All Chapters of 2:17 A.M.: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Eliana didn't sleep that night, even though she convinced her body to lie in bed for two full hours, eyes open on the ceiling, her mind replaying the calm voice she'd heard so many times it had started to lose meaning — the way a word loses its meaning if you repeat it enough times."Marcus Reed."By seven in the morning, she gave up on sleep and sat on the edge of the bed, her bare feet touching the cold floor. The apartment was unnaturally quiet, the gray light before full sunrise creeping in from behind curtains drawn tighter than usual.She got up and went to the kitchen. She made coffee she didn't need so much as she needed to do something ordinary with her hands. Watching the water boil, she tried to lay out the previous night in her head with cold logic, as if she were analyzing a case for her university project instead of her own life.An unknown man had called her. He'd said a name. He'd sent a photo. That was all that had actually happened. None of it proved anything.She sa

The moment Eliana walked in, she hit a wall of muffled noise, nothing like the artificial calm she'd expected from a hospital lobby at this hour of the day. There was unusual movement everywhere: men in uniform standing near the main elevator, talking low into radios, nurses moving faster than usual, and a handful of people with cameras and microphones trying, uselessly, to push past a temporary barrier security had set up at the entrance to one of the wards.She stood for a moment in the middle of the lobby, trying to look like she knew where she was going, her eyes scanning the signs hanging over the different corridors, searching for anything that might point her toward the wing Marcus Reed was likely in.She approached the reception desk, where an employee sat looking already worn down by the sheer number of questions she'd fielded that morning."Excuse me," Eliana said, trying to keep her voice steady. "I'm looking for Mr. Marcus Reed's room."The employee looked up at her with v

The call ended around a quarter to three in the morning, after Daniel had listened to every detail Eliana relayed without any real interruption, sticking to short, direct questions every now and then. Before ending the call, he asked her to come to the station in the morning, as soon as she woke up, bringing the recording and the phone she'd saved the old messages on.Eliana didn't sleep after that. She stayed lying in the dark, watching her ceiling until the first threads of light began slipping in behind the curtains, then finally got up without feeling any real exhaustion, as if the tension itself had replaced her need for sleep.She arrived at the station at nine in the morning, carrying her old phone and laptop in her bag. The building looked nothing like the image she'd pictured in her head the night before, while rehearsing a confession she'd ultimately never spoken — no harsh neon lights, just ordinary desks cluttered with paper, intermittent phone noise, and the smell of bad

The following days passed at a relatively slower pace — not because the danger had receded, but because the investigation had entered a quieter phase: careful, patient searching, far from the sudden escalation that had marked the first few days.Daniel tried to get official access to Claire Morgan's disappearance file, but ran into a small, irritating obstacle: the case wasn't under his direct jurisdiction, and any formal request to view it would raise questions he wasn't ready to answer yet — especially since he couldn't justify his interest without revealing the details of Eliana's calls to his superiors."This is going to take longer than I expected," he told her over the phone on the fourth day. "I can't just request the file without a solid reason. I'll try a different angle."Rather than wait passively, Eliana decided to dig on her own, drawing on the research skills she'd built as a student used to digging through archives and open sources for academic work. She sat at her comp

In the morning, Eliana sent Daniel everything she'd noticed during the night: the full details of the third call, the strange sentence the caller had said about not being the one she should fear, and finally her observation about the faint ticking of the old clock in the background of the recording.He called about an hour later, his voice carrying more seriousness than usual."I listened to the recording myself several times," he said. "You're right, there's a steady ticking sound in the background. I sent it to a colleague in the digital forensics unit, but he'll need some time to analyze it more precisely.""And what about Ravencroft?" Eliana asked eagerly.She heard the sound of papers being flipped on the other end. "I found something, but it's very vague. There's no active record under the name Ravencroft in any current government database, but I found a single reference, in an old archive of property permits, to a facility that once carried the name Ravencroft Research Facility