Chapter one hundred and seventeen

Chapter one hundred and seventeen
Marlowe

The city outside my window is too quiet.

Evening has settled, the kind of dead hour where neon signs hum louder than voices. I should leave the office, go home, eat, sleep—do something to remind myself I exist outside this case. Instead, I sit here, staring at the phone, half-hoping it will ring with news that will break the pattern.

It doesn’t.

What unnerves me most isn’t the silence, but the feeling that someone is answering my thoughts.

When I try to dismiss Emeline as victim, as fragile, something inside me whispers liar. When I tell myself Vivienne is grieving, the same voice scoffs. The rebuttals come too quickly, too precisely, as if I’m not thinking alone but debating with a presence lodged beneath my ribs.

I push away from the desk, pace the room. My shadow leaps across the wall in exaggerated jerks. It doesn’t look like me. The movements are mine, but the outline is stretched, distorted, thinner at the neck. Almost feminine.

I stop. The shadow stops a fraction late.

The air feels thick, metallic. My pulse races. I force myself to return to the desk, to the evidence. Evidence anchors. Evidence is real. But when I look down, the photographs have shifted. Not scattered, not blown by some draft—shifted. Edward’s sketch lies atop the crime scene photos, his neat charcoal lines overlapping with the blurred outline of a body.

And scrawled across the margin—where there was nothing before—is the same hand as the earlier message:

You are already inside.

My breath stumbles. I grip the edge of the desk to steady myself.

Maybe the museum isn’t just hiding something. Maybe it’s absorbing anyone who dares to stare too long.

I can’t tell if the case is breaking open—

or if I am.