Chapter 3: NOBODY WILL BELIEVE ME

Eliana left her building and went down the stairs quickly, without having decided yet exactly where she was headed. As she walked down the street, part of her kept drifting toward one idea that seemed more sensible than anything else she'd considered so far: go straight to the police. No hospital, no reassuring friend — a police station, an officer, an official report documenting what had happened.

She slowed at the corner of the street and paused for a moment by the window of a closed shop, trying to work out how she'd form the first sentence if she actually walked into one of those cold offices lit with white neon.

"Hello, I... I got a call from an unknown number last night. A man told me someone was going to die tomorrow, then he said a name — Marcus Reed — and a few hours later he was shot."

She heard the sentence in her own voice inside her head, and immediately felt how fragile it was.

Any reasonable officer would ask the obvious first question: did you save the caller's number?

No.

Did you report the threat as soon as you got it, before the attack — not after?

No.

Do you have any physical evidence besides a recording, in your own memory, of a voice you don't recognize?

Nothing beyond that.

At best, she'd come across as a shaken young woman connecting a public event to a disturbing call out of ordinary fear. At worst, someone might start wondering about her actual relationship to the victim, or whether she knew more than she was letting on.

That thought terrified her more than the thought of not going at all.

She pulled out her phone again and opened her conversation with Maya — the one that had stalled on a clipped reply that morning. She typed a sentence, deleted it, then typed a slightly longer one.

"I have something I need to tell you. It's not normal."

A full minute passed before the reply came.

"Tell me!! What happened?"

Eliana hesitated for a moment, then decided to share only part of the truth, not all of it. She wasn't ready yet to say the whole thing out loud — especially not the part about the photo of her own apartment taken from outside, or the last message about him calling her again tomorrow so she'd understand why he'd chosen her specifically.

"Last night an unknown number called me. Some guy with a weird voice told me someone's gonna die tomorrow. Then he said a name, and it turned out to be that journalist, and today there really was an assassination attempt on him."

She waited for the reply, feeling her heart race just from typing the sentence and seeing it written out in front of her, as though seeing it made visible gave it a weight she hadn't felt while it was only turning over inside her head.

"Oh my God!! That's actually terrifying. But Eliana, could someone just be messing with you? Or is it a coincidence? Some people are into weird stuff like that — threats, unknown numbers."

A few seconds later, another message followed.

"Delete the number and block it. And don't answer if it rings again. It's definitely just some bored person messing with you."

Eliana read the message twice. It wasn't honestly the reaction she'd hoped for, even though it was the most reasonable reaction anyone sensible could give based on the little she'd shared with her. Maya wasn't wrong in her advice; she simply didn't have the full picture, and Eliana couldn't blame her for that.

She typed a short reply: "Yeah, I'll do that. Don't worry."

But she had no intention of deleting anything.

She closed the conversation and stood silent for a few moments at the corner. What she had wasn't proof — it was a shape she could see clearly and no one else could, and she didn't know yet how to hand that shape to another person without it collapsing in their hands.

She finally decided the police weren't the right next step — not yet. She needed something more concrete first, something she could see with her own eyes rather than only describe in words.

She decided to go to the hospital.

The idea wasn't entirely practical — what exactly did she expect to do there, walk into the room of a man with serious injuries and tell him a mysterious voice had warned her, one night earlier, that he was going to die? But she found a cover story in her mind that felt more acceptable to herself: she'd go as a student writing an academic project on criminal behavior, interested in his recent coverage of Claire Morgan's disappearance and the criminal patterns he'd written about. A logical, professional cover — one that gave away nothing about the unknown number or the real fear driving her.

She knew, somewhere inside her, that this justification was just as flimsy, but at least it gave her a clear destination, and a reason to do something instead of hesitating endlessly at a street corner she didn't even know why she'd chosen to stop at.

She pulled her coat tighter around herself and kept walking this time, without hesitation.

The way to the hospital passed through an old part of the city, lined with stone buildings from earlier decades standing shoulder to shoulder — some converted into offices and shops, others left as they were, half-abandoned or shut for reasons no one seemed to know. The air here smelled faintly of wet stone and old rain, and her footsteps sounded louder than they should have against the narrow street.

Eliana walked quickly, her mind busy with the details of what she'd say if asked why she was there, when she passed an old stone building on the corner of a side street — no clear sign, its upper windows covered with dark curtains despite the building looking almost abandoned from the outside.

She hadn't noticed this building before, even though she'd walked this route many times throughout her years at university. But something about it now, as she passed alongside it, made her slow down without meaning to.

A sudden tightness settled in her chest — light, but unmistakable, like someone holding their breath for a few seconds without consciously deciding to. She stopped for a moment at the edge of the sidewalk and looked at the old stone facade, trying to understand where this strange feeling was coming from, one with no clear logical cause.

She didn't know this place. She'd never been inside it, didn't recall any event connected to it. And yet, for a fleeting moment, she felt something oddly familiar in the way the shadow fell across its stone face, in the angle of the covered upper windows, in the sudden hush of the street around her — as if the city's usual noise had quietly dimmed for no obvious reason.

She shook her head and kept walking, faster than before, without looking back — though something in her, all the way to the hospital, kept turning the building over, the way a tongue returns to a sore tooth.

A few minutes later, she reached the hospital's large forecourt, where the activity seemed heavier than usual — ambulances parked, people talking in low voices near the main entrance, a general sense of anticipation hanging over the place, likely because of the nature of the case that had brought this much attention to an ordinary city hospital not used to handling something of this media scale.

Eliana stood for a moment at the entrance, looking at the large glass doors ahead of her, suddenly feeling the full weight of the question she'd avoided the entire way there: what if she went in, asked for Marcus Reed's room, and someone asked who she really was and why she was interested? What if a nurse or a security guard didn't believe her, exactly the way a police officer wouldn't?

But she remembered the sentence she'd said to herself back at that corner: " nobody will believe me if I don't have more than words."

Maybe, she thought, finally pushing the glass door open and stepping inside, what she needed right now wasn't for someone else to believe her. What she needed was to understand it herself first — before asking anyone else to understand it with her.