Someone shouted at her.
Trey found his under a chair.
I picked up a black phone that wasn’t mine.
Mine was brown.
I searched beneath the table.
Nothing.
Under the neighboring table.
Nothing.
People were moving around us, annoyed that we were blocking the floor.
I asked Mara if she had it.
She checked her purse.
No.
I started feeling strangely panicked.
It was a phone.
Replaceable.
Annoying to lose, expensive to replace, but not worth the feeling rising in my chest.
Still, I needed it.
I needed my phone.
Eventually someone handed me one.
Brown case.
“There.”
I grabbed it.
Relief hit immediately.
Too immediately.
I pressed the side button.
The screen lit.
No wallpaper.
A message.
DON’T GO HOME WITH HER.
I stopped breathing.
The message disappeared.
My normal lock screen appeared.
I unlocked the phone.
No notification.
No text.
Nothing.
I checked every messaging app.
Nothing.
Mara appeared beside me.
“You found it?”
I locked the screen.
“Yeah.”
She smiled.
Something inside me screamed not to tell her.
So I didn’t.
For the first time since meeting my sister, I lied to her.
“Somebody had it.”
She linked her arm through mine.
“Come on.”
I let her lead me away.
But I looked back.
A man stood near the table.
I recognized him.
It took a few seconds.
High school.
Someone I’d known briefly. Not a friend. Not really.
He was staring directly at me.
I stopped.
Mara felt it.
“What?”
The man looked away.
I told her it was nothing.
Later, while dancing, I felt someone move behind me.
Too close.
I stepped forward.
The person followed.
I turned sharply, already telling him to back up.
It was the same man.
He raised both hands.
“Relax.”
I knew his face.
I could almost remember his name.
Almost.
“What are you doing here?”
He frowned.
“Seeing if you remember me.”
My skin prickled.
Mara appeared beside me before I could answer.
The man’s expression changed when he saw her.
Not recognition.
Fear.
Mara stepped between us.
He backed away.
I grabbed her arm.
“Do you know him?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly.
The man disappeared into the crowd.
Mara wanted to leave.
Immediately.
I resisted.
She insisted.
Something in her face convinced me.
We found Trey and headed toward the exit.
As we crossed the room, my phone vibrated.
I pulled it out.
Unknown number.
One message.
She found you first this time.
I stopped walking.
Mara turned.
“What?”
I looked at her.
The message vanished from the screen.
My sister reached for my hand.
I stepped away.
The hurt on her face was immediate.
But for once, I didn’t fix it.
I walked outside alone.
⸻
Chapter Eight
I didn’t go home with Mara.
I went with Trey.
Technically, we all ended up at the same house eventually, but I refused to ride in her car.
She didn’t argue.
That frightened me.
Trey drove.
For the first ten minutes, neither of us spoke.
Streetlights moved across his face in intervals.
Light.
Dark.
Light.
Dark.
I watched the city pass outside.
Then I asked whether he remembered the man from the club.
He tightened his hands around the steering wheel.
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
He sighed.
I told him about the messages.
That got his attention.
He looked at me too long before returning his eyes to the road.
“What did they say?”
I told him.
His face changed.
Not confusion.
Recognition.
My heartbeat picked up.
“You know what that means.”
He denied it.
I told him to stop lying to me.
He kept driving.
I asked whether Mara was dangerous.
“No.”
That answer came immediately.
It was the first thing he’d said all night that I believed.
“Then what’s happening?”
He swallowed.
“I don’t know how much I’m allowed to tell you.”
Allowed.
The word landed heavily.
“By who?”
He didn’t answer.
I turned in my seat.
“Trey.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Then what is it like?”
He looked miserable.
For a moment he seemed much younger than he was.
Then he said something that made every hair on my arms rise.
“You always get farther when she finds you.”
I stared at him.
The road hummed beneath us.
“What?”
He shook his head immediately.
“Forget I said that.”
“No.”
“I shouldn’t have—”
“Get farther where?”
He wouldn’t answer.
I asked again.
Nothing.
Then something moved across the road.
Trey slammed on the brakes.
I screamed.
The car stopped so hard my seat belt cut into my shoulder.
For several seconds we sat there breathing.
The road ahead was empty.
“What was that?”
Trey stared through the windshield.
“I don’t know.”
I looked behind us.
Nothing.
Then I noticed people standing on the sidewalk.
At first there were only three.
All wearing black.
A woman.
A man.
A child.
None of them moved.
As we watched, another person stepped out from between two buildings.
Black shirt.
Then another.
Then another.
My stomach tightened.
“Trey.”
“I see them.”
Farther down the street, orange light appeared.
A flame.
Someone was carrying a torch.
Then another flame appeared beside it.
And another.
The people began walking.
Not toward us exactly.
Down the street.
Together.
More emerged from side roads as they passed.
Children.
Teenagers.
Adults.
Old people.
All dressed in black.
Some carried torches.
Some carried what looked like rifles.
My brain refused to understand what I was seeing.
Then the chanting started.
Too far away to make out at first.
A rhythm.
Hundreds of voices finding the same words.
Trey put the car in reverse.
The chanting grew louder.
I heard the words.
My entire body went cold.
Kill all the Blacks.
Again.
Kill all the Blacks.
Again.
Louder.
People appeared behind us.
Trey stopped.
We were surrounded by bodies moving through the streets.
Nobody was running.
Nobody was screaming.
The marchers weren’t frantic.
That made it worse.
They moved like this had been planned.
Like everyone knew where they were supposed to be.
Trey reached over and pushed my head down.
“Get down.”
I folded toward the floor.
He did the same.
Through the bottom of the window I could see legs passing.
Black pants.
Black shirts.
Boots.
Sneakers.
A child’s light-up shoes blinking blue with every step.
The chanting continued.
I covered my mouth.
Someone hit the roof of the car.
Once.
Hard.
Trey grabbed my wrist.
Neither of us moved.
Another hit.
Then a voice close to the window told us to get out.
My brother looked at me.
I shook my head.
The voice repeated itself.
A gun appeared against the glass.
We got out.
The man holding it couldn’t have been older than twenty.
He told us to get on the ground.
We did.
My cheek pressed against cold pavement.
Around us, hundreds of feet continued marching.
I searched for Trey.
He was close enough that our fingers touched.
Then I heard barking.
Two dogs had gotten loose from somewhere nearby.
They ran through the crowd, completely unaware that anything was wrong.
One came toward us.
Golden.
Happy.
Tail wagging.
It licked my face.
A laugh escaped me.
I couldn’t help it.
The absurdity was too much.
Trey started laughing too.
Quietly.
Terrified.
The dog dropped something beside my hand.
A tennis ball.
