The shadowed belief
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When Jessie Alton ran from home that rain-soaked night, she thought freedom lived somewhere past the bridge.
What she found instead was Michael Fenton — a stranger who seemed to know her better than she knew herself.
Hours later she woke in a locked institution, her clothes burned, her memories blunted, and her name questioned.
Inside, under the watch of the unflinching Dr. Quinn and the ever-smiling nurse Dot, Jessie becomes a subject in an experiment she doesn’t remember joining: the Mirror Initiative, a project designed to “heal” the human mind by rewriting identity.
Among the patients, one woman — Catherine Fielding — seems to know the truth. Together they uncover files linking Jessie to a forgotten past and a single word scrawled across her record: ELIZABETH.
As Jessie’s sense of self begins to fracture, she must decide what to believe — and who to trust — before her memories, and the world’s last record of her, are erased for good.
But survival means facing an impossible question:
If you are rewritten, do you die… or do you begin again?
A Shadowed Belief is a haunting psychological drama about identity, manipulation, and the quiet violence of being remade.
The Shadowed belief
PART ONE — THE SHADOW
CHAPTER ONE — The Bridge
I couldn’t trust anyone. Everyone was blurred to me. Faces passed me by as I stood shadowed in the darkness. With my white Converse shoes on, hair done up, makeup set, shorts and a crop top — I was in with the crowd. Why did I try so hard? Everyone would just look at me the same way and brush me off their shoulders. But deep down, I knew that wasn’t true.
A shadowed figure approached me under that steep bridge and left me with questions. Who was this? Why me?
“Michael Fenton,” the man in black said in a muffled tone.
“Is that your name?”
“No, it’s the rain’s name — of course it’s my name,” he said, half amused.
His humour disarmed me, but not for long.
“Names are strange, don’t you think?” he went on. “Your parents shuffle out a piece of life and decide to name it. Don’t you think we should name ourselves?”
I was already growing bored. The rain poured harder as faces and bodies hurried by. Swollen clouds swallowed the streetlight. He still stood there, motionless, like a sentinel.
And that scar — shaped like a ‘J’ — carved across his face. I could swear it was intentional.
“Shouldn’t you be getting home?” he asked finally.
“Shouldn’t you?” I shivered, rubbing my arms for warmth.
“I asked first.”
“I don’t want to go back there,” I whispered. “Bad things happen there.”
He didn’t mock me. He only listened.
“Painful things happen everywhere,” he said softly. “But everything happens for a reason.”
“I said bad. Horrible. I feel trapped in that house. I feel waves of ugliness as soon as I walk in. Those people aren’t my family.”
Something flickered in his expression — pity, maybe. Empathy. Or recognition.
Hours passed. We said nothing.
“Why are you still here?” I asked.
“Because I have something to tell you.”
“Something to tell me? You’ve stood here all this time and—what? You know me?”
“No,” he said. “Not exactly. I used to know you. It was a very long time ago.”
“I’m twenty-one,” I said.
“I know.”
“But you never used to be,” he added.
My stomach knotted.
“Stay away from me,” I said, backing off.
He smiled faintly. “I’m not a horror movie man. I’m your lifelong friend from your past life.”
After those words, I felt ridiculous. He was insane.
“Look, you’ve got the wrong girl. Maybe you should tell your story to someone else. Goodnight.”
He didn’t move.
“I’m not lying,” he said. “You loved to sing. You had dangerous eyes. Your name was Elizabeth.”
That name jolted through me.
“I’m done,” I said, grabbing my things. “Good luck with your comedy career, Michael Fenton.”
And I walked away.
The sky spun above me; the ground tilted. The world went black.
CHAPTER TWO — The Field
When I woke, I was sprawled on concrete near a field, my hands bloody and bruised. My head spun. My legs ached. Every inch of me stung.
Smoke rose in the distance — people, I thought. People meant help. I stumbled toward it, throat raw, voice hoarse. “Help!”
The only thing I found was a lighter. I flicked it, set the dry grass ablaze, and ran — or tried to. The flames grew fast. I fell hard. Then darkness again.
“She's got a pulse,” someone said.
I drifted in and out, aware only of movement, sirens, the sting of antiseptic, the whisper of fabric.
Hours, maybe days later, I opened my eyes to brightness and noise — a hospital, or something like one. Blue clothes, blue sheets, blue walls. A woman with greasy curls and a badge that read Dot hovered near my bed.
“Where are my clothes?” I asked.
