Tessa shows up before I can decide who to call.
I hear her car first, the familiar growl of her Civic straining up the Maple Hollow slope. Headlights smear across my living room window in a long, bright streak, glass turning the beams into a warped ribbon of white. My phone, still faceup on the coffee table, buzzes with a mechanical chime from the neighborhood app—another complaint about someone’s lawn length, because the HOA keeps better track of grass than of fear.
Then knuckles hit the door, sharp and fast.
I check the peephole on reflex. Tessa’s face fills the little fisheye circle, distorted, nose wider, eyes larger, like a caricature of my sister. It fits a little too well with the idea that nothing I see is trustworthy anymore.
I pull the door open. “You didn’t text.”
“Yeah, I did.” She nudges past me without waiting for an invitation, duffel bag bumping her hip, the smell of hospital soap and stale coffee riding in with her. “Maybe check the twelve missed notifications on your phone.”
“That many?” I glance back at the couch, at the black rectangle of my phone. My cheeks heat.
She drops the duffel in the hall with a thud and looks around. Her eyes land on the freshly rehung photo of Caleb on the console, the crack in the glass forming a jag across his face. Her jaw tightens.
“You told me about the spiral,” she says. “You did not mention the part where they stomped on his face.”
“I fixed it,” I say. “Mostly.”
“That’s not fixed.” She turns back to me. “I’m staying.”
“You have a lease,” I shoot back. “A roommate. A life. You can’t just—”
“Watch me.” She toes the duffel with the front of her sneaker. “Until further notice, this is my house too.”
Micro-hook: If I let her in to protect me, how many new targets am I hanging around my neck?
I fold my arms across my chest, a flimsy barrier. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
“Good thing I’m not volunteering to babysit you.” Her voice softens just a notch. “I’m here to make it harder for whoever did this to walk in and rearrange your brain on the floor again.”
The words hit a tender spot I didn’t know was exposed. I look past her, out through the sidelight glass at the cul-de-sac. Afternoon fog burrows low between the houses, wrapping the street in a white band that makes every car that passes look half-submerged. Across the way, a neighbor’s Ring camera blinks tiny blue, watching everything and protecting nothing.
“It’s not safe,” I say. “For you. Being here.”
“Try that sentence again,” she says, “but listen to your own voice this time.”
My throat closes around the answer. I don’t want to admit that having her here already eases something in my ribs.
“Fine,” I say. “Short term.”
“Short term,” she agrees, which means she’s not leaving until either I make her or the threat does.
We haul the duffel upstairs to the small guest room that used to be my makeshift office before grief overflowed into every room. She tosses a pile of scrubs into the tiny closet, then lays out socks on the bed with military precision. Her movements carry a brittle energy, like she’s channeling panic into neat stacks.
“You tell Ruiz?” she asks. “About the spiral, the alarm?”
“Not yet. I called patrol. They told me to consider that I might have… moved things and not remembered.” I bite down on the memory of the word forgetfulness.
“Cool,” she says. “Love that for you.”
She doesn’t joke it away with a laugh, though. Her shoulders stay high and tight. She checks the window latch twice, then tugs the curtain closed with more force than necessary.
Downstairs, we sit at the dining table with legal pads and my laptop between us. The spiral is gone, but I can still see its ghost on the floor, feel the imprint under my bare feet.
“All right,” Tessa says, clicking a pen. “We’re doing house rules.”
“What am I, a teenager?” I pull my mug closer. The tea has gone lukewarm, a skin forming at the top, but I sip it anyway for something to do with my hands.
“You’re a highly stalkable novelist with a history of trauma, and somebody with cigarettes and free time just proved they can walk around in here while you’re buying milk,” she says. “So, yes, we’re doing house rules. You got better ones, write them down. You’re the author.”
The word author stings in a new way now that my draft is out in the world without my consent.
“Fine,” I say again. “Rule one: alarm is never off when we’re asleep or out.”
“Add who is responsible,” she says. “You and me will forget whose turn it is and then yell about it.”
“Because we’re our mother,” I mutter, but I write: Alarm – whoever leaves last arms; whoever goes to bed last checks.
“Rule two,” Tessa says. “We don’t open the door without checking the camera feed first. I don’t care if it’s Girl Scouts or some HOA lawn inspector with a clipboard.”
