The video ends.
His pupils dilate—slow, controlled, like shutters widening for more light. No gasp, no jerk of the head. Just the tiniest pause, as though something behind his eyes had just changed shape.
Inside, there's no panic. Only a clean, sterile emptiness that begins to spread… like frost along glass.
He clicks the next file. The motion is quick, but his breathing is steady, almost deliberate—like turning a page you've been waiting to read for years.
Static. Then the image clears.
He's outside an apartment building.
It's night.
Hands buried in pockets. Shoulders perfectly level. His shadow tilts across the wet pavement under the jaundiced spill of streetlights.
He doesn't move. Not even to blink.
The timestamp at the corner of the screen pulses with a steady glow.
He knows that date. Down to the hour, down to the second.
That morning, he'd ironed his grey tie twice, because the first press left a faint crease that wouldn't stop burning in his mind.
At 9:12, he'd stirred sugar into burnt coffee, counterclockwise, exactly ten rotations.
At 10:47, the receptionist had offered him water; he'd declined because he hates changing the taste in his mouth before speaking.
At 11:03, he'd been in the interview, answering the question about "career goals" with the same precision he uses to arrange books on a shelf.
He remembers every second of that day. It is impossible to forget—because forgetting is not something his mind permits.
And yet…
In the video, on that exact date, he is here.
Standing in front of an apartment building he had never been to.
A door opens across the street.
She steps out. Hair unbrushed, grocery bag heavy in her hand.
She walks right past him.
He doesn't turn. Doesn't greet her. Doesn't follow.
He only watches her reflection in the darkened shop window beside him.
The video runs a full four minutes before it ends. His posture never changes. Not once.
He stares at the frozen frame.
There's no jolt of disbelief, no frantic denial. Just a quiet shift—like a hairline crack forming in a mirror.
The wrongness hums at the base of his skull.
Who altered it?
The video?
His memory?
Or… reality itself?
And yet—when he scrolls down the folder, the next file is already highlighted.
Its timestamp is the very next date in his memory that he can recall, with perfect clarity, without even trying.
Almost as if… the folder knew which one he would question next.
The mouse rests under his hand. The air feels thinner.
It's not random.
It's not chance.
It's for him. Waiting for him to open it.
He stopped. Not startled—just… still.
Like the air in the room had been told to hold its breath.
Arven.
The name rose, uninvited, and sat there in his head as if it had always been waiting. No context. No reason. Just the quiet weight of something that should mean nothing, but didn't.
The window.
That day—his reflection caught, not by the camera, but in the glass. A man standing in the living room, staring out as if expecting someone. Expecting her.
The apartment.
Grainy footage, but enough to see it—him, standing outside her building. The date stamped in the corner said he was supposed to be at an interview.
But there he was.
Feet planted. Eyes locked on a window three floors up.
A stranger's home—or maybe not.
He dug through his memories with surgical precision, searching for a reason. There was none. His mind was a vault, his life a clock, every moment accounted for.
Yet the man in the video stood there with the quiet certainty of someone who had always known exactly where to be… and exactly who was inside.