“They were burned,” she said. “We can show you what’s left if you promise not to hurt yourself again.”
“What? I didn’t do that on purpose!”
She didn’t answer. She left.
I turned to the bed beside me. A girl sat there, biting her lip until it bled, her arms and legs scarred, her eyes hollow.
“Hey,” I said. No reply.
“Hey.”
Nothing.
I touched her arm. She flinched.
“What do you want?” she snapped.
“I want to know what kind of ward this is. I don’t see any burns.”
She looked away.
“I need to know where I am!” I shook her arm.
She kept her face turned until she said quietly, “In hospital.”
I looked at her name tag: Catherine.
That was the moment I realized everyone here had a tag. Everyone except me.
CHAPTER THREE — The Corridor
Later, I ripped the wires from my skin and stepped into the corridor. Nurses in white watched me like I was a moving infection.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Dot’s voice thundered from behind.
I froze.
She marched toward me, two orderlies at her back. “Stop!”
I ran. They caught me, pressed me to the ground, and injected something cold into my arm.
Bright light. Pain. Sleep.
When I woke again, Catherine sat curled on her bed, whispering to herself.
“It gets better,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
“No one does at first.”
Dot came in with a clipboard. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I muttered.
“Fine means depressed. And yesterday?”
“Fine.”
“Take that as denial.” She smiled thinly. “You’ll meet a good patient soon. She’ll take you outside for five minutes. There’s no escape, Jessie.”
So they knew my name.
This wasn’t a hospital. It was something else entirely.
CHAPTER FOUR — The Courtyard
Half an hour later, Dot returned with Catherine.
“Meet Catherine,” she said. “She’ll show you around.”
Catherine smiled faintly. “You’re stuck with me.”
We walked through dim corridors to a courtyard that smelled of rain and bleach.
“This is an institution,” she said. “Everyone here has broken in some way.”
“I don’t belong here,” I said. “I didn’t try to—”
“I know,” she interrupted.
“What?”
“You’re lost, not mad.” She looked at me, eyes glassy. “I’m psychic.”
I almost laughed, but her face stopped me. She meant it.
Before I could question her, Dot appeared again. “A new arrival,” she said. “Meet Michael Fenton.”
Thunder rolled outside as the name hit me like a slap.
CHAPTER FIVE — The Ward
That night, rain tapped against the windows. Dinner came as grey mush on a tray. Across the ward, Michael sat reading, the scar on his face catching the light.
“Why are you allowed to wear your own clothes?” I asked.
He glanced up. “Why are you allowed to be here?”
“You’re impossible.”
“So are you,” he said, and went back to his book.
The lights went out. The loudspeaker crackled: “Sleep time now. Medication rounds begin.”
A nurse with red hair and a false smile forced pills into my mouth. Within minutes, my chest tightened, my body numbed.
I woke hours later, drenched in sweat, unable to sleep.
I crept to Michael’s bed. “Psst.”
He didn’t move.
I poured water over his face.
He jerked up. “What the—”
“Quiet!”
“If they hear us—”
“What are you up to?” I asked.
“I’m here because of you,” he whispered.
“What do you mean?”
“I know what happened. I know about the burns.”
He looked at me with something like guilt.
“Do I look burnt?” I asked.
“No. Not your face.”
I breathed out, shaky.
PART TWO — THE DESCENT
CHAPTER SIX — The Mirror Room
Morning came wrapped in fog and silence. A nurse led me down a corridor that seemed longer than before. Doors lined each side, numbered but nameless. At the end waited Dr. Quinn — a woman in grey with sharp eyes and a voice that could slice through thought.
“Jessie,” she said softly. “How are you feeling today?”
“Fine,” I lied.
She nodded toward the glass wall behind her. “Then tell me what you see.”
Through the pane, I saw my reflection — but it wasn’t mine. My skin was paler. My eyes colder.
“That’s not me,” I whispered.
Quinn smiled. “It’s the version you’ve forgotten.”
CHAPTER SEVEN — The Questions
Every day followed the same pattern. Pills at seven, therapy at nine, silence until lights out.
Dr. Quinn asked the same questions over and over.
“Who are you?”
“Jessie Alton.”
“Who were you before that?”
“No one.”
Her smile was patient, practiced. “One day, you’ll remember.”
Catherine visited when she could. She had stopped smiling completely.
“They’re trying to build something,” she said one night. “Something bigger than any of us.”
“What?”
“A belief,” she said. “And you’re the proof.”
CHAPTER EIGHT — The Voice
I started hearing him again — Michael’s voice through the walls.