I picked it up.
Threw it a few feet.
The dog chased it.
For the next several minutes, while people marched past chanting for our deaths, my brother and I played fetch from the ground.
It was the strangest moment of my life.
And somehow the most human.
Eventually the man with the gun moved away.
Trey waited.
Then whispered that we needed to run.
We waited for an opening.
Then we moved.
We ran between buildings.
Across a yard.
Through an alley.
My lungs burned.
I lost one shoe.
I didn’t stop.
My phone vibrated inside my pocket.
I ignored it.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Finally we ducked behind a wall.
I pulled it out.
Seventeen missed calls.
Mara.
One message.
WHERE ARE YOU?
Another arrived.
PLEASE ANSWER ME.
Then another.
I CAN GET YOU OUT.
I called.
She answered before the first ring finished.
I couldn’t even speak before she said my name.
Her voice broke.
I told her we were alive.
She started crying.
Real crying.
The sound nearly broke me.
I pressed my hand against my mouth.
My teeth hurt.
Not now.
Please.
Not now.
Mara was asking where we were.
I looked around.
I didn’t know.
Trey took the phone and described the street we’d crossed.
Mara told us to stay hidden.
She was coming.
I grabbed the phone back.
“No.”
Silence.
I remembered the message.
Don’t go home with her.
She found you first this time.
“You can’t come here.”
Mara’s breathing changed.
Then she said something so quietly I almost missed it.
“They started early.”
My blood went cold.
“What?”
She went silent.
“Mara.”
Nothing.
“You knew this was going to happen?”
Trey looked at me.
I put the call on speaker.
Mara started crying again.
Not loudly.
The exhausted kind.
Like someone whose worst fear had finally arrived.
“I thought we had more time.”
The pressure in my teeth increased.
I touched my mouth.
My gums were tender.
When I pulled my fingers away, there was blood on them.
Trey stared.
I stared too.
My phone vibrated.
The call disconnected.
A new message appeared.
Unknown number.
This one didn’t disappear.
You have been here before.
I looked at Trey.
He looked at the blood on my hand.
Somewhere beyond the wall, hundreds of voices continued chanting.
And for the first time, I understood something that should have terrified me from the beginning.
Nobody had ever told me I was experiencing
Chapter Nine
The blood stopped before Mara found us.
That should have made me feel better.
Instead, I spent the next fifteen minutes rubbing my tongue along my teeth and waiting for one of them to move.
None did.
Trey and I stayed crouched behind the wall while the sounds from the street changed. The chanting never fully disappeared, but it thinned into pockets, sometimes close enough that I could make out individual voices and sometimes far enough away that it became something almost abstract, a terrible rhythm carried on the wind. Sirens started eventually. Not many. Not enough.
The city felt abandoned by whoever was supposed to protect it.
I had stopped checking my phone. The messages from the unknown number sat on the screen like they had always belonged there.
You have been here before.
There was no timestamp.
No number attached.
No option to reply.
I had opened the message three times just to make sure I wasn’t missing something obvious. Each time, it remained exactly the same.
Trey refused to look at it.
That bothered me.
He sat with his back against the brick, both knees pulled up, staring down at the one shoe I’d lost somewhere in the alley. His breathing had mostly returned to normal, but his face hadn’t. He looked like somebody carrying too much information and trying not to let any of it spill.
I was done allowing that.
I told him I knew he remembered more than he had admitted. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t have enough energy left for anger. That seemed to make him more uncomfortable than yelling would have.
He stayed quiet for so long that I thought he might refuse again.
Then he rubbed both hands over his face and told me that he remembered pieces.
Not everything.
Never everything.
That word sat heavily between us.
Never.
Apparently this wasn’t the first time he had watched me forget.
He couldn’t tell me how many times because he genuinely didn’t know. His memories came in flashes that didn’t always agree with one another. In some, Mara had lived with us for years. In others, she had appeared recently. In one, Trey remembered being a child and Mara teaching him how to ride a bike. In another, he remembered asking our mother who Mara was.
Each version felt true while he was inside it.
I listened without interrupting.
The world around me became strangely distant.
A bottle rolled somewhere nearby. Glass scraped against pavement. Someone shouted from another street. A dog barked twice and went quiet.
Trey said the clearest thing he remembered was me.
Not the same version of me each time.
Just me asking questions.
I always started asking questions.
Pictures. Dates. Names. Places.
Then something changed.
His memory usually ended there.
I stared at him.
The ache in my jaw returned.
Softly this time.
A warning pulse beneath my gums.
I asked what happened after I started remembering.
Trey wouldn’t look at me.
That was answer enough.
A car horn sounded twice from the end of the alley.
Then twice again.
Trey stood immediately.
Mara.
Her car was half on the curb when we reached it. The driver’s door flew open before she’d fully stopped moving.
She ran to us.
Whatever anger I had been holding vanished the second she grabbed me.
Mara hugged me so hard I lost my breath.
She smelled like sweat, perfume and cold night air. Her hands moved over my shoulders, my arms, the sides of my face, checking that I was whole.
I let her.
I was too tired not to.
When she saw the dried blood near my mouth, something in her expression collapsed.
She touched my chin carefully and asked where it had come from.
I told her my gums.
Her hand froze.
That scared me more than the blood had.
She got us into the car.
Nobody spoke for the first several blocks.
The roads looked wrong.
That was the only word I had for them.
Wrong.
Traffic lights continued changing for intersections nobody used. Storefronts glowed behind locked doors. A bus sat empty with its hazard lights blinking. Somewhere, a trash can burned unattended.
The march had moved elsewhere, but signs of it remained everywhere.
Black fabric tied around lampposts.
Broken glass.
Discarded signs.
One torch still burning in the middle of a median.
I watched it shrink behind us.
Mara kept checking the mirrors.
Not for police.
Not for the marchers.
For something else.
I could tell.
She drove past our neighborhood.
I noticed after the third turn.
Trey noticed too.
Neither of us said anything until we crossed the bridge and entered a part of the city I barely recognized.
Mara finally explained that we couldn’t go home.
She said it gently, like the softness of her voice might make the words easier.
I thought of my room.
My clothes.
My wallet.
My bag.
The notebook beneath my mattress.
My mother’s photographs.
The strange little collection of ordinary things that had seemed worthless until I imagined never seeing them again.
I asked about Mom.
Mara said she was safe.
That answer came too fast.
I asked where.
Mara’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror.
She didn’t answer.
My stomach tightened.
The car turned into a narrow residential street lined with houses set far back from the road.
Mara pulled into the driveway of a small brick house with no lights on.
It looked empty.
Not abandoned.
Prepared.
That distinction chilled me.
