Chapter one hundred and nine

Chapter one hundred and nine
Marlowe

It’s begun happening when I’m awake.

Not dreams, not hallucinations. Just a pressure in the air that tells me someone else is here. I’ll be writing, the pen dragging over the page, and the hairs at the back of my neck will stand as if an unseen breath brushed past. I turn—and there’s nothing. But the absence feels staged, deliberate, like they left just before I looked.

Vivienne, I think. Or Emeline. One of them. Sometimes both.

The other night, I stayed late at the station. Everyone else had gone home, the building heavy with silence. I was reading over the erased files—those hollow gaps where testimony used to be—when I heard it: the faint sound of heels on tile. Slow, measured. Not rushed, not random. Coming closer.

I didn’t move.

Didn’t even breathe.

The footsteps reached the threshold of my office. I raised my head, and for the smallest second, I saw a shadow—slim, poised—vanish just as the light caught it. I swore I smelled perfume lingering, something faintly floral, cut with smoke.

Vivienne.

But then a whisper followed, right behind my ear, so close my skin prickled.

“Marlowe.”

That voice—higher, sharper. Not hers. Emeline.

I searched the halls until sunrise, every room, every locked door. Nothing. No trace of them.

And yet… when I returned to my desk, the case file had been shifted. My pen rested across the top as though placed there with care. And in the margin of one report—a child’s neat scrawl: You’re looking in the wrong place.

I know my own handwriting. This wasn’t mine.

I told myself I wouldn’t give in to paranoia. That’s the trap of investigators who work too long in the dark—they start seeing their cases everywhere. But this isn’t projection. This isn’t fatigue.

Vivienne and Emeline are here. With me. Not just in memory or paperwork, but in the very air I breathe.

Sometimes I wonder if they’re alive at all. Sometimes I wonder if I am.