Chapter One Hundred and Five

Chapter One Hundred and Five
Marlowe

I do not leave the apartment. Not tonight. Not while the file breathes like this.

The lamp on my desk hums faintly, throwing its narrow light across the sprawl of papers. It feels less like illumination and more like dissection, as if I am peeling back the skin of something that refuses to be dead.

Everywhere I look, the gaps multiply. I try to rebuild the missing chains from memory, from scribbled notes I trust more than official records. But the erasures are deliberate. They are not oversights. They are surgical.

The Langfords have been rewritten.

I stare at Edward’s name, black ink bleeding into the page, until the letters blur into a smudge. A thought I cannot shake presses forward: maybe Edward isn’t missing from the record because he died. Maybe he’s missing because someone needed him to live forever.

The idea terrifies me more than it should.

I lean back, rubbing the knot in my neck. The silence of my apartment is not silence at all. The refrigerator ticks. Pipes shift in the walls. Somewhere above me, a neighbor’s bed creaks with restless weight. Every sound sharpens, as though I am being reminded that I am not alone.

But when I glance at the window, the glass reflects nothing.

It’s just me, surrounded by these half-bodies of evidence.

I find myself writing the same phrase across the page without meaning to:

“The truth resists disappearance.”

Over and over, until the words layer like a chant. A defense.

But even as I write it, my eyes are drawn to the emptiest space on the desk—the absence of a folder I am certain I placed there. I remember the thickness of it, the slight coffee stain in the corner. And now it is gone.

I have not left this room. No one else has entered. And yet something has been taken.

I close my eyes. The air tastes like dust, like stone. For a moment, I could believe I am not in my apartment at all, but somewhere else. Somewhere vast and echoing.

Somewhere I promised myself I would not return.