Inside, the air smelled stale, like nobody had opened the windows in weeks.
There were blankets stacked on the couch.
Cases of water.
Canned food.
Flashlights.
Batteries.
A first-aid kit large enough for a school nurse.
I stopped in the doorway.
This wasn’t someplace Mara had chosen tonight.
This place had been waiting.
She saw me notice.
For once, she didn’t try to explain.
I walked through the rooms slowly.
Two bedrooms.
One bathroom.
Kitchen.
Back door.
Curtains already drawn.
No family pictures.
No decorations.
Nothing personal.
A house designed to be left behind.
I felt suddenly sick.
When I asked how long she’d had it, Mara sat down.
She looked exhausted.
Older somehow.
She told me she’d been paying for it for eleven months.
Eleven months.
I had met her less than a week ago.
I didn’t need to say anything.
The numbers spoke for themselves.
Trey moved into the kitchen and began opening cabinets, perhaps to give us privacy or perhaps because he had heard this before.
I stood in front of Mara.
The room was dim except for one lamp near the couch.
Her face looked different in that light.
Not unfamiliar.
Too familiar.
I thought of the photograph from when I was sixteen.
Found you.
The white dress.
The hand entering from outside the frame.
The sentence she had whispered in her bedroom.
You weren’t supposed to remember yet.
Something inside me gave way.
Not dramatically.
No screaming.
No tears.
Just the quiet exhaustion of being lied to by people who kept insisting the lies were for my own good.
I sat across from her.
I told her I didn’t need everything.
Not yet.
I only needed one thing that was true.
Mara looked at me for a long time.
Then she nodded.
She said we had known each other since we were thirteen.
The room went still.
She told me we had met at a summer program.
Her father had been dating my mother by then, although neither of us knew how serious it was. We hadn’t liked each other at first. Apparently I thought she was stuck-up. Mara thought I talked too much.
That sounded plausible.
Almost comfortingly so.
Over time, we became close.
Closer than either family expected.
When our parents’ relationship ended, ours didn’t.
We kept seeing each other.
Calling each other.
Sleeping over.
Sharing clothes.
Fighting.
Making up.
Sisters in every way except legally.
My throat tightened.
That version of my life felt more believable than the one I remembered.
That was the frightening part.
Mara said I had been there for birthdays I couldn’t remember. Holidays. Graduations. Breakups. Funerals. Ordinary Tuesdays.
She had hundreds of pictures.
Messages.
Videos.
Proof.
And every time she showed me too much, something happened.
I felt my pulse in my gums.
I asked what.
Her eyes dropped to my mouth.
That was all I needed.
I touched my teeth.
The room seemed to shrink around us.
Mara told me she didn’t know what the teeth meant. She didn’t know why my body reacted that way. She only knew it always began around the same point.
Always.
There was that word again.
I asked how many times.
She shook her head.
I asked again.
This time her voice barely carried.
Seven.
For several seconds, I thought I had heard her wrong.
Seven times.
Seven versions of my life.
Seven times forgetting her.
Seven times Mara finding me.
I looked toward the dark window.
Outside, something moved past the curtain.
A shadow.
Human-shaped.
Too slow to be a car.
Mara stood immediately and switched off the lamp.
The house disappeared into darkness.
Nobody breathed.
The shadow stopped.
Then came three soft knocks at the front door.
⸻
Chapter Ten
We didn’t open it.
The knocking continued for almost an hour.
Three taps.
Silence.
Three taps.
Silence.
Never harder.
Never impatient.
That somehow made it worse.
Mara turned off every light and made us sit in the hallway where no windows faced the street. She moved through the house with the quiet confidence of someone who had rehearsed this. Doors checked. Curtains checked. Back lock checked twice.
I watched her and understood something I hadn’t before.
Mara wasn’t hiding information because she enjoyed controlling it.
She was afraid of it.
There was a difference.
That didn’t excuse the lies, but it changed their shape.
We slept in shifts.
Or pretended to.
I spent most of the night staring at the ceiling while Trey snored lightly beside the couch.
Seven times.
The number became meaningless after I repeated it enough.
Seven times I had forgotten a person who had apparently been central to my life.
Seven times she had come back.
Seven times something had gone wrong.
I tried to imagine being Mara.
The thought was unbearable.
To know someone deeply, lose them, find them again and watch them look at you with polite curiosity.
To become a stranger to someone who had once called you family.
I rolled onto my side.
Mara was sitting on the floor by the front window, knees pulled to her chest.
She thought I was asleep.
For a while, I watched her silhouette.
Then she covered her face.
Her shoulders moved once.
Twice.
She was crying silently.
I closed my eyes.
I gave her the privacy of pretending not to know.
⸻
By morning, the person outside was gone.
There were no footprints.
No notes.
No damage.
Only three faint marks on the door where something had struck the paint repeatedly.
Mara wouldn’t touch them.
She made coffee instead.
The routine felt obscene.
Coffee after hate marches.
Coffee after impossible messages.
Coffee after learning my life had apparently restarted seven times.
Still, I drank it.
The warmth helped.
Trey found an old deck of cards in one of the kitchen drawers and began playing solitaire at the table.
Nobody mentioned leaving.
I asked Mara what happened the other six times.
She stood by the counter with both hands wrapped around her mug.
Her answer took a long time.
The first time, she thought I’d had a breakdown.
I had woken one morning insisting she wasn’t my sister.
Not in anger.
Not after a fight.
I simply didn’t know her.
Doctors found nothing.
Scans normal.
Bloodwork normal.
No injury.
No drugs.
No neurological explanation.
My memories were otherwise intact.
I remembered school.
Family.
Friends.
Jobs.
Addresses.
I remembered my childhood.
Only Mara was missing.
Then other things began to change.
Pictures.
Messages.
Records.
Not immediately.
Slowly.
As though reality was correcting itself to match what I remembered.
That sentence made the hair along my arms rise.
Mara said photographs had once shown us together.
Then weeks later, they didn’t.
People who had known her as my sister gradually remembered meeting her recently.
My mother forgot first.
Trey later.
Eventually even Mara’s own memories shifted around the edges.
Only she never forgot me.
Not completely.
She didn’t know why.
I thought of the old picture.
The hand.
The empty chair.
Reality correcting itself.
The phrase made everything sound deliberate.
Like a system.
Like there were rules.
I asked whether the march happened every time.
Mara’s eyes hardened.
Not every time.
But something did.
A fire once.
A citywide blackout.
Civil unrest.
A flood that had never appeared in any official record afterward.
A disease scare.
Different disasters.
Same timing.
Each one began after I remembered too much.
I stared at her.
It was impossible not to hear the implication.
I asked whether she thought I caused them.
