And then he holds it out.
A photo.
My throat closes.
It’s me.
In bed.
This bed.
Taken from above—before he ever touched me, before I ever knew what his voice sounded like in the dark.
The angle is wrong.
This photo isn’t his.
He knows it.
And now, so do I.
There’s a line of ink along the bottom.
She always made that sound when she dreamed.
My knees go weak.
I sit because I have to.
Because my legs stop working.
Because whoever wrote that?—
Was here?
“Do you remember this?” he asks, voice razor-thin.
I shake my head. “No. I mean—I don’t know. It looks like… me, but?—”
“It is you.”
His tone is cold. Hollow. Not angry—wrecked.
I look up at him.
“Damien…”
He paces now, turning tight circles like a tethered thing.
“There’s no record of this. No timestamp. No system ID. There were no traces on the backups. Whoever took this?—”
He stops.
Looks at me.
“They were in the apartment before I was.”
“That’s not possible.”
