Chapter 4 The Mistake in the Glass

I don’t remember locking the back door, but when I checked that morning, the bolt was in place.

It bothered me.

Not because the door was locked—but because I couldn’t recall doing it.

A small thing, really. Something normal people would forget without thinking twice. But lately, the small things felt loud, like the memory of them was fading too quickly, or being replaced, erased, or rewritten.

Memory shouldn’t feel slippery. It shouldn’t feel like something with its own agenda.

I opened the blinds in the kitchen, letting in the early light. The pavement outside glistened from last night’s rain, and for a second—just a second—I saw a shoeprint near the porch. Just one. Faint. Too large to be mine.

Then it faded with the drying concrete, as if it had never been there.

I watched Sophie pour her cereal. She didn’t comment on my silence—not anymore. Children adapt to emotional weather the way birds know storms before they form.

“Mom,” she said, very quietly. “Did you change your hair while I was asleep?”

I blinked. “No. Why?”

She squinted at me, studying. “It looks different.”

I ran my fingers through it. Same length. Same color.

But she watched me as if something about me had changed—just not physically. Something only children saw. Or remembered.

When she left for school, I stood at the doorway watching her walk to the bus stop. No man stood across the road this time. No shadow behind the trees. No presence against the morning haze.

Just stillness.

Almost too still.

I made coffee. I didn’t drink it.

Instead, I stood at the kitchen sink, staring at the window.

Not out of it, but at it.

There was a distortion in the reflection—not the glass itself, but the image.

The reflection of my kitchen looked normal, except the dining chair closest to the window… was missing.

I turned slowly.

All four chairs sat perfectly around the table.

But in the reflection, only three.

I looked back at the glass.

Four chairs behind me.

Three in the glass.

No flicker. No mirage. No fast blur.

Just… simply wrong.

I didn’t move for a long time.

I didn’t check again.

Didn’t blink or lean closer.

I just turned away and walked to the living room, heart thudding softly—not in fear, but in recognition.

Like something in me already knew this wasn’t a trick of light.

It was a crack.

Not in the window,

But in the timeline.

Around noon, I walked to the edge of the cul-de-sac where my neighbor, Mr. Fisher, stood pruning roses. He was retired, quiet, the kind of man who noticed things. He saw me pause by the hedge, and nodded.

“Morning,” he said.

I hesitated. “Can I ask you something strange?”

He didn’t seem surprised. “Probably.”

I pointed across the street to my house.

“Do you ever see… people near the porch? Or standing across the road? Just watching?”

He didn’t look where I pointed. He just kept pruning, as if he already knew the question.

“A man,” he said slowly, “used to stand across that road. Long before you moved in.”

A chill crept up my back. “A man?”

He nodded, trimming another branch.

“Never did anything. Never came close. Just stood there. Watching that house.”

“My house?” I asked quietly.

He looked at me then. His eyes were sympathetic, but not fragile. “That lot has seen more watching than living.”

My heart thumped once, deep.

“Do you know who it was?” I whispered.

He didn’t answer. Not directly.

He just shook his head and said:

“Some people don’t haunt places. Some places haunt people.”

When I came back inside, the house felt different.

Not hostile.

Not welcoming.

Just aware.

I stood in the hallway noticing things I’d always seen but somehow never observed.

The slant of light across the stairs.

The slight dip in the floor near the kitchen.

The way the living room window reflected the house with one less chair than reality.

That reflection bothered me.

Not because it was wrong—

but because it was consistent.

The real world.

And the version I only saw in glass.

Both correct.

Both existing.

But never the same.

A knock sounded softly at the back door.

Not confident. Not timid.

Just present.

I froze—not because I was afraid someone was there,

but because a small part of me already knew

someone had been there

for a very, very long time.

A knock sounded softly at the back door.

Not loud enough to be urgent, not hesitant enough to be shy. Just three quiet taps, as if whoever stood there knew I was already listening.

For a moment I didn’t move. The sound seemed to hang in the air, repeating itself inside my head even after it stopped. I wiped my palms on my jeans and tried to remind myself that this was ordinary. People knocked on doors. Packages got delivered. Neighbors needed favors.

Another knock. Two taps this time. Closer together.

“All right,” I murmured, mostly to myself.

I walked down the hall, every step feeling a little too aware. The house creaked softly under my feet, as if it were also adjusting its weight. When I reached the back door, I paused and looked through the small frosted pane at the top.