Mara put her mug down too quickly.
Coffee spilled across the counter.
She said no.
The force of it startled me.
No.
Whatever was happening, she refused to let me carry that.
The disasters were connected.
That much she believed.
But not caused by me.
Maybe the opposite.
Maybe they happened to stop me.
The room seemed colder.
I thought of the message.
Don’t go home with her.
She found you first this time.
I told Mara.
All of it.
The messages.
The man from high school.
His question.
Her face drained of color.
She asked what he looked like.
I described him.
The recognition was immediate.
Mara sat down.
His name was Julian.
I knew it as soon as she said it.
A memory flashed so suddenly I gasped.
Summer heat.
A basketball court.
A boy sitting on the hood of a car.
Mara beside me.
Someone laughing.
Gone.
I gripped the edge of the table.
Mara reached for me but stopped before touching.
Julian had been there the first time.
And the third.
Possibly the fifth.
Never in the same role.
Sometimes friend.
Sometimes stranger.
Once, according to Mara, he had claimed to be my cousin.
I laughed.
I couldn’t help it.
The sound came out wrong.
Too sharp.
Trey stopped moving his cards.
The absurdity of it broke something in me.
All these people.
All these lives.
All these versions.
How many relationships had I forgotten?
How many had changed?
Who had I been?
My laughter became crying before I realized what was happening.
I hated it.
I stood and walked into the bathroom.
Locked the door.
Sat on the floor.
For a long time, I cried without making a sound.
When I finally looked up, the mirror above the sink reflected only part of me from that angle.
Forehead.
Eyes.
Hair.
I looked older than yesterday.
Not physically.
Tired.
I got up and washed my face.
Then I opened my mouth.
My gums were normal.
Teeth normal.
Tongue normal.
I stared at them.
Seven times.
I wondered how many teeth I had lost in the other versions.
The thought came from nowhere.
I wished it hadn’t.
When I opened the bathroom door, Mara was sitting on the floor outside.
She didn’t say anything.
She just moved over.
I sat beside her.
For several minutes, we leaned against the wall without touching.
Then I rested my head on her shoulder.
Her body went still.
Slowly, carefully, she rested her cheek against my hair.
I didn’t remember growing up with her.
But my body did.
That frightened me.
It comforted me too.
⸻
Chapter Eleven
We stayed in the safe house for two days.
The city outside continued existing without us.
The news called the march a series of isolated extremist demonstrations despite videos showing thousands of people across multiple neighborhoods.
By the second day, most of those videos had disappeared.
By the third, news anchors spoke about property damage and traffic disruptions.
Nobody mentioned the chanting.
Nobody mentioned the rifles.
Nobody mentioned people being forced onto the ground.
I watched the coverage in silence.
Trey paced behind the couch.
Mara didn’t watch at all.
She had seen this part before.
That realization followed me constantly now.
Every strange thing carried a second layer.
Not only was it happening.
It had happened.
Maybe differently.
Maybe exactly the same.
The world felt less like reality and more like a room someone kept rearranging when I wasn’t looking.
By afternoon, I couldn’t stand being inside.
Mara hated the idea of leaving.
I hated the idea of becoming afraid of daylight.
Eventually we compromised.
There was a grocery store fifteen minutes away.
Public.
Busy.
Normal.
We needed food anyway.
The parking lot was full.
People pushed carts.
Children begged for snacks.
Someone argued over a parking space.
Relief almost made me laugh.
I hadn’t realized how badly I needed to see strangers behaving badly for ordinary reasons.
Inside, I wandered away from Mara on purpose.
Not far.
Just enough.
I needed to know whether the world felt different without her beside me.
It didn’t.
Cereal aisle.
Frozen foods.
Bread.
Everything aggressively normal.
I stood near a display of bottled juice and stared at the labels.
One bottle had been turned backward.
A handwritten message covered the back.
ASK HER ABOUT THE WATER.
My hand froze.
I looked around.
Nobody nearby.
I picked up the bottle.
The words disappeared.
Just nutritional information.
I put it back.
Picked it up again.
Nothing.
My skin prickled.
Water.
What water?
A memory moved at the edge of my mind.
Blue.
Sunlight.
Someone screaming my name.
I grabbed the shelf.
The memory vanished.
Mara found me a minute later.
I didn’t tell her.
I had started collecting secrets.
I didn’t like what that was doing to us.
But I needed something that belonged only to me.
That night, while everyone slept, I opened my notebook.
I wrote:
ASK HER ABOUT THE WATER.
Then beneath it:
Julian remembers.
Then:
Do not assume Mara knows everything.
I stared at that last sentence.
It felt cruel.
I left it anyway.
⸻
The next morning, Mara made pancakes.
They were better than the eggs.
Not good.
Better.
I watched her move around the kitchen and wondered whether I had ever taught her how much vanilla to use.
The thought hurt.
After breakfast, I asked about water.
The spatula slipped from her hand.
It hit the floor.
Neither of us moved.
There it was.
The answer before the answer.
Mara picked it up slowly and rinsed it.
She asked where I’d heard that.
I told her I remembered something.
A lie.
She knew.
I could tell.
Still, she answered.
There had been water in the fourth version.
A lake.
A vacation house.
I had disappeared for six hours.
When they found me, I was standing waist-deep in the lake.
Fully dressed.
I didn’t remember walking there.
I didn’t respond when they called my name.
Mara had gone in after me.
When she reached me, I turned and asked who she was.
The forgetting had happened instantly that time.
Not gradually.
I felt sick.
I asked whether I’d tried to hurt myself.
Mara said no immediately.
She knew because I’d been afraid of deep water.
Apparently I couldn’t swim well.
That sounded like me.
I asked what happened before I went into the lake.
She didn’t know.
Nobody did.
Except Julian had been there.
Of course.
Julian.
I wrote his name in my mind.
Then wondered whether it would stay.
Mara said he disappeared before they found me.
Never answered calls.
Never returned.
The next time she saw him was two versions later.
He acted as though they’d never met.
Something cold settled inside me.
Julian wasn’t merely remembering.
He was moving through this.
Maybe better than we were.
I asked Mara why she had never looked for him.
She had.
The addresses changed.
Phone numbers disconnected.
Social media accounts vanished.
Once she found an obituary.
He had supposedly died at nineteen.
Three months later, she saw him at a gas station.
I stopped eating.
The pancake on my plate suddenly looked ridiculous.
There were too many impossible things now.
They had begun competing with one another.
Mara studied me carefully.
I realized she was waiting for something.
A headache.
Bleeding.
Memory loss.
I hated being observed like a bomb.
I told her to stop.
She apologized.
I got up.
Then my phone rang.
Unknown number.
Mara saw it.
