The wrong ceiling greets me when I open my eyes.
My childhood bedroom stretches around me in soft morning light, the glow-in-the-dark stars my father helped me stick up there at seven still clinging to the plaster like stubborn memories. I'm in my own bed, tangled in sheets that smell like lavender detergent instead of sandalwood and sex, and I have absolutely no recollection of how I got here.
The last thing I remember is falling asleep on Jaxson's chest, his heartbeat steady beneath my ear, his arm wrapped around me with the possessive pressure that has become my favorite form of captivity. We made love twice more after that first devastating round, slower the second time, almost tender the third, and I drifted off feeling more complete than I have in years.
Now I'm alone in a room I haven't slept in since I was sixteen, wearing a silk nightgown I don't remember putting on.
The bedside table holds a folded piece of paper, my name written across it in handwriting I would recognize anywhere. The letters slope with characteristic impatience, each stroke pressed hard enough to leave grooves in the cream-colored stationery.
Harper—
Business in the city required my attention. Didn't want to wake you. Mrs. Wilson moved you to your room so you could rest properly. Back by dinner.
—J
The note crumples in my fist before I can stop myself. He left. After everything that happened between us, after the confessions and the Italian and the way he looked at me like I was the only source of oxygen in a burning room, he left me to wake up alone in a bed that doesn't smell like him.
I tell myself the irritation is irrational. I tell myself that business obligations don't pause for inconvenient emotional breakthroughs. I tell myself that his absence for a few hours shouldn't feel like abandonment when he's been obsessively documenting my existence for seven years.
None of it helps.
The house echoes with emptiness as I wander through rooms that hold too many memories. The study where we first collided. The staircase where he pinned me against the wall. The foyer where I screamed accusations while he bled onto the marble floor.
Every corner contains a ghost of what we've become to each other, and without his physical presence to anchor me, I feel like I'm drowning in accumulated history.
My feet carry me back to my childhood bedroom without conscious direction. The closet door stands slightly ajar, and I push it open to reveal the chaotic archaeology of my teenage years. Shoeboxes stuffed with polaroids, sketchbooks filled with drawings I was too embarrassed to show anyone, clothing I outgrew but couldn't bring myself to donate.
The back wall looks wrong.
I stare at the wood paneling for several seconds before I understand what I'm seeing. A seam runs along the baseboard, barely visible unless you're looking for it, creating a rectangle approximately two feet wide and three feet tall. My fingers find the edge and press, and the panel swings inward on silent hinges to reveal a space I didn't know existed.
USB drives fill the hidden compartment, dozens of them, organized in rows with dates written in handwriting that makes my blood run cold.
My handwriting.
The first drive is labeled "September 2017—Pool House." I plug it into my laptop with hands that have started trembling, and footage fills the screen. Jaxson at eighteen, shirtless and wet from swimming, talking to a girl I don't recognize while I apparently filmed through a gap in the blinds. The camera angle is intimate, obsessive, capturing every flex of muscle as he towels off his hair.
I don't remember taking this video.
The second drive contains footage from the following month. Jaxson in his bedroom, changing clothes, completely unaware that someone had positioned a camera to capture his privacy. The third drive shows him at a party, my focus tracking his movements through the crowd with the single-minded intensity of a predator stalking prey.
My throat closes around a scream I can't release.
I grab drive after drive, plugging them in with frantic desperation, watching years of my own obsession play out on screen. His workouts in the home gym. His phone calls with friends. His private moments of vulnerability when he thought no one was watching. I documented everything with the meticulous attention of someone building a shrine to their own destruction.
Then I find the drives labeled "Milan."
The footage is recent—within the last two years, based on Jaxson's appearance. Him walking through Italian streets, sitting in cafes, leaving his apartment building. Surveillance footage that matches the photographs he showed me, except these videos are taken from angles that suggest someone following him on foot rather than hiring professionals from a distance.
I was there.
I was in Italy, filming him, stalking him, and I have absolutely no memory of any of it.
The compartment holds other items buried beneath the drives. A worn t-shirt that smells faintly of his cologne, stolen from his laundry years ago. A watch he thought he'd lost. A photograph of us at some family event, my face cut out and repositioned so I'm pressed against his side instead of standing three feet away.
Everything in this hidden space screams one undeniable truth: I am the obsessive one. I have always been the obsessive one. Whatever Jaxson did with his photographs and his surveillance and his systematic removal of my romantic interests was just a reflection of the darkness I've been carrying since adolescence.
The room tilts beneath me. My knees hit the hardwood floor, USB drives scattering around me like evidence at a crime scene. Each one contains proof that I am exactly the monster I accused him of being. Each one rewrites the narrative I've been telling myself for seven years.
I didn't wait for Jaxson to come back.
I followed him. I watched him. I documented his existence with the same obsessive precision he used on me.
We are mirrors of each other's madness, and I've been too broken to see my own reflection.
"Miss Harper."
Mrs. Wilson's voice comes from the bedroom doorway, and I spin to face her with evidence of my own insanity scattered across the closet floor. Her expression holds no surprise, no shock, just the weary acceptance of someone who has been keeping secrets for far too long.
"You found it," she says quietly, her eyes moving across the drives and the stolen items and the altered photograph clutched in my trembling hand. "I always wondered if you would, though I suppose I hoped you wouldn't have to learn the truth this way."
"Mrs. Wilson, what is this? Why do I have videos I don't remember taking, and why is there footage from Italy when I've never been to Italy, and why does none of this make any sense?"
She steps into the room, her sensible shoes silent on the hardwood, her silver bun catching the morning light. The woman who has managed this household since before I was born looks at me with an expression that mingles pity with something that looks almost like relief.
"I wondered when you would remember."