Nothing but blurred light and shapes I couldn’t quite make sense of.

“Who is it?” I called.

No answer.

I cracked the door open, just an inch, the chain still latched.

Empty.

The small back step, the trash bins by the fence, the patch of concrete leading to the side gate—all exactly as they always were. No person. No car idling nearby. No footsteps vanishing down the lane.

A faint smell of damp earth drifted in.

I opened the door a bit wider and stepped out, glancing automatically toward the gate. It was shut. The neighboring garden beyond the fence was quiet, except for the distant sound of someone’s radio playing an old song.

Then I saw it.

On the back step, just to the right, where the door would have hidden it when I first looked out, something pale lay against the concrete.

A photograph.

I stared at it for several seconds before bending down.

It was the size of an old instant print, slightly curled at the edges. The surface was matte, the image soft and faded. I picked it up with numb fingers.

The playground again.

The same one as before. The same slide, the same tree, the same sagging fence. But this photograph was taken from a different angle—farther back, as if from across the street. The kids were smaller, their faces indistinguishable, just moving shapes and colors.

There, near the oak tree, were two small figures, side by side.

I squinted, bringing the photo closer.

Someone had drawn a circle in blue pen around one of them. Not both. Just one.

My stomach clenched. The circled figure was slightly taller, shoulders tipped at a familiar angle. Even as a blur, even from a distance, I knew who it was meant to be.

K.

I turned the photo over.

On the back, in the same looping handwriting:

You weren’t the only one watching.

A breeze picked up, pushing against the open door. I stepped inside slowly and shut it, leaning my back against the wood for a moment while I tried to steady my breathing.

The house felt smaller again.

Not suffocating, exactly. Just… narrowed. As if the walls had shifted inward while I was outside.

I walked back to the kitchen and laid the new photograph beside the postcard, careful not to let them touch. The looping letters seemed to pulse against one another.

You weren’t the only one watching.

Did you miss me?

It felt like the beginning of a conversation I hadn’t agreed to have.

My phone vibrated on the counter.

For a moment, I was sure it would be the unknown number again. I didn’t think I could bear hearing that voice say my name a second time.

But the screen flashed Mark.

I answered on the second ring. “Hi.”

“Hey.” His voice sounded normal, slightly distracted. “Just checking in. How’s your day?”

I glanced at the photographs. “Quiet.”

“That good or bad?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

He chuckled faintly, not quite hearing me. “Listen, I might be home later than usual tonight. We’ve got a late meeting. Board stuff. You know how it is.”

I didn’t really know how it was. Mark rarely talked about work in a real way—just vague mentions of projects, people I’d never met, lots of phrases like “we’ll see” and “up in the air.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you remember locking the back door this morning?”

There was a pause on the line. “What?”

“The back door,” I repeated. “Did you lock it before you left?”

Another pause, longer this time. “I… don’t think so. I went out the front. Why?”

“No reason,” I said quickly. “I just couldn’t remember doing it, that’s all.”

“Elena.” His tone shifted. Soft, but edged. “Did something happen?”

I looked at the photographs again. At the handwriting. At the playground that wouldn’t leave me alone.

“No,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

He exhaled like he didn’t quite believe me but didn’t want to push. “Okay. Just—remember the electrician at three, all right? He’ll need to get into the fuse box in the basement. Don’t forget, or he’ll stand there like an idiot.”

“Right. Three.”

“Love you,” he said. The words were automatic, like punctuation.

“Love you too.”

When the call ended, the silence felt heavier. The house went back to listening.

I stared at the clock for a while. The second hand moved in gentle, steady ticks. 11:22 a.m.

But something tugged at the edge of my mind.

I looked again.

For a second—only a second—the clock read 10:17.

I blinked. The hand stuttered and jumped, and it was 11:23.

I walked closer, watching it. The minute hand sat where it should be. The second hand moved at the correct pace. Nothing wrong. Nothing strange. A normal clock.

I checked the oven display. 11:23. My phone—11:23.

But I knew what I had seen.

Not just the time. The feeling of a different time layered beneath this one, out of sync by an hour and six minutes for reasons that made no sense at all.

I turned both photos face down to hide the handwriting and went to the sink to rinse a cup that didn’t really need rinsing.

By mid-afternoon, the light outside had shifted toward a flat, gray tone that made every object look slightly more tired. I kept glancing at the street whenever I passed a window, half-expecting to see the man across the road again.