We both stared.
I answered.
No voice.
Only water.
Waves.
Soft.
Close.
Then a man breathed into the phone.
He said one sentence.
“You drowned the first time.”
The call ended.
⸻
Chapter Twelve
I didn’t tell Mara what he said.
Not immediately.
I walked outside.
The air was cool and bright, cruelly pleasant for a morning that had just handed me another impossible fact.
There was a small backyard behind the safe house.
Patchy grass.
Wooden fence.
One plastic chair tipped on its side.
I stood barefoot near the back steps and replayed the sentence until it lost its shape.
You drowned the first time.
Not almost drowned.
Not were found in water.
Drowned.
My lungs tightened.
I tried to remember drowning.
Nothing.
No water.
No panic.
No burning chest.
No darkness.
Only the vague blue flash from the grocery store.
Mara came outside eventually.
She didn’t ask what the caller had said.
That was somehow worse.
She stood beside me and looked at the fence.
For a long time, we said nothing.
Then I told her.
Her reaction wasn’t surprise.
It was grief.
I turned toward her.
She knew.
Of course she knew.
The betrayal hit before I could stop it.
She had promised one true thing.
Then another.
Then another.
Always just enough to keep me from walking away.
Never enough to give me the shape of my own life.
I asked whether I had drowned.
Mara closed her eyes.
Yes.
The first time.
At seventeen.
A pool party.
Too many people.
Too much noise.
Nobody saw me go under.
By the time someone noticed, I had been underwater long enough that they thought I was dead.
Paramedics revived me.
I spent two days in the hospital.
Afterward, I remembered everything except Mara.
My first forgetting.
I sat down on the step.
Seventeen.
A pool.
I searched my memory.
There was a party.
Maybe.
Music.
A blue swimsuit.
Someone bringing chips.
Then nothing.
I asked whether Julian was there.
Mara nodded.
I laughed once.
Of course he was.
The pattern was becoming almost insulting.
I asked what happened to me after the drowning.
Physically, I recovered.
Mentally, I changed.
Not personality.
Not dramatically.
Just Mara.
At first I knew her name but couldn’t remember why she mattered.
Then I stopped recognizing pictures.
Within weeks, I believed we’d met recently.
Then photographs started changing.
Other people’s memories followed.
Mara said the world seemed to reorganize around my forgetting.
I stared at the grass.
“What if it’s the other way around?”
She looked at me.
The thought had arrived fully formed.
What if I wasn’t forgetting Mara?
What if something had inserted her into my life?
What if my memories were the correct version and everyone else was being rewritten?
Mara went pale.
I hated myself immediately.
But the question remained.
She didn’t defend herself.
That made it worse.
She sat beside me.
Her hands shook slightly.
After a long time, she said she had wondered that too.
Years ago.
After the first time.
She had spent months questioning whether she was somehow the false thing.
Whether I had forgotten her because she wasn’t supposed to exist in my life.
The idea had nearly destroyed her.
Then she found proof.
Something that couldn’t be rewritten.
I turned.
“What?”
Mara stood.
She told me to put shoes on.
We drove for forty minutes.
No explanation.
No destination.
Trey stayed behind.
The city looked nearly normal now.
Crews swept broken glass from sidewalks.
Traffic moved.
The world had already begun smoothing over what had happened.
We left the neighborhoods behind and drove toward the edge of town.
Mara turned onto an old road lined with trees.
My stomach tightened before I knew why.
I knew this road.
Not consciously.
My body did.
My palms started sweating.
She noticed.
Kept driving.
The road ended near a cemetery.
I stopped breathing.
Mara parked.
We walked.
Gravel crunched beneath our shoes.
Rows of stones spread beneath old trees.
I followed her through them.
Left.
Right.
Farther back.
She stopped.
There was a grave.
My name was on it.
Everything inside me disappeared.
Sound.
Air.
Thought.
My full name.
My birthday.
A death date.
Seventeen years old.
I stared until the letters blurred.
Mara stood beside me but didn’t touch.
The death date matched the pool party.
The first drowning.
I crouched.
My fingers traced the carved letters.
Stone.
Real.
Old.
Weathered.
Not new.
Not staged.
There was a small photograph embedded in the marker.
Me.
Seventeen.
Smiling.
I looked at Mara.
She was crying.
I couldn’t speak.
The cemetery seemed to tilt.
I sat hard on the ground.
There was a dead girl with my name.
My face.
My birthday.
And I was touching her grave with my own living hand.
For the first time since this began, my jaw didn’t hurt.
Something deeper did.
⸻
Chapter Thirteen
I stayed at my grave until sunset.
Mara didn’t rush me.
She sat several feet away beneath a tree and waited.
That kindness almost made me angrier.
I wanted someone to force an explanation into me.
I wanted answers with clean edges.
Instead I had dirt under my fingernails from touching the base of my own headstone.
Seventeen.
Drowned.
Buried.
Alive.
The contradiction refused to become less impossible no matter how long I stared.
Eventually I asked who had been buried there.
Mara didn’t know.
The coffin had been closed.
My mother had identified the body.
Dental records confirmed it.
That detail made my stomach turn.
Dental records.
I pressed my tongue against my molars.
Mara continued carefully.
The funeral happened.
People grieved.
She grieved.
Trey was young but remembered pieces.
Then, six days after the burial, Mara woke to a text from me.
Not a ghost message.
Not a strange number.
My normal phone.
My normal contact.
I had asked why everyone was ignoring me.
She thought it was cruel.
A prank.
Then I sent a selfie.
I was sitting in my bedroom.
Alive.
Confused.
My mother drove home from work and found me there.
From that point, reality began changing.
The death certificate disappeared from county records.
Hospital files changed.
The funeral home denied having handled my body.
People who had attended the funeral gradually remembered something else.
A memorial for a cousin.
A neighbor.
Someone unnamed.
Only the grave remained.
Mara had checked after every reset.
Always there.
Always mine.
The one thing that didn’t change.
I looked at the stone again.
“Why?”
Mara didn’t know.
I laughed.
That phrase had become our family motto.
We know something impossible.
We know it has happened before.
We know it keeps happening.
Why?
No idea.
I stood eventually.
My legs were numb.
As we walked back toward the car, I noticed another grave.
Julian’s name.
I stopped.
Mara followed my gaze.
The stone stood three rows away.
Same birth year as mine.
Death at nineteen.
The obituary.
Mara had said she’d once found it online.
I walked closer.
The death date was two years after mine.
No photograph.
No flowers.
No inscription beyond his name and dates.
I touched the stone.
Cold.
The world flashed.
Water.
Not a pool.
A lake.
Hands around my arms.
Someone shouting.
Mara crying.