At first it was faint, just a hum beneath the air vents. Then, one night, clear as breath: “Jessie, don’t trust them.”
I pressed my hand to the cold wall. “Where are you?”
No answer.
The next morning, Dr. Quinn showed me a photograph of a burning field.
“Does this look familiar?” she asked.
I swallowed hard.
“Accidents shape memory,” she said. “But guilt creates faith.”
I didn’t understand then, but I would.
CHAPTER NINE — The Visitor
Rain blurred the windows again. Catherine was gone; her bed stripped bare.
Dot came in holding a clipboard. “Transferred,” she said when I asked. “Progressing well.”
That night, Michael appeared at the window of my room — bruised, exhausted, eyes wild.
“They’ll erase you,” he hissed. “Run when I tell you.”
Before I could respond, alarms blared. He vanished into the dark.
When I turned around, Dr. Quinn was there, her face calm as ice.
“You can’t run from healing, Jessie,” she said.
CHAPTER TEN — The Descent
They moved me underground after that.
The air was colder there, filled with the hum of machines. I was strapped into a chair beneath a ring of lights that blinked like eyes.
“Memory is fluid,” Quinn said, adjusting the wires on my temples. “Belief, even more so.”
“What are you doing to me?”
“Reconstruction,” she said simply.
The current surged — not pain, but light. Images burst behind my eyes: a house on fire, a name whispered through smoke.
Elizabeth.
When I woke, my reflection in the metal table smiled before I did.
PART THREE — THE RECONSTRUCTION
CHAPTER ELEVEN — The Voice
When I woke again, I wasn’t sure if I was awake at all. The walls breathed. The lights pulsed like veins under skin. Somewhere beyond the haze, a voice spoke.
“Good morning, Jessie.”
Dr. Quinn’s voice was calm, deliberate. “Your responses are stabilising. Tell me who you are.”
I tried to speak, but the words were heavy. “Jessie.”
“Full name.”
“Jessie Alton.”
A pause. “That’s good. And who was Elizabeth?”
My head ached. “I don’t know.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “You do.”
The hum of the machines deepened. My chest rose and fell faster, as though something inside me had been reprogrammed to obey her voice.
CHAPTER TWELVE — The Reflection
They gave me mirrors again, but this time, I didn’t recognise the face. My skin looked smoother, my eyes colder.
Michael appeared behind the glass, restrained. His mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear.
“Let him speak,” I said.
Dr. Quinn smiled faintly. “He’s part of your therapy.”
She turned a dial, and suddenly his voice came through the speaker.
“Jessie, it’s not real. They’re using our memories.”
“Enough,” Dr. Quinn snapped, and the sound cut off.
The glass went black, and I saw only myself.
“Repeat after me,” Quinn said. “You are Jessie. You are safe. You have never been anyone else.”
I whispered it, even as tears ran down my face.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN — The Hall
Days lost meaning. They made me walk the same corridor, answer the same questions, sleep at the same hour. Each time, I forgot more.
Catherine returned one night, slipping through the door while the lights dimmed. “You’re fading,” she said. “That’s what they want.”
“How do you know?”
“I was part of it too. But I remembered too much.”
She handed me a folded piece of paper. Inside was a photograph of me and Michael standing in front of a building labelled Mirror Project 01.
“I took this before they erased me,” she said. “Hide it.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN — The Archive
Dr. Quinn’s voice followed me everywhere.
“We’re close now, Jessie. I can see it in your eyes — the peace. The belief.”
She showed me a room stacked with folders and tapes.
“This is the archive,” she said. “Every subject we’ve worked with. Every iteration.”
I looked around. Hundreds of names. Hundreds of lives.
One caught my eye: Elizabeth Arden — Deceased
I turned to her. “What is this?”
She smiled. “An old name. A failed version.”
I felt my heartbeat stutter.
“She wasn’t real,” Quinn added. “But you are.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN — The Breach
That night, the alarms sounded. Catherine burst into my room, out of breath.
“They know I’ve been helping you,” she said. “We have to go now.”
Michael appeared behind her, blood on his shirt. “They tried to shut me down.”
We ran through the corridors, past the mirrors, past the files, past everything that had been built to contain us.
The lights flickered red. The walls trembled.
“This way,” Catherine said, leading us through a maintenance hatch.
Behind us, Dr. Quinn’s voice echoed through the intercom: “You can’t run from what you are, Jessie.”
But I didn’t stop.
For the first time in years, I was running toward something — not away.
