It began with the phone call.
We didn't have a landline. We'd left our phones behind months ago, in the locker of a forgotten school and the drawer of a dead bedroom.
But still—it rang.
An old rotary phone we found in the cabin, long believed broken.
It rang.
Once.
Then silence.
Aiko stood frozen in the kitchen, a dish still in her hands. Her eyes locked on the receiver like it was a bomb.
I stared, heart in my throat.
We didn't speak about it that night. But neither of us slept.
---
The next morning, she was already awake when I opened my eyes.
She stood by the window, staring east, the bellflowers waving like ghosts behind her.
"They found us," she said.
I didn't ask who they were.
Some part of me already knew.
---
For weeks, things had felt... different.
Off.
The light in the cabin dimmed faster each day, even as summer approached.
Shadows clung to corners they hadn't before.
I kept finding things in odd places—my journal on her side of the bed, my clothes folded in ways I never folded them. And once, I found a note in my own handwriting:
"She isn't who you think she is."
I never told her.
Because I wasn't sure I hadn't written it myself.
---
Then the dreams returned.
Only now, they were clearer.
The forest. Aiko's blood staining my hands.
But this time… there was something else.
A third figure in the trees.
Watching.
Laughing.
---
One morning, I woke to find her missing.
Her side of the bed cold.
The front door open.
Panic clawed at my throat.
I searched the woods, calling her name.
No answer.
The sun had barely risen.
Birds scattered as I crashed through branches, barefoot and wild.
And then I found her.
By the river.
Kneeling in the water, palms open, as if praying.
"Aiko!" I cried, rushing toward her.
She turned slowly.
There was blood on her fingers.
But no wound.
She smiled faintly. "I remembered something."
I knelt beside her, breathless. "What?"
"That this is where we ended."
She looked at me.
"And where we began again."
---
We walked back together, hand in hand.
Neither of us mentioned the blood.
---
That evening, I found the photograph again—us as children.
Only this time… her face was missing.
Scratched out.
Not by accident.
Deliberate.
Furious.
Like someone had hated her.
I confronted her.
She didn't deny it.
"I wanted to see if you'd notice," she said.
"Why?"
"Because I need to know if I'm still real to you."
"You are," I said immediately. "You always have been."
She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes.
"You say that now."
---
We made love that night like we were both trying to prove something.
That we were alive.
That we were real.
That this world, this cabin, this dream we built out of ash and blood, wasn't collapsing beneath us.
---
And then, one morning—
She was gone.
This time, for real.
No footprints.
No note.
Just the red ribbon, tied around the door handle.
Like a signature.
Like goodbye.
---
I searched for days.
Weeks.
I tore through the woods, the town, the train stations.
Asked strangers for a girl with black hair and eyes like the end of the world.
No one had seen her.
Some looked at me with pity.
Others, with fear.
At night, I returned to the cabin and found new things missing—her sketchbook, her ring, the photo.
It was as if she had never been there at all.
---
I began to doubt.
Had she ever existed?
Was the house real?
Was I?
One night, I stared into the mirror for hours.
Waiting for my reflection to blink first.
Waiting for someone—anyone—to knock.
To wake me up.
---
Then I found her journal.
Buried beneath the floorboards.
Page after page, written in her hand.
Most of it I remembered.
Little poems.
Sketches of our garden.
But near the end, something new.
Something terrifying.
---
"The boy is breaking again. I can't hold him together much longer."
"He doesn't know what he did. He can't."
"But the truth is buried in the roots. He has to dig for it himself."
"I'll come back when he's ready to remember everything."
---
The last page was a drawing.
Me.
Alone.
Standing in front of a grave.
No name on the stone.
Just the red ribbon.
---
And beneath it, a final line:
"If you love me—come find me where the lies began."
---
I packed a bag.
Put on the clothes I wore the night we ran.
Tied the red ribbon around my wrist.
And I walked into the woods.
Alone.
Again.