Julian standing on the shore.
Then another image.
A road at night.
Julian bleeding from his forehead.
Then another.
A room with white walls.
He was older.
Much older.
Looking directly at me.
“You always choose her.”
The memory vanished.
I stumbled backward.
Mara caught me.
My nose started bleeding.
She swore under her breath.
I wiped it.
Blood on my palm.
Not my mouth this time.
Interesting.
Horrifying.
Mara tried to get me to sit.
I refused.
I looked at Julian’s grave.
The words came before I could stop them.
“He’s dead too.”
Mara nodded slowly.
At least once.
That answer followed me all the way home.
⸻
Chapter Fourteen
The notebook changed overnight.
Not one missing sentence.
Pages.
Three of them.
Gone.
Not torn out.
Blank.
The paper remained bound exactly where it had been.
I ran my fingers over the empty pages.
No indentations.
No ink.
Nothing.
Everything I had written about Julian was gone.
Everything about the grave was gone.
I rewrote it all.
This time I pressed hard.
My grave exists.
Julian has a grave.
I drowned at seventeen.
I came back six days later.
Then I wrote the date.
Then my full name.
Then Mara’s.
Then Trey’s.
When I finished, my hand cramped.
I hid the notebook somewhere new.
Inside the lining of my bag.
Not because I thought the house could search.
Because I had stopped knowing what counted as impossible.
That afternoon, I convinced Mara to take me home.
I needed my things.
More than that, I needed to see whether home still belonged to me.
The neighborhood looked untouched.
No damage from the march.
No broken windows.
No black fabric.
Children rode bikes.
A woman watered flowers.
For a second I wondered whether Trey and I had imagined the entire night.
Then I saw the scrape on my knee.
No.
Inside, the house smelled exactly as it always had.
My mother wasn’t there.
Mara said she was staying elsewhere.
I didn’t ask where.
Not yet.
I went upstairs.
My bedroom was exactly as I’d left it.
Clothes.
Shoes.
Chargers.
Lotion.
Pads.
Wallet.
The ordinary inventory of a life.
I started packing.
Crossbody first.
Then a larger bag.
I didn’t know how long we’d be gone.
The act of choosing what mattered became strangely emotional.
Medication.
Toothbrush.
Underwear.
Phone charger.
A sweater.
Pictures?
No.
Pictures changed.
I left them.
My hands moved faster.
Body wash.
Hair products.
Notebook.
Wallet.
Passport.
Cash.
Mara stood in the doorway watching.
I told her to stop looking at me like that.
She looked away.
I bent to grab my phone from the floor.
The pressure hit.
Hard.
My jaw snapped open.
I dropped to one knee.
Both hands flew to my mouth.
Something was there.
Not imagined.
Not muscular.
Something rigid pressed behind my teeth.
I could feel edges.
Metal.
Plastic.
I couldn’t close my jaw.
Mara moved toward me.
I backed away, making a sound I didn’t recognize as mine.
My teeth shifted beneath my fingers.
One moved.
Actually moved.
Blood filled my mouth.
I screamed around whatever held it open.
Mara froze.
She had seen this before.
I knew from her face.
I touched my upper teeth.
They moved together.
Not individually.
Together.
As if attached to something.
Blood ran over my fingers.
My panic became animal.
I wanted it out.
Mara begged me not to pull.
I barely heard her.
My fingers found an edge near my gums.
I gripped it.
Pain exploded through my skull.
I stopped.
For several seconds, I knelt there shaking.
Then the pressure vanished.
My jaw snapped shut.
I gagged.
Blood dripped onto the carpet.
Mara crouched in front of me.
I pushed her away.
Not because I blamed her.
Because she knew.
Again.
Always.
She knew.
I demanded to know what happened the other times.
She looked sick.
The teeth came out.
Not all at once every time.
Sometimes over days.
Once overnight.
Once in the middle of a grocery store.
The first time, nearly all of them.
I touched my mouth.
Still there.
I asked how many remained.
Mara’s eyes filled.
Four.
The dream image I had never lived flashed through me with impossible clarity.
A little thing holding teeth.
Blood.
Four left.
I vomited into the trash can.
⸻
Chapter Fifteen
I stopped sleeping.
Not completely.
Twenty minutes here.
An hour there.
Every time my jaw relaxed, I woke myself and checked my teeth.
Mara bought a mouth guard.
I refused to wear it.
The idea of putting anything between my teeth made me nauseous.
For two days, nothing happened.
No bleeding.
No messages.
No knocking.
No march.
The silence felt staged.
Then Julian called.
This time his number appeared.
A real number.
Local area code.
I answered before Mara could stop me.
His voice sounded older than I remembered.
Calm.
Tired.
He asked whether I’d seen the grave.
I didn’t ask how he knew.
We were beyond pretending privacy existed.
He told me not to trust the sequence Mara had given me.
Not because she was lying.
Because she remembered the versions in the wrong order.
That sentence bothered me more than if he’d simply accused her.
Memory was already unstable.
Now chronology too.
Julian said the drowning hadn’t been first.
The grave had.
I didn’t understand.
He said I had died before I drowned.
Different death.
Different version.
The cemetery didn’t mark the beginning.
It marked one reset that had survived.
I asked what a reset was.
He laughed softly.
Not mocking.
Sad.
Then he told me something I had been avoiding.
I wasn’t returning to the same life.
None of us were.
Each time I came back, the world was slightly different.
Relationships changed.
Deaths changed.
Events moved.
People existed who hadn’t before.
Others vanished.
Mara remained connected to me in every version.
So did Julian.
Trey usually did.
My mother sometimes.
The rest shifted.
I thought of SZA.
The impossible celebrity connection.
A detail so bizarre I had accepted it because everyone else had.
Maybe that was the point.
Reality didn’t need to be believable.
Only agreed upon.
Julian told me the resets became unstable when I started remembering across versions.
The disasters weren’t punishments.
They were overlaps.
One version bleeding into another.
The march might belong to a world where it had always existed.
The lake to another.
The blackouts.
The fire.
The disease.
Pieces colliding.
I sat on the floor beside my bed.
Mara stood across the room.
She couldn’t hear Julian.
She watched my face instead.
I asked him why me.
He went quiet.
Then he said, “Because you keep refusing to stay dead.”
The room tilted.
I closed my eyes.
He continued.
Every version ended with my death.
Always.
Different causes.
Different ages.
But death.
Then I returned.
Not resurrected exactly.
Rewritten.
Placed into another version where I had survived.
Most of the time with no memory of the previous one.
Mara found me.
Julian found me.
Then I remembered.
Then the versions began colliding.
Then I died again.
Cycle.
I pressed my fist against my mouth.
My teeth ached.