I picture the front-door camera lens, round and black, staring out at the same fog I do and recording nothing useful when it matters. “Done,” I say, and write it.
We move down the list: nightly check-ins even if she’s working a late shift; a code word for texts that actually mean trouble and not regular panic; agreed places to leave our phones when we shower so they don’t end up in some corner out of reach if someone breaks in.
“You’re treating this like a trauma ward,” I say.
“That’s because it is,” she answers.
Micro-hook: If we turn my house into a hospital, are we admitting it’s already a crime scene?
After we finish, she traces the last line with the tip of her finger: No one comes in without both of us agreeing. No one.
“Including Liam,” she says.
I look up sharply. “Liam is not—”
“Mara.” She holds my gaze. “Guy consults on memory studies for shell companies and shows up in your dreams. He’s on the No Fly list.”
I want to argue that he has information, that he has already helped. My chest fills with competing narratives: Liam the infiltrator, Liam the liar, Liam the only one who believed me, Liam whose car might have been near Caleb that night. My storylines about him knot in my head like bad code.
“I won’t open the door to him alone,” I say, which is the only promise I can make without choking.
Evening slides into night. The neighborhood quiets, turning from lawnmower buzz and kids’ scooters into the background wash of freeway noise and the occasional dog bark. Through the front window, the glass shows me my own reflection superimposed on the street; I look like I’m floating over the wet asphalt, part ghost, part watchman.
We carry our mugs to the couch. Tessa puts on a comfort show with the volume low, just enough chatter to make the house feel inhabited. I only half-watch. My gaze keeps drifting to the alarm panel, to the tiny icon of a house with a line through it.
“You’re doing the silent spiral thing,” Tessa says, elbows on knees. “Talk or you’re getting a sedative.”
“You can’t prescribe at home,” I say.
“I can strongly recommend.”
I pull the throw blanket over my legs and breathe in detergent and the sour edge of old tears. “Do you remember when Mom took us to see Aunt Jo that first time?” I ask.
Tessa makes a face. “In the facility? Yeah.”
“You were, what, nine?”
“Ten.” She takes a sip of tea. “You keep shaving a year off that in your stories. I’m not sure if that’s flattering.”
“In mine she didn’t let us in the room right away,” I say, ignoring the jab. “We sat behind the glass, and Jo was pacing, talking to herself. Mom kept saying, ‘She’s not herself, she’s not herself,’ like that was a spell. Then they brought us in.”
“Nope.” Tessa shakes her head. “We went straight in. No glass. No pacing. Jo was already sitting at the table, wrapped in that ugly shawl. She said my hair reminded her of birds. You got mad because she didn’t say anything about you.”
Heat rushes up my neck, a flash of being twelve and furious and invisible. “That’s not right.”
“It is,” she says. “I remember the smell in there. Disinfectant and orange juice. You hate both now. Connect the dots.”
I lean my head back against the couch and stare at the ceiling. The living room light throws a faint reflection up there too, a warped circle around the fixture that makes the plaster look cracked. “So I added the glass later.”
“Or we just remember different scenes,” Tessa says. “You love a good viewing window in your books. God forbid your brain doesn’t give you one in real life.”
The idea knocks something loose in me. “What if that’s what they’re counting on?” I ask quietly. “That every time I say I saw one thing, someone can pull out a different version from another angle and say, ‘No, you’re confusing it with a movie’?”
“Then we write all of it down,” she says. “Both versions. We don’t throw out your memory because it doesn’t match mine, and we don’t swallow mine because I work in a hospital and sound official.”
Glass, again. Different panes, different distortions. All of them claiming to show the same event.
“Do you ever worry you’ll end up like Jo?” I ask.
“Every Tuesday,” she says. Then, softer, “Lately, more.”
“Because of me,” I say.
“Because of all of this,” she corrects. “What happened to her wasn’t just genetics. It was secrets and no one listening and pretending bad things weren’t happening. I’m not repeating that script.”
Micro-hook: If the only way to avoid my aunt’s fate is to keep telling the story, what happens when the story itself becomes the trigger?
The show clicks into its end credits. Outside, the cul-de-sac is reduced to silhouettes and smears of reflected light. Somewhere down the slope, a teenager’s car engine revs, then fades; my mind flashes to kids sneaking out to the reservoir, parents later posting angelversary hashtags under filtered photos.
