The Night Before

( Marlowe )

I moved the notebook four times that night, which tells you most of what you need to know about the state I was in.

First the nightstand drawer, where it had lived since I started it. Then under the loose floorboard behind the armchair, a hiding spot I'd found by accident years ago and never told a single person about. Then, in a fit of paranoia that embarrassed me even as I did it, into the lining of an old coat the same trick someone had already used on me once, with an earring I still hadn't fully made sense of. I stood in my closet at midnight with the coat in my hands and laughed, once, a short, humorless sound that didn't feel like it belonged to me, at the strange symmetry of hiding my own secrets the exact way someone else had hidden theirs.

I ended up putting it back in the drawer. If a stranger was about to start living in this house, cataloguing my every mood and gesture for a file I'd never get to read, I decided I'd rather know exactly where the one honest record of my own life was sitting than lose track of it in some clever hiding spot I might forget myself.

I sat on the edge of the bed afterward and opened it, meaning only to reread the last week's entries, and stopped on a page near the middle that I didn't remember writing.

The handwriting was mine. That was the unsettling part, not a forgery, not obviously different, just mine, slightly looser than usual, the letters leaning further right than they do when I'm fully awake. A single line, undated, wedged between two entries I did remember writing three days apart.

I don't think I can trust either of them anymore

I read it four times, trying to place the moment I might have written it, and came up with nothing at all, no memory of picking up the pen, no memory of the thought itself in those words, though God knew I'd had some version of it in my head more than once. I closed the notebook and sat very still, because even my own handwriting, it turned out, wasn't something I could fully trust to only exist in moments I remembered.

I made myself take inventory instead, the way I used to before a big negotiation not of numbers this time, but of everything I actually knew for certain, stripped down to what I could prove rather than what I merely feared.

I knew someone had drugged my tea for at least one night, possibly many. I knew someone had hidden a stranger's earring in my coat, and that Beatrix wore its match. I knew an entire week of my life had vanished from every record I owned, and that a woman on the other end of an unfamiliar phone number had known my name before I'd said it. I knew my father had almost told me something important and been stopped, deliberately, by a woman who always seemed to know exactly when to walk into a room. And now, apparently, I knew my own notebook wasn't entirely safe from whoever was managing the rest of my life either.

I did not know why. I didn't know who was actually orchestrating any of it, or how many of the people smiling at me across dinner tables understood the full shape of what was happening, or whether some of them Sable, maybe, even my own father were as trapped inside it as I was, just from a different angle.

Tomorrow, a stranger was going to move into my house and decide, on paper at least, whether any of what I'd just catalogued in my own head counted as reality or as the proof everyone already believed it was.

I thought about running. I want to be honest about that, looking back there was a version of that night where I packed a bag and drove somewhere Thorne's name meant nothing, called Jo from a payphone like something out of an old movie, disappeared long enough to breathe air that didn't feel curated. I sat with that thought for a long time, turning it over, and setting it down again for the same reason I always set it down.

Running would prove every story they'd already built about me. A woman who disappears in the night looks exactly like a woman who's finally lost her grip. I needed, more than I needed almost anything else, to stay standing inside my own life long enough to prove I still belonged in it.

So I stayed. I lay awake most of that night listening to the house settle around me, the particular creaks and shifts I'd learned so well over three years I could probably identify each one by name, and somewhere past three in the morning I finally slept, dreamless and shallow, the kind of sleep that doesn't so much rest you as pass the hours until you're allowed to stop pretending to need it.

I woke to the sound of a car in the drive.

Too early. The staff weren't due to prepare for another hour, and Thorne, whatever performance he had planned for the arrival, hadn't struck me as a man who'd want to greet anyone before he'd had his coffee.

I went to the window in my robe, hair still loose from sleep, and looked down at the gravel drive three stories below.

A black car, engine still running, driver already out and opening the rear door. And stepping out of it, a full hour before anyone in this house was ready for him, a man I'd never seen before in my life tall, dark-haired, unhurried, pausing at the base of the front steps to look up at the house the way you'd look at something you were trying to read before deciding how to approach it.

He looked up.

For one suspended, impossible second, three stories and a pane of glass between us, Dr. Kael Everhart looked straight at my window, straight at me standing in it in my robe with my hair undone and three years of carefully buried evidence sitting in a drawer six feet behind me and something in his expression, even from that distance, even for that fraction of a second, was nothing at all like the look I'd been braced f

It wasn't an assessment. It wasn't a suspicion.

It looked, impossibly, like recognition.