I asked what he wanted.
His answer was simple.
To stop it.
I asked how.
He told me Mara already knew.
I looked at her.
Her face changed.
She knew what he was saying without hearing him.
That frightened me.
Julian gave me an address.
Then hung up.
I lowered the phone.
The room was silent.
Mara looked at me.
I looked at her.
For a long time, neither of us moved.
Then I asked the question that mattered.
“What happens if I don’t come back?”
Mara started crying before she answered.
And there it was.
The truth she’d been protecting.
Not how to save me.
How to let me die.
Chapter Sixteen
Mara did not deny it.
That was the first thing I noticed after the call ended.
She stood across my bedroom with one hand pressed against her stomach and the other hanging uselessly at her side. She had cried so often over the past week that tears no longer frightened me. They irritated me. They had started to feel like curtains she could pull whenever the truth got too close.
“What happens if I don’t come back?”
The answer had already appeared on her face.
I didn’t need her to say it.
For several seconds I watched her struggle with herself. She glanced toward the doorway, toward the window, toward every possible place except me. I wondered how many times I had stood in front of her like this. How many different bedrooms. How many different lives. How many times she had looked at my face while deciding which truth I could survive.
I was suddenly sick of being survived on my behalf.
Mara sat on the edge of the bed.
She looked smaller there.
“I killed you once.”
Everything inside me stopped.
There were sentences that required time to understand. That one didn’t.
My body understood it immediately.
My shoulders tightened. My hands went cold. Somewhere beneath my gums, a small pulse began.
Mara kept talking before I could respond, perhaps because she knew she would lose the nerve if she stopped. It had happened during what she called the fifth version, though she no longer trusted the numbering. By then, the pattern had become impossible to ignore. I would live, remember, unravel, and die. The method changed. The location changed. Sometimes months passed between remembering and death. Sometimes only days.
That version had been the worst.
The world had begun collapsing around us quickly. Not metaphorically. Streets shifted. Buildings appeared where empty lots had been the day before. People went to sleep remembering spouses who woke as strangers. There had been two moons visible for nearly six minutes one night, although no photograph of them survived until morning.
And my teeth had started coming out.
One by one at first.
Then in groups.
Mara had taken me somewhere outside the city, a place she believed was safe. I had been bleeding continuously by then. Feverish. Terrified. Barely able to speak.
I had asked her to end it.
She refused.
I begged.
She refused again.
Apparently I had become furious with her.
That part felt familiar without producing a memory.
I imagined myself bloody and desperate, trying to convince the person who loved me most to do the one thing she couldn’t bear to do.
Eventually, I had made her promise.
If I stopped recognizing her, if I lost enough of myself that I couldn’t make the decision anymore, she would do it.
Three days later, I forgot her name.
Mara’s voice fractured there.
She had used pills.
A ridiculous detail to focus on, but I did.
Not violence.
Not a weapon.
Pills crushed into tea.
She sat beside me while I drank it.
Held my hand.
Told me stories about us while I became sleepy.
I had apparently smiled at her and said she seemed nice.
My chest hurt.
There were tragedies too cruel to invent deliberately.
Mara said she stayed with me until I stopped breathing.
Then she waited.
Six days.
Nothing.
Seven.
Nothing.
For the first time, I didn’t come back.
She thought it was over.
On the ninth day, I called.
Different city.
Different apartment.
Different life.
I had no brother in that version.
My mother had died when I was twelve.
And Mara had never existed.
At least not anywhere I could find.
She spent eight months searching before she found me.
Eight months.
The phrase Found you appeared in my mind.
I sat down because my legs had begun shaking.
That photograph hadn’t been affectionate.
Not entirely.
It was evidence of a hunt.
Mara moved toward me.
I backed away.
Her face crumpled.
I didn’t care.
Not yet.
“You killed me.”
Her mouth trembled.
“You asked me to.”
“I don’t remember asking you.”
“I know.”
“That doesn’t help.”
“I know.”
The familiar answer made something vicious rise inside me.
I picked up the nearest thing—one of the decorative pillows from my bed—and threw it at the wall.
It hit uselessly and fell.
Not satisfying.
I wanted glass to break.
I wanted something in the room to look the way I felt.
Instead everything remained intact.
My dresser.
My lamp.
My shoes.
My ridiculous yellow dress still hanging from the closet door.
Normal things in a room where my sister had just admitted she had once murdered me.
Mara stayed seated.
For once, she didn’t try to calm me.
That helped.
I paced until my breathing hurt.
Then another thought arrived.
“If you did it once, why haven’t you done it again?”
She looked up.
Fear.
There.
Immediate and unmistakable.
Because something had changed after that version.
She had learned that dying wasn’t the reset.
It wasn’t death that made me return.
It was her finding me.
I stopped moving.
Mara had spent eight months looking for me.
During those eight months, nothing had happened.
No changed photographs.
No disasters.
No overlapping memories.
No messages.
No teeth.
I had apparently lived peacefully in a city hundreds of miles away, completely unaware of her.
Then Mara found me.
Within twelve days, the first memory returned.
Within three weeks, my gums began bleeding.
Within two months, that version ended too.
The room felt airless.
All this time, I had assumed Mara was the person trying to save me from whatever was happening.
Maybe she was.
Maybe she was also the reason it kept happening.
She saw the realization.
“I don’t know that it’s me.”
I laughed.
It sounded ugly.
“Of course you don’t.”
“Please.”
“Every time you find me, it starts again.”
“We don’t know—”
“You literally just told me.”
“I told you what happened once.”
“Seven times, Mara.”
Her face tightened.
“We don’t know if I cause it.”
“What if you do?”
That silenced her.
The possibility sat between us.
She had spent years chasing me across realities because she loved me.
What if love was the thing killing me?
Mara cried silently.
I didn’t comfort her.
That felt cruel.
I did it anyway.
She eventually left my room.
I locked the door.
Then I searched every photograph on my phone for her face.
I found hundreds.
More than there had been days ago.
Pictures I had never seen.
Mara and me at sixteen.
Mara asleep with her head in my lap.
Mara holding a birthday cake.
Mara beside me at a hospital.
Mara crying in a graduation photo.
Mara standing in a white dress beneath hanging lights.
My white dress.
The photograph from the lock screen.
I opened it.
This time I could see what stood between the trees behind us.
A woman.
Same height as me.
Same hair.
Same face.
Me.
She stood in the distance watching us.
I dropped the phone.
When I picked it up again, the woman was gone.
⸻
Chapter Seventeen
I left before Mara woke.
Trey was asleep downstairs. The safe house was quiet. I carried one bag, my phone, the notebook and the address Julian had given me.
Nothing else.
