Chapter One Hundred and Six

Chapter One Hundred and Six
Marlowe

I rub my temples until the skin burns beneath my fingertips. The missing file can’t be missing. It can’t. I am not the sort of man who misplaces things. I was trained to notice. To account. To recall.

Yet the desk is bare in that one exact spot, as if something has been vacuumed out of existence.

My first instinct is to search—every drawer, the floor beneath the chair, the stack of boxes I haven’t opened in years. I crouch, kneel, scatter papers. But no. Nothing. Only absence.

And as I search, another voice rises in me: Are you sure it was ever there?

I freeze, crouched on the floor, hand still inside a half-open box. The room feels suddenly smaller. Not empty, but close. Pressed. The air is too thick in my throat.

I know the file was real. I remember the weight of it, the uneven cut of one page. I remember underlining Edward Langford’s name. But memory is fragile, isn’t it? A slippery surface. What if I’ve begun inventing evidence the way grief invents faces in the crowd?

I sink into the chair again, staring at the vacant space. The silence mocks me, as if the room is holding its breath.

Maybe I have been here too long. Maybe the case has eaten through the barriers I keep between myself and obsession.

My father used to tell me a man is only as sound as his record. I used to believe that. That paper never lied. But tonight, I can’t tell which betrayal is worse—the records being altered, or my own mind warping around them.

I touch the desk again, my palm resting flat where the file should be. A gesture of faith, or desperation.

Because if it was never here, then it means I am unraveling.

And if it was here—if it truly was—then I am not alone in this room.