PART FOUR — THE FRACTURE
CHAPTER SIXTEEN — The Woods
We didn’t stop running until the ground turned from concrete to soil. The air outside was heavy with the scent of pine and rain. For a long moment, none of us spoke.
Catherine bent over, hands on her knees, gasping. “We’re out,” she whispered.
Michael stared back toward the lights of the facility, distant now through the trees. “Out doesn’t mean safe.”
I looked down at my hands — still trembling, still covered in faint bruises where the wires had been. “Where do we go?”
Catherine stood and pointed north. “There’s a safe house. People who escaped before us.”
I didn’t ask how she knew. I just followed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN — The Cabin
The cabin sat deep in the woods, small but alive with candlelight. An older woman opened the door before we could knock.
“You made it,” she said to Catherine. “Barely.”
Her name was Mara. Her face was marked with the same faint surgical scars I’d seen on Michael.
“You were one of them too,” I said.
She nodded. “We all were.”
Inside, maps and notes covered the walls. Dozens of photographs showed people with vacant eyes. Under one, written in fading ink, was the word Rewritten.
Mara turned to me. “You were their favourite experiment, Jessie. Or Elizabeth. Whichever they left you with.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN — The Confession
That night, while Catherine slept, Michael sat across from me by the dying fire.
“I remember everything now,” he said quietly. “Before this life. Before Quinn.”
I stared at him. “You said we were in the first trial. What did they do to us?”
“They tried to make us believe different lives. To see if memory could be replaced with faith.”
“And it worked?”
“For a while. Until you started to remember.”
“What happened to me?”
“You burned it all down. The first facility. You tried to stop them.”
The memory flickered like a light behind my eyes — smoke, fire, screams.
“I killed people?” I whispered.
He shook his head. “You freed them.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN — The Return
At dawn, Catherine shook me awake. “They’ve found us,” she said.
We could hear the hum of engines in the distance, growing louder.
Mara handed us a small metal box. “This holds the original data from the Mirror Initiative. Proof. Get it to the coast.”
She stayed behind as we ran.
Through the trees, flashlights cut the dark. Voices shouted our names.
Michael grabbed my hand. “No matter what happens, don’t stop.”
We didn’t. Not until the world exploded in light and sound and I felt myself falling again.
CHAPTER TWENTY — The Fracture
I woke to silence. Smoke drifted through broken branches. The world was tilted, fractured.
Michael lay a few feet away, blood seeping from his side. Catherine was gone.
I crawled to him. “Stay with me.”
He smiled faintly. “You have to finish it.”
“Finish what?”
“The truth.”
He pressed something into my hand — the metal box. Inside it, a small drive pulsed faintly with blue light.
“Tell them what they did,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “Don’t let them make you again.”
Then his hand went still.
I sat there for a long time, rain soaking through my clothes, until the sirens began again — and I ran.
PART FIVE — THE REWRITING
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE — The Coast
The sea was louder than I remembered. It roared like something ancient, something alive. I stood on the cliff’s edge, Michael’s blood dried on my hands, the metal box heavy in my coat pocket.
Catherine had found me again by dawn, limping, her hair matted with dirt and rain. “They’re still looking,” she said. “We can’t stay long.”
“What’s on the drive?” I asked.
“Everything. The blueprints, the patient records, the names of those still inside. It’s proof they can’t erase.”
I looked at her — really looked. The fear in her eyes wasn’t for herself anymore. It was for me.
“We send it,” I said. “All of it.”
She nodded.
We found an old communication post buried in the cliffs, its rusted antenna still standing. I connected the drive, typed the last password Michael had muttered before he died — mirrorbreak — and watched the data upload.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO — The Broadcast
Across every channel, every network that still had a signal, the files appeared. Names, photos, confessions, medical scans — the Mirror Initiative laid bare.
The world would know now.
Catherine sat beside me, watching the screens flicker. “You did it,” she said quietly.
“No,” I said. “We did.”
A sound came from behind us — a vehicle, slow, deliberate. The last of Quinn’s enforcers.
Catherine handed me her gun. “If they take you, they’ll start again.”
I took the weapon but didn’t raise it.
When the doors opened, I fired into the ground, scattering dirt and sparks. “You can’t take me back,” I shouted. “It’s over.”
They hesitated, their orders faltering under the weight of what had just been unleashed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE — The Return
For months, I stayed hidden. Cities turned against themselves. Newsfeeds replayed the story until it became myth.
The girl who remembered.
