Page 65 of Wells

Tuesday night, I light a cigarette and watch the black screen where her camera used to be. She turned it off five minutes ago after she agreed to fall asleep with me again. We did it a few calls ago because I didn't know what else to ask her with everything in my head getting harder to separate.

She thinks I'm drifting off with her, but I'm not. I smoke and listen to her breathe. I wait until her breaths go shallow and note when she turns over in bed. I listened like that for two hours the last time.

"You still there?"

Her voice comes through quieter than usual.

"I'm here, about to fade out," I lie, wanting her to feel comfortable enough to fade out with me.

I take a drag and let the smoke settle in my lungs before I exhale. The room is dark except for the glow from the monitor and the city lights bleeding through the glass behind me.

She shifts, and I hear fabric against skin, maybe her pulling a blanket around herself.

She hums, and the sound filters through the speaker, a handful of notes that catch on something at the edge of my brain. I heard this before. Recently. The melody is too specific to be a coincidence.

And then it hits me. It was yesterday at the office. Cera, standing at the printer, was humming this exact same tune, in the exact same tone and voice.

The connection slams into place, impossible to dismiss.

The same tune and the same bars.

My throat tightens, and I force my breathing to stay even. Peoria keeps humming, unaware, the sound threading through the silence between us. My heart slams against my ribs, my hands brace on the desk, and every instinct I have screams at me to trace her right now, pull her IP, run her voice through the filters I built to break anonymity.

I double-check the mute, then let out a wrecked sound I've never made in front of anyone, into the dark. I'm losing it. I'm seeing each of them in the other. My obsession is bleeding into reality.

My mind starts to catalog the things that have niggled at me over the last several weeks, things that mean nothing on their own but together can't only be in my head.

The silver belly ring in Florida, the twin of the one Peoria wears for the camera. The tilt of Cera's head when I catch her out, a tic I've watched a hundred times on a dark screen.

Then there's her voice when she forgets to perform, too close to a voice I talk to every day at the office.

None of it seems meaningless now.

"I'm fading, Midnight. Sleep tight."

Peoria's voice pulls me back. I unmute.

"Me, too. Good night."

I end the call and sit in the dark, not moving.

Despite every fiber of my being telling me not to, I open a new terminal and pull the call log.

I am not doing this.

The trace protocols load, automated tools I built years ago to unpack VPN layers and locate endpoints anywhere in the world. I use them on rivals, threats, loose ends the family needs mapped. I made a personal vow to never aim them at Peoria.

That was the rule. The one rule I swore I would never break.

The day I know who she is, she stops being the one part of my life no one gets to touch.

I stare at the blinking cursor in the command line and tell myself to close it and walk away. Let the coincidence stay a coincidence. The tune could be anything. People hum the same songs. The ring could belong to a thousand women in a thousand cities. None of it proves anything.

My fingers move anyway.

I run the first layer. The VPN peels back to a commercial server, routing traffic through Dallas. Standard setup, nothing unusual. I punch through to the next node and find another relay, this one in Miami. She bounced herself well, better than most amateurs would know to do.

I keep peeling. The third layer routes through Atlanta. The fourth drops into a private server hosted on a residential network. My pulse kicks up, not from excitement but from the gravity of what I am doing. This is a violation, and if I'm wrong, there's no going back.