A Missing Week

 (Marlowe's pov)

I started keeping the notebook after the earring. Nothing dramatic, a plain black journal, bought under the fake pretense of "getting back into writing," dates in the margin, small entries about what I'd eaten, who I'd seen, whether I'd slept. I told myself it was for my health. It was for evidence. I think I knew that even when I bought the pen.

Three weeks in, I sat down to fill in a gap and realized the gap was bigger than I'd let myself notice.

It started small. I was trying to work out whether a dinner with the Whitmores had happened before or after Beatrix's spring luncheon, some inconsequential detail I needed for the notebook, and reached for my phone to check the calendar the way anyone would.

There was a week in March with nothing in it at all.

Not just an empty calendar, calendars go empty, that means nothing on its own. I mean nothing anywhere. No photos in my camera roll between the eleventh and the eighteenth. No texts sent or received. No emails opened. My step count, which usually sat somewhere reasonable, held at a flat, suspicious zero for six straight days, as if I hadn't so much as walked to the bathroom for an entire week of my own life.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the phone in my lap and felt something cold settle low in my stomach, the particular vertigo of finding a hole exactly where a week of your life is supposed to be.

I tried remembering it the old-fashioned way, without the phone, working backward from things I did remember. The Whitmore dinner. A vague memory of feeling unwell around then, days blurring the way illness blurs days, nothing alarming on its own. Thorne had said, at the time, that I'd caught some kind of flu. I remembered him bringing me tea and toast in bed. I remembered being grateful.

I didn't remember a single moment from inside that week. Not one. No conversation, no meal, no dream. Just Thorne's voice afterward, telling me I'd been sick, and me believing it completely, the way you believe anything you have no competing memory to argue against.

I went looking for proof instead, because proof, unlike memory, can't be talked out of existing.

My bank statement took longer to access than it should have I'd stopped managing our joint accounts myself somewhere in the second year of the marriage, another small hand at the small of my back I hadn't clocked until much later but I found an old login still saved on my laptop and pulled the activity from that week.

Four charges. A compounding pharmacy I didn't recognize, thirty minutes outside the city, the kind that mixes custom prescriptions rather than filling standard ones off a shelf. A courier service, same-day delivery, no itemized description. A locksmith. And one wire transfer, dated the sixteenth, for an amount large enough that my hands went cold holding the laptop, made out to an account I'd never seen before, under a name I didn't recognize at all.

I stared at that transfer until the numbers stopped meaning anything, until they were just shapes on a screen, because the alternative meant admitting what they actually were proof that during a week I couldn't account for, in a body I apparently hadn't been fully occupying, I had moved money I had no memory of moving, to someone I had no memory of ever knowing existed.

Or I hadn't moved it at all. Someone else had, using my name, my signature, my life, while I lay upstairs believing I had the flu.

Neither option let me breathe properly.

I found the call log almost by accident, scrolling back through months looking for anything at all from that week, and there it was, wedged between an appointment reminder and a message from Sable six outgoing calls over four days, all to the same number, no name attached, no contact saved.

I didn't recognize it. I ran through every possibility I could think of and came up empty.

It was past midnight by then, Thorne long asleep down the hall, the house gone still around me in the particular way old houses go still, like it's holding something in the walls right along with you. I sat there with my thumb over the call button longer than I want to admit, some clear part of me insisting this was reckless, that whatever I found on the other end I might not be able to un-know afterward.

I called anyway.

It rang twice.

"Hello?" A woman's voice, unfamiliar, brisk, the sound of someone answering a call she'd half been expecting. "Is this about the transfer?"

My mouth opened and nothing came out. My entire rehearsed explanation vanished the second an actual voice answered a number I had apparently called six times with no memory of a single one of those conversations.

"Hello?" Sharper now, wary. "Marlowe?"

She knew my name. I hadn't said it. I hadn't said anything at all.

Before I could force even one word past the roaring in my ears, the line went dead, not a hang-up so much as a cut, sudden and total, the exact silence of someone realizing they'd said too much and ending it before I could ask a single question they had no intention of answering.

I sat there in the dark with the phone still pressed to my ear, listening to nothing, and understood, with a clarity that frightened me more than the missing week itself, that whatever had happened during those six days, I hadn't imagined a second of it.

Someone else knew exactly what I'd done. And she'd known my name before I ever gave it.