Some said I was dead. Some said I’d been taken again. I preferred it that way.
I lived quietly near the water, writing down everything I could remember — about Quinn, about the mirrors, about the first life that wasn’t mine. Each night I dreamed of fire and light, of a voice whispering my old name.
Elizabeth.
Sometimes I answered. Sometimes I didn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR — The Letter
One evening, a letter arrived — no return address, just my name in a hand I recognised instantly.
Jessie, They can’t destroy what they don’t understand. The mirrors still exist, but now they reflect you — the version they couldn’t contain. Don’t stop writing. Every word you remember breaks another chain. — M
The paper smelled faintly of smoke and sea salt. I read it until the ink bled under my tears.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE — The Rewriting
I returned to the coast. The sky was pale, washed out. The sea stretched endlessly, unbroken.
In my hands, I held the notebook filled with everything I had written — my memories, my truths, my belief.
I tore the final page free, the one that began “My name was Elizabeth.”
I let it fall into the water and watched it drift away.
Then I opened to a clean page and wrote the words that mattered most:
My name is Jessie Alton. I am real. I remember everything they tried to erase.
I closed the notebook and stood in the wind, letting the salt sting my face.
Somewhere far behind me, the ruins of the facility burned. Ahead, the horizon opened wide — empty, possible, alive.
And I turned off the light, because endings are also a kind of rest.
PART SIX — THE EXPOSURE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX — The Witness
The story wouldn’t stay in the wires. It spilled into mouths and headlines, and then into argument. Anonymous sources. Fabricated evidence. A traumatized girl mistaking care for cruelty.
Mara met me in a church hall where the heaters clicked like patient insects. She set down a recorder and didn’t turn it on. “They’re building their counter-narrative,” she said. “They say the files are doctored. That you’re a composite subject.”
“I am,” I said. “Composed of what survived.”
Her mouth twitched. “They’ll subpoena everything. Quinn has lawyers like weather—everywhere, indifferent.”
“Then we need a storm they can’t name,” I said. “A face.”
“Someone from the inside?”
“Catherine,” I said. “If she speaks, they’ll listen.”
Mara hesitated. “She’s gone.”
“Dead?”
“Moved,” she said. “Or erased. The kind of gone that money buys.”
I looked at the recorder. “Turn it on,” I said. “If they want a composite, I’ll give them my whole.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN — The Network
Threats arrived with careful grammar. Cease and desist. Defamation. Duty of care. The Alton Research Foundation’s crest—the old name in a new suit—bloomed on the letterheads. My landlord slid envelopes under my door with two fingers like they were hot.
Mara called from a different phone every time. “We found a shell company paying for the ‘satellite unit’ you broke into,” she said. “Addresses cross to Quinn’s consultancy. And Dot’s pensions fund.”
“Find Catherine,” I said.
“We’re trying.” A pause. “Jessie… do you want to stop?”
I looked at the notebook on the table, the words I’d written to keep my shape. “Stopping would be a different kind of erasure.”
That night someone stood outside my building and whistled the melody from the ward—three notes, patient as a drip. When I looked through the curtain, no one was there. The tune kept playing anyway, inside the part of my head that had learned to hold echoes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT — The Interview
They filmed me in a room with neutral art and a plant that had forgotten to die. The presenter’s voice was sympathetic in the way of people who practice every syllable.
“Jessie,” she said, “some say you’re unwell. That what you endured is… interpretation.”
“I was made,” I said. “Then I lived. Those aren’t interpretations.”
They cut to a pre-recorded segment—the calm measured vowels of Dr. Quinn. “We treated a young woman in crisis. Our methods are rigorous and humane. Any suggestion of identity ‘erasure’ is a dangerous misreading of modern psychiatry.”
The camera found my face again. “She calls it humane,” I said. “I call it tidy.”
After, the producer pressed my hand. “You were brave,” she said, already looking at her next schedule.
On the way out, a woman brushed my shoulder. “He wants to meet,” she murmured without stopping. “Same river. Midnight.”
I almost asked who, but the tune—those three ward-notes—threaded the street behind her like a leash.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE — The House of Glass
The river wore its usual black coat. Fog made the lamps into small moons. I waited under the bridge where Michael had once said my name like a map.
Footsteps. Not one person—two. Catherine stepped from the fog with her hair cropped close, her eyes older. Beside her, a man in a dark coat whose stillness I recognized before his face.
“Hello, Jessie,” Dr. Quinn said. “You’ve grown persuasive.”