We go through our new ritual before bed. All downstairs windows: checked, latched. Back door: locked, bolt turned, bar wedged. Front door: locked, chain slid, alarm armed with a confirming beep that lodges in my spine. Cameras: front and back feeds clear. It feels both meaningful and ridiculous, like putting a band-aid on a cracked windshield.
“You take your usual,” Tessa says at the foot of the stairs. “I’ll crash in the guest room. If you wake up and hear weird stuff, text me ‘blue’ so I know it’s not just regular nightmare.”
“That’s our safe word?” I ask. “Blue?”
“You wanted something subtle,” she says. “Not ‘HELP, GHOST CORPORATE ASSASSIN.’”
“Fine,” I say. “Blue.”
Sleep doesn’t come; it stalks the edges. I lie in my bed, sheets cool against my legs, listening to the house breathe—heater clicking, wood settling, the distant freeway hum floating in through the closed windows. My mind cycles through alarm codes, spirals, emails, cigarettes, glass.
At some point, I drift off.
The mechanical chime on my nightstand snaps me awake.
My phone screen burns bright in the dark, notification banner slicing across it: FRONT DOOR – MOTION DETECTED. 3:02 A.M.
My heart slams into my throat. I fumble the phone onto the carpet, curse under my breath, grab it again. The hallway outside is dark, Tessa’s door still closed.
I text her one word: Blue.
Her reply comes back in seconds: On my way.
I pad out into the hall, every board a megaphone under my feet. Tessa opens her door, hair pulled back into a messy knot, scrub pants twisted at one ankle. Her eyes are sharp, fully awake, ER mode.
“Front?” she whispers.
I nod and hold up the phone. We move together down the stairs, sticking close to the wall. The glow from the alarm panel paints our hands green.
In the living room, the reflection in the window shows two ghostly women creeping through their own house, phones raised. I tap the security app and pull up the live front-door feed.
The camera shows grainy black-and-white: the porch, the welcome mat, the potted fern, the faint outline of the street behind them through the railings. Fog presses in, a pale mass. The porch light cuts a cone through it. No figure. No movement.
“Rewind ten seconds,” Tessa says.
I slide back on the timeline. For a moment, there’s nothing but gray static, a single frame where the image warps, the glass of the storm door throwing back a washed-out version of our living room from earlier. Then the picture clicks back to clarity: empty porch.
“Glitch?” she asks.
The word tugs at too many other glitches—camera skips, missing minutes, spiral notes. “Or someone out of frame,” I say.
We stand there, breathing shallow, listening for any sound beyond the phone’s faint hiss. Nothing. No footsteps, no retreating car, no scrape of a cigarette lighter.
“Open the door?” Tessa asks.
“Hell no,” I say.
We watch the feed for another full minute. The fog shifts in small eddies, like breath on glass, but nothing enters the cone of light. Finally, Tessa exhales.
“Okay,” she says. “We logged it. Time, video, witnesses. If this is them testing us, they know we’re not sleeping through it anymore.”
“And if it’s the system cross-wiring with some other neighbor’s motion?” I ask. “Like, somebody three houses down took their dog out and now my heart is doing parkour.”
She looks at me over the blue glow of the screen. “Would you feel better believing that?”
I think of the circled word FORGET, the forum threats about making me forget permanently, the officers writing up “possible occupant forgetfulness” while my notes lay in a pattern on the floor.
“I don’t know,” I say.
We leave the monitor on the coffee table, feed still rolling, and sit on the couch without turning on any lights. From here, the front window becomes another screen, a wide rectangle of darkness framed by trim, our reflections barely visible. Inside glass, outside glass, camera lens somewhere between.
Tessa leans her shoulder into mine. Our bodies share heat, the contact anchoring and terrifying at the same time.
“We’re up now,” she says quietly. “Whatever this is, it doesn’t get to happen to you alone.”
I nod, eyes on the empty porch.
The motion alert sits on my phone like a tiny capsule of time we can’t explain, another entry in a growing log. I know something is coming next; patterns in stories demand escalation, and whoever is writing threats into my life reads narratives for a living.
I just don’t know whether having my sister under this roof means we’re stronger together—or just easier to hit in one blow.