I didn’t leave a note.
That bothered me for approximately half a block.
Then anger replaced guilt.
Mara had followed me through seven lives without permission.
She could survive one morning without knowing where I was.
Julian’s address led me to an abandoned recreation center near the edge of the city.
Of course it did.
Apparently nobody involved in my increasingly supernatural personal crisis believed in meeting somewhere sensible like a coffee shop.
The building had been closed long enough for weeds to split the parking lot. Old posters remained taped inside the glass entrance, their colors bleached nearly white by years of sun. A faded sign promised swimming lessons, youth basketball and summer camps.
Swimming.
I almost turned around.
Then the door opened.
Julian stepped outside.
He looked exactly as I remembered from high school and completely different from the flashes at the cemetery. Older than me by maybe a few years, although Mara had said we were roughly the same age. His face carried a kind of exhaustion that made age difficult to guess.
He didn’t smile.
He moved aside.
I followed him in.
The building smelled like dust and chlorine.
That seemed impossible considering the pool had been drained.
I saw it through a set of open double doors.
An enormous empty rectangle sunk into the floor.
Blue tile.
Dark stains.
A few leaves gathered at the deep end.
Julian sat in the bleachers.
I remained standing.
He studied me for several seconds and then looked at my mouth.
That irritated me immediately.
Everybody looked at my teeth now.
“I still have them.”
“Most of them.”
My tongue moved involuntarily across the row.
“What does that mean?”
“You already know.”
“No. Everybody keeps deciding I know things because another version of me knew them.”
He nodded.
Fair.
That annoyed me more.
I asked why he kept appearing.
Julian rested his arms against his knees.
His explanation was less dramatic than I expected.
He had died too.
Not once.
Many times.
Sometimes before me.
Sometimes after.
In some versions, we barely knew each other. In others, we’d been close. Once, we’d dated for nearly three years.
I stared at him.
“No.”
He almost smiled.
“That’s always your reaction.”
I hated that sentence.
He told me there had been a version where Mara hated him, another where she considered him family, another where the three of us shared an apartment.
The relationships changed.
The pattern didn’t.
We always found one another.
Mara.
Julian.
Me.
Three people circling the same break in reality.
I asked what connected us.
He looked toward the empty pool.
“The first death.”
Mara had said I drowned at seventeen.
Julian said she was telling the truth.
She simply didn’t remember enough.
I hadn’t drowned alone.
A memory tried to surface.
Chlorine.
Music.
A hand beneath water.
I gripped the edge of the bleacher.
Julian continued carefully.
There had been a party.
Mara was there.
He was there.
I was there.
Someone had pushed someone.
Nobody agreed anymore on who.
The memories had changed too many times.
What Julian remembered most clearly was going into the water after me.
He found me beneath another person.
Mara.
My stomach turned.
“She was drowning?”
Julian shook his head.
“She was holding you down.”
The entire building seemed to go silent.
No.
I stood.
Julian didn’t move.
“No.”
“I saw her.”
“No.”
“You asked for truth.”
“You’re lying.”
“Maybe.”
That stopped me.
He didn’t defend the claim.
Didn’t insist.
He simply admitted his memory might be wrong.
That frightened me more.
He remembered Mara’s hands around my shoulders beneath the water.
Mara remembered pulling me out.
Another version of me had apparently remembered jumping in voluntarily.
One memory showed Julian pushing me.
One showed nobody else in the pool at all.
Reality had rewritten the beginning so many times that none of them knew which event was original.
“But somebody died,” he said.
Maybe me.
Maybe him.
Maybe Mara.
Maybe all three.
The first reset had destroyed the evidence.
Julian reached into his jacket and placed an old phone on the bleacher between us.
Not old in model.
Old in condition.
Cracked screen.
Worn edges.
Brown case.
My breath caught.
It looked like mine.
Not similar.
Mine.
I pulled my phone from my pocket.
Same case.
Same crack near the charging port.
Same tiny stain where I had spilled nail polish months ago.
Two identical phones.
I didn’t touch the other one.
Julian said he’d been carrying it for almost four years.
He found it in a motel room after I disappeared during another version.
It couldn’t connect to a network.
Most files were corrupted.
One video remained.
He had never been able to open it.
Until yesterday.
I stared at him.
“Why yesterday?”
“Because you’re remembering.”
He slid the phone toward me.
The screen was already open.
One file.
No title.
I pressed play.
My own face appeared.
Not me now.
Me exhausted.
Blood dried along my chin. Several teeth missing.
I sat close to the camera in a room I didn’t recognize.
For a second, video-me only breathed.
Then she said Mara’s name.
My stomach dropped.
She wasn’t warning me about Mara.
She was apologizing to her.
Video-me explained something in a trembling, broken voice.
Something I had not considered.
Mara wasn’t the one who kept finding me.
I was.
Every version, eventually, I went looking for her.
Even the one where Mara spent eight months searching.
I had apparently started searching first.
My internet history.
Old newspaper articles.
Names written on scraps of paper.
Photographs of strangers who looked familiar.
I had been drawn toward her long before I consciously remembered her.
Video-me looked directly into the camera.
“Stop blaming her.”
I stopped breathing.
Julian watched me.
The video continued.
“I always make her think she found me because it’s easier.”
There was blood on her teeth when she smiled.
“I don’t know why I do it.”
The screen flickered.
Then video-me said something that turned my skin cold.
“I think I’m the one bringing us back.”
The file ended.
⸻
Chapter Eighteen
My mother slapped Mara before I got home.
I didn’t see it happen.
I saw the mark.
Red across Mara’s cheek.
My mother stood in the kitchen trembling with anger while Trey hovered near the doorway looking like he wanted to become furniture.
The room stopped when I entered.
Mara looked at me first.
Relief.
Then anger.
Then hurt.
All of it moved across her face so quickly that I couldn’t separate one from the next.
My mother reached me before Mara could.
She wrapped both arms around me.
I hadn’t realized how badly I needed my mother until I smelled her perfume.
For a few seconds I became a child again.
Safe because she was there.
Then I remembered she had lied too.
I pulled away.
Her hands stayed on my arms.
She looked at my face as if checking for injury, then my mouth.
Always my mouth.
I asked why she’d hit Mara.
My mother’s expression hardened.
Because Mara had promised.
Apparently there had been rules.
Actual rules.
Not supernatural ones.
Family ones.
Things they had agreed to after the sixth—or possibly seventh—reset.
No photographs.
No childhood stories.
No returning to places associated with earlier versions.
No mentioning the grave.
No Julian.
Most importantly, if I began remembering naturally, nobody was to encourage it.
They were supposed to let me forget.
Mara had broken almost all of them.
The picture.
The safe house.