Catherine didn’t meet my eyes. “I asked for immunity,” she said. “For the staff. For the ones who didn’t know what they were part of.”
“And for yourself?” I asked.
She swallowed. “I knew enough to drown.”
Quinn’s smile could have been mistaken for pity. “You wanted truth,” she said. “Come and see it.”
She turned and the fog opened like a door. The building they led me to had glass walls and the kind of quiet money buys to hear itself think. Inside, rooms reflected rooms reflected rooms—an infinite rehearsal of certainty.
In the center: a chair, a ring of lights, a mirror that was not glass. My body remembered where to hurt.
CHAPTER THIRTY — The Final Session
Quinn stood behind the pane, hands folded. “No sedatives,” she said. “No restraints. Talk with me.”
Catherine hovered at the edge of the room like a note someone was afraid to play.
“You told the world we erase people,” Quinn said into the intercom. “What if I told you we only ever held up a mirror?”
“You built the mirror,” I said. “Then decided what it should show.”
“Belief is a cure,” she said. “Without it, trauma replicates.”
“And with it?”
“It obeys.”
I stepped closer to the glass. My reflection stepped with me, a fraction late—as if the machine were deciding what version to return. “I won’t obey.”
“Of course you will,” she said gently. “You already are. You’ve built a new belief about yourself and you’re asking the world to adopt it. That’s all I ever did.”
Catherine flinched. “Stop,” she said to Quinn. “This isn’t medicine.”
“It’s survival,” Quinn replied. “For all of us. Even you.”
I reached into my coat and set a small device on the table—Mara’s gift, a blind little box with one purpose. “This room’s a broadcast booth now,” I said. “Say it again, Howard. Tell the world what cure means.”
Quinn’s mask slipped—not fear, calculation. “You think exposure ends systems,” she said softly. “It only renames them.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’m good with names.”
The mirror flickered. For one second it returned a face that wasn’t mine—Elizabeth at twelve, cautious and luminous. Then it found me again. I put my palm to the surface and left no smudge.
Catherine stepped forward, voice raw. “I’ll testify,” she said to the glass, as if speaking to every room it watched. “I helped build it. I’ll help end it.”
Quinn turned away first. In people like her, that counted as surrender.
PART SEVEN — THE REBIRTH
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE — The Name
The hearings were rooms without weather. Air-conditioning made the seasons irrelevant. Lawyers arranged language into fences and invited us to admire the symmetry.
Mara’s articles multiplied; strangers sent letters that smelled of damp kitchens and hope. Some called me Elizabeth, some Jessie, some both as if stacking the names might make me stronger.
When it was my turn, I said the simplest thing. “I am the person who lived,” I told them. “I am the proof that the story you impose is not the only one that holds.”
Outside, Catherine waited on the steps in a coat too thin for the wind. “They’ll come for me,” she said.
“They already did,” I answered. “You came back.”
She nodded toward the street, where a bus sighed like something tired of arriving. “If I disappear again, don’t come looking,” she said. “Let me decide what I’m called.”
“Okay.”
She turned to go, then paused. “You were never a failed version,” she said without facing me. “You were the control we couldn’t control.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO — The Rebirth
I moved into a small flat above a bakery that woke at four. The first smell of bread each morning reminded the rooms to be kind. I taught myself ordinary rituals: buying fruit, leaving shoes by the door, letting the kettle sing without rushing it.
On the bathroom mirror, two names remained in neat marker: Jessie and underneath Elizabeth. Some days one blurred with steam before the other, a private weather report. I never wiped them off.
I visited the ruins once more. The building had been eaten by air and time; weeds stitched the cracks together like a patient tailor. In what had been the observation room, a shard of the old mirror still clung to its frame. It showed less than a face, more than a fragment. Enough.
I took Catherine’s tape from my pocket and placed it on the ledge where the light could find it in the mornings. I didn’t press play. I didn’t need to. The words were in the walls now, and in me.
On my desk at home, I stacked the pages of the book I had been writing—our book—and slid a rubber band around them the way you hold a thing without squeezing it into silence. The title on the first page was the only one that had ever fit: A Shadowed Belief.
The city exhaled outside my window. Somewhere, a child banged a spoon against metal until it learned the rhythm of itself. I turned off the light.
Acknowledgment
This novel was developed and refined with creative assistance from ChatGPT (OpenAI), used as a writing and editing tool under the direction and authorship of Pollyanna Bruce.
All characters, storylines, and creative rights belong entirely to the author.
© 2025 Pollyanna Bruce. All rights reserved.
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