Chapter 2
Marlowe's POV
The words died in my throat.
On the screen, at 3:15 AM, the mirror was completely normal. On the bed, Adrien was patting Silas’s back, coaxing him to sleep. No ripples in the glass, no doppelgänger, no steamy betrayal.
And the timeframe when I watched the woman appear? The progress bar showed only a bizarre block of static. File corrupted.
Impossible.
"Where is the proof, Marlowe?" Adrien gently pushed the phone away, his eyes full of condescending pity. "You’ve been pushing yourself too hard on this pharmaceutical case. Caffeine overdose coupled with sleep deprivation can cause severe visual hallucinations."
"I’m not blind! I saw it with my own eyes!"
"Enough!" Adrien suddenly raised his voice. He pulled me into a tight embrace, pressing his hand against the back of my head. His tone shifted into a sickly-sweet, fake warmth. "Shh... honey, you're just under a lot of stress from work. Let's not scare our son, okay?"
Before I could push him away, a strange scent invaded my nose.
Not my cheap soap. Not Adrien’s usual woody cologne. It was a sickeningly sweet, synthetic floral perfume.
It was that woman’s scent.
A shudder ran through my body. I stiffly turned my head over Adrien’s shoulder—Silas was backed into the corner of the bed, his tiny hands gripping the duvet for dear life.
My own flesh and blood was looking at me like I was a monster. He wasn't scared of the imaginary woman; he was terrified of me.
Over the next few days, our house turned into a high-security psych ward.
Sporting heavy dark circles, I neurotically searched every inch of the house. Adrien acted like nothing was wrong, wearing his crisp shirts to teach at Ashmont College every day.
"Marlowe, if you keep being so paranoid, maybe I should take you in for a psych evaluation." At the dinner table, he sliced his steak, his tone infuriatingly calm.
"Screw your shrinks, you're playing dumb!"
I abruptly stood up, turning to my son who was midway through swallowing his peas, grabbing onto him like a lifeline. "Silas, tell Mommy. Was there another lady next to Daddy that night?"
Silas shrank back, his little hand shaking with his fork. "No... it was just me and Daddy that night. Please stop yelling, Mommy, I'm scared..."
My son’s answer hit me like a sledgehammer, shattering my last line of psychological defense.
I was losing my mind. During an online editorial meeting, I misread the interviewee list entirely. My editor, Teddy, DM'd me asking if I was on drugs. I had to take a leave of absence, determined to dig out the truth at any cost.
I inspected the master bedroom mirror countless times; there was nothing behind it but bare drywall. Just as I was starting to believe I was truly sick, I remembered Mrs. Laurie next door—her Ring doorbell camera pointed right at our driveway.
I knocked on her door under the guise of looking for a lost dog and asked to check her footage from the past few days.
"Oh, honey, you looked so lovely in that dress the other night. Like a true lady," Mrs. Laurie pointed at the iPad screen.
I stared at the screen, a cold sweat drenching my back.
In the corner of the frame, a woman with my exact build was walking perfectly toward my front door. Every neighbor who walked by, including Laurie, had greeted her, and everyone thought she was me.
But I would never be caught dead in a cinch-waisted retro pink dress, nor would I ever wear that robotic, perfectly subservient smile.
What was even more spine-chilling was—
This thing could perfectly replicate me, openly taking my place in this community.
At dusk, I dragged my exhausted body back to an empty house.
When my sanity caught up to me, a terrifying truth exploded in my brain.
When Adrien faced that woman, there was no surprise, no rejection. His practiced embrace, that "My girl" whispered like he'd said it a thousand times—
This wasn't some one-night stand. He knew this monster existed all along. They had been secretly living together in my home, in my bed, for who knows how long.
At 10:00 PM, I texted Adrien: "Going to see my sister in Chicago. Back on the weekend."
Then I turned off my phone, disabled my location, and climbed back into the house through the narrow basement window.
I needed to see with my own eyes what exactly crawled out of that mirror when this house was supposedly "without a wife."