He never appeared.

At three o’clock, there was a knock at the front door, firm and practical. The electrician.

He was in his forties, with a baseball cap and a logo on his jacket. His eyes were polite and uncurious, the way people’s eyes got when they came to fix things and leave.

“Fuse box?” he asked.

“In the basement,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

I led him to the narrow door in the hallway and flicked on the light. The basement stairs descended into a space that always smelled slightly of concrete and forgotten cardboard.

He walked ahead of me, boots thudding on the steps.

I hesitated at the top, then followed.

The basement was unfinished, with shelves along one wall and a washer and dryer along another. Mark kept some tools down here, and a few sealed boxes from our old apartment that we’d never made time to unpack.

The electrician crouched near the fuse box, muttering to himself as he opened it and began to inspect the wires.

I watched dust float lazily through the light from the small ground-level window. The air felt thicker here, quieter, like sound didn’t travel the same way.

On one of the shelves, a cardboard box sat slightly ajar.

I frowned.

We stacked those boxes carefully when we moved in. Mark had sealed them with thick tape and written labels in his compact handwriting. This one’s tape was peeled back, the lid bent.

“Did you move any boxes?” I asked without really thinking.

The electrician glanced up briefly. “Me? Nah. Just got here.”

“Right.”

I stepped closer to the box. The label read Old Photos / Misc in black marker.

My skin prickled.

I shouldn’t open it. There was no reason I needed to open it. The electrician was here for the fuse box, not for me to start digging through old ghosts.

Still, my hand moved on its own.

I lifted the lid.

Inside, several photo albums lay stacked on top of a jumble of smaller envelopes and loose prints. Some were from Mark’s childhood—yellowing edges, grainy school pictures, his parents’ house behind him in every shot. Others were from the early years of our marriage. Holidays. Friends. Backyards I barely remembered stand in.

But beneath those, as I pushed carefully aside a small stack, I saw something that made my breath catch.

A strip of four photographs, still attached to each other along a perforated edge. The kind you got from old booths in malls.

Two kids grinning at the camera.

Making faces.

Shoving shoulders.

Laughing.

K and me.

The images were slightly blurred from motion, but his profile, his messy hair, his eyes—there was no mistaking him. No mistaking us.

I didn’t own these. I would have remembered if I’d kept something like this.

I turned the strip over.

No handwriting. No Note. Just the faint imprint of numbers from whatever machine had processed them.

“Elena?” the electrician’s voice floated over. “You all right?”

I swallowed. “Yeah. Just… dusty.”

“Yeah. Basements.” He tapped something in the box and swore affectionately at a stubborn fuse.

I looked back at the photographs. My fingers were trembling now, just enough for the glossy paper to quiver.

Why were they here? In our basement? In a box Mark had labeled and sealed?

How many times had I walked past this shelf without knowing that a small piece of my childhood was sitting in the dark, waiting?

Something tightened in my chest—a mixture of anger, grief, and a thin strand of something like betrayal.

Had Mark known these were here? Had he put them there?

If he had… why hadn’t he told me?

When the electrician left, I locked the door and went straight back to the basement. The light felt weaker now, the bulb hanging from the ceiling casting long, uncertain shadows.

The box sat where I’d left it.

I took the strip of photos upstairs and placed it between the postcard and the two playground prints on the kitchen table.

Four pieces now.

The postcard.

The note on the windowsill.

The playground photos.

And this strip of memory I hadn’t known I still had.

All circling the same center.

K.

The boy who never came home.

The boy they said the lake swallowed.

The boy whose voice still knew how to say my name.

As I stared at the collection, a small movement caught my eye.

At the edge of the table, near the sugar jar, Sophie’s crumpled drawing from the other day lay half-tucked under a magazine. I pulled it free.

The same childish sketch—me, Sophie, and the tall figure across the road.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but there was something else in the background this time, behind the houses. Faint, almost erased, as if she’d drawn it and then tried very hard to hide it.

A second tall figure.

No face.

No details.

Just a shadow behind another shadow.

I stared at it until the lines blurred.

For the first time, an idea surfaced that frightened me more than ghosts, stalkers, or voices on the phone.

What if the man watching us wasn’t the beginning of something?

What if he was the end—

of something that had already happened,

and was finding its way back

through a mistake in the glass.