It was there.
Not hidden in the corner of a drawer.
Not wedged behind books.
Not slipped under the carpet.
It sat in front of him — plain, silver, and unblinking — in the most impossible place for him to have missed.
The edge of his desk. Right where his wrist brushed every day when he set his coffee down.
For three months, his routine hadn't changed.
Same seat. Same order of tasks. Same pen aligned exactly parallel to the edge.
There was no margin for oversight.
He would have seen it.
He should have seen it.
Yet now, the pen drive looked as though it had always been there — placed not to break his symmetry, but to complete it.
Perfectly parallel to the desk's edge.
Perfectly distant from the pen.
A placement so precise, so… acceptable to his eye, it hadn't triggered him to move it.
And that was wrong.
Wrong enough to make his skin feel… thinner.
He picked it up.
It was warm — faintly, absurdly warm — as if someone had only just set it down.
The laptop accepted it with a soft click.
A single folder appeared: "Archive".
Inside — perfection.
Not the casual neatness of habit, but the obsessive kind that punished even a single misalignment.
Every file labelled to the second.
Columns so evenly spaced they seemed carved into the screen.
This wasn't his order.
This was more.
An OCD that didn't soothe, but cut.
The thought slid into his mind, uninvited: Could this be any better?
No.
No, it couldn't.
The cursor hovered over the first file.
Click.
The grainy frame held him in the kitchen.
He sat at the counter, the pale 7:00 a.m. light slanting through the blinds in perfectly even strips, cutting his face into quiet shadows. A bowl of cereal in front of him. A book open — the one he'd read a dozen times before.
Nothing out of place.
Spoon to mouth.
Turn a page.
Chew.
Swallow.
Blink.
Then, without pause, without any visible thought, the man in the video — he — placed the spoon down with surgical precision, pushed the chair back, and stood. His movements were deliberate, smooth, too smooth.
He walked toward the far corner of the living room. Out of the camera's frame.
For a moment, the footage was empty — only the soft shift of light as the clouds moved outside.
And then — in the mirror leaning against the wall by the window — his reflection appeared.
He was standing in the exact middle of the room, not moving, not blinking, just staring out the window.
Or… maybe at something in the glass.
The reflection was wrong — not distorted, but off, as if the angles didn't match the room he knew.
He leaned forward in the video, almost imperceptibly, until his face was inches from the mirror.
The recording had no sound, but in his head, the silence throbbed.
He remembered that day.
He remembered it exactly.
He had eaten his cereal, read his book, and gone straight to work. Nothing else. Not this.
The frame froze in his mind — his own eyes in the mirror, looking back at him, sharper than they should be.