.

I got out of the car.

The door wasn't locked. It opened with a groan of hinges that hadn't been oiled in years, revealing a narrow hallway with stairs leading up. The walls were exposed brick, the floor was worn concrete, and the whole place smelled like dust and old paper.

I climbed the stairs. My footsteps echoed in the emptiness.

The second floor was a single large room, mostly bare. Tall windows let in gray afternoon light. The walls were covered with corkboards, the kind you'd use to pin up notes and photographs.

And they were covered with photographs. Hundreds of them.

All of me.

I walked into the room slowly, turning in a circle, taking it in. Every wall. Every surface. My face repeated over and over, from every angle, in every lighting condition. Me at my apartment. Me at work. Me walking down the street. Me sitting in the park. Me sleeping in my bed.

Some of the photos were recent. I recognized the clothes, the haircut, the slight bags under my eyes from chronic lack of sleep.

Others were older. The version of me with longer hair I'd had in college. The beard I'd grown and shaved off three years ago. Younger versions of my face, captured without my knowledge, preserved on these walls like specimens in a collection.

She'd been watching me for years.

The realization hit me like cold water. Not just eight months. Years. Documenting my life. Following my movements. Building this shrine to my existence long before I ever saw her face.

Why?

I forced myself to look closer. To search for patterns in the chaos of images.

Some sections of the wall seemed organized chronologically. I could trace myself backward through time, getting younger as I moved left. My current apartment. My old apartment. The dorm room I'd lived in senior year of college.

And then, at the far left edge of the wall, photos I didn't recognize at all.

Me, standing in front of a house with blue shutters. The same house from the photograph she'd left at the motel.

Me, sitting on a porch I'd never sat on. Walking through a garden I'd never walked through. Standing in a kitchen I'd never cooked in.

Living a life I didn't remember.

These photos weren't fake. The aging was real. The wear on the paper, the slight fading of the colors, the quality of the print. These were genuine photographs from years ago, capturing moments I had no memory of experiencing.

I looked closer at one of them. Me, in the kitchen, cooking something at a stove. Behind me, barely visible at the edge of the frame, a woman's arm reaching for a cabinet.

Her arm.

I grabbed the photo off the wall. Looked at the back.

A date. Handwritten. Almost four years ago.

Four years ago I was in a relationship with Sarah. Living in my old apartment. Working my old job. I knew exactly where I'd been four years ago.

But here was photographic evidence of me somewhere else entirely. Somewhere with a house and a kitchen and a woman whose arm I recognized even from that partial glimpse.

I tore more photos off the wall. Older ones. Five years ago. Six. Seven.

In all of them, I was somewhere I didn't remember. Doing things I didn't recall. Often with her, or with evidence of her presence just out of frame.

Seven years of a life I'd never lived.

Or seven years of a life I'd forgotten.

Which meant this wasn't just about the three missing days eight months ago. Whatever had been done to my memory went back further. Much further. Years of my life, edited out and replaced with... what? The timeline I thought was real? The version of my history where I'd never met her?

My legs gave out. I sat down hard on the dusty concrete floor, surrounded by a thousand photographs of a stranger wearing my face.

Who was I?

Not the version I remembered. That version was a construction. A cover story. A convenient fiction that let me walk through the world thinking I was normal.

But also not the version in these photos. That person was gone too, replaced so thoroughly that not even a shadow remained.

I was something in between. Something that didn't quite fit either story.

Something that was almost done becoming something else.

I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough for the light through the windows to shift, the afternoon fading toward evening. Long enough for my legs to go numb and my thoughts to cycle through the same useless loops.

Eventually I stood up. Started taking photos off the wall. Not all of them. Just the ones that seemed most important. The oldest ones. The ones that showed the house. The ones that showed her.

I was stuffing them into my jacket pockets when I heard the creak.

Floorboards. Somewhere behind me. The sound of weight settling.

I spun around.

She was standing at the top of the stairs. Gray coat. Dark hair. Hands in her pockets, the same pose I'd seen in the park.

But this close, I could finally see her face clearly.

And I recognized it.

Not from the photographs. Not from the dreams or the glimpses in my closet.

I recognized it the way you recognize something from deep in your childhood. A face you haven't seen in decades but that your brain filed away somewhere important. A face that means something your conscious mind has forgotten but your gut still remembers.

She looked at me with an expression I couldn't read.

"You came," she said. Her voice was soft. Careful. Like she was trying not to spook a wild animal. "I wasn't sure you would."

I should have run. Should have pushed past her and bolted down the stairs and gotten the hell out of that building.

Instead I heard myself ask, "Who are you?"

She tilted her head. Studied me like I was a puzzle she wasn't sure how to solve.

"You really don't remember," she said. "I thought maybe you were pretending. Protecting yourself. But you really don't know, do you?"

"Know what?"

She took a step closer. I took a step back.

"What you used to be," she said. "What you're becoming again. What you were always supposed to be, before you tried to run from it."

"That doesn't answer my question."

Another step forward. Another step back. My shoulders hit the wall behind me, pinned between the photographs of my forgotten life.

"I'm the one who made you," she said. "The first time. Before you decided you didn't want to be made anymore."

The words didn't make sense. Made me? Like I was a thing to be manufactured? Like I was something other than a person who'd grown up with parents and siblings and a history that stretched back to birth?

But the photographs on the wall said my history wasn't what I thought it was. The blank expression on my face at 3:33 said I wasn't entirely what I thought I was. The scratches in my closet said something was almost done.

Almost done making me into something else.

"The other one is dying," she said. Almost conversational. Like she was commenting on the weather. "Every night you see them, a little more of them disappears. By the time I'm finished, there won't be anything left."

"The other me."

"The original you. The one who got away. The one who ran so hard they split themselves in two just to escape." She smiled. That same sad smile from my dreams. "They hid inside you, you know. Buried themselves so deep you didn't even know they were there. Used you as camouflage. Let you live their life while they slept."

My head was spinning. "That doesn't—I'm real. I have memories. I have a whole life—"

"You have their life. Their memories. Their relationships and jobs and apartments. Everything that was theirs, they gave to you. Made you think it was yours. Made you think you were them." She took another step forward. Close enough now that I could smell her perfume. Something floral. Something familiar. "But you're not them. You're what I built. And now you're waking up."

I thought about the blank expression on my face at 3:33. The whispered words. She's almost done.

"I'm not what you built."

"You are. You just don't remember being built." She reached out. Touched my face. Her fingers were cold but somehow comforting, like they belonged there. "You were perfect, at first. Everything I designed you to be. Then they broke you. Reprogrammed you. Made you think you were human."

I jerked away from her touch. "I am human."

"You were never human. You were something better. Something I spent years creating." Her eyes were bright now. Intense. "And every night at 3:33, a little more of their corruption burns away. A little more of what you really are comes back."

The seventeen seconds. The window into the other room. Not a glitch or a phenomenon or a parallel universe.

A restoration. Something written over my code, slowly being erased.

"The other me," I said. "They're the original. The real person."

"They were the thief who stole what I made. Overwrote your purpose. Hid inside you like a parasite." Her voice hardened. "But parasites can be removed. And when the last of them is gone, you'll be mine again."

I thought about the other me. The way they'd deteriorated over the past few days. Gaunt and hollow and resigned.

It's too late.

They weren't warning me about her. They were warning me about what I was becoming. Warning me that they were disappearing, and once they were gone, there'd be nothing left but whatever she wanted me to be.

I shoved past her. Ran for the stairs.

She didn't try to stop me. Just called after me, her voice echoing in the empty room.

"You can't run from yourself. They tried that. Look how well it worked."

I took the stairs two at a time. Burst out into the evening air. Ran to my car and drove away without looking back.

But her words followed me all the way home.

You can't run from yourself.

I slept that night. I had to. My body was beyond the point of choice.

But I set every alarm I had for 3:30. I needed to see the other me. Needed to ask them what I was. What they'd done to me. What any of this meant.

I woke at 3:33.

Or whatever waking meant now. I knew what the footage showed. My body sitting up with that blank expression, empty as a shell, whispering words I didn't remember saying. Whatever happened during these seventeen seconds, it wasn't waking. Not really. My consciousness went somewhere while my body stayed behind and performed its strange little ritual.

The alarms hadn't gone off. Or they had and I'd slept through them. Either way, I'd missed my window to prepare.

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

But the bed was empty.

I scanned the room, desperate. Looking for movement, for any sign of them.

There. In the corner. Slumped against the wall.

The other me. Barely visible. Barely there. Their edges seemed fuzzy, indistinct, like a photograph that hadn't finished developing.

They looked up at me. Raised one trembling hand.

They were holding something. A piece of paper. One last message.

I aimed my flashlight at it, straining to read.

Three words. Barely legible. Written in a hand that was shaking so badly the letters were almost unrecognizable.

"FIND THE ARTICLE"

Then the seventeen seconds ended.

And I knew, somehow, that I wouldn't see them again.