Chapter 2 The Wrong Bag

The porch light was still on when I got home, which meant Mum hadn't gone to bed, she'd been watching the clock again.

I found her curled up on the sofa with a blanket over her knees and the TV on low, some old sitcom rerun she wasn't actually watching. She looked up the second I opened the door, and made an expression of relief and worry showing up at the exact same time.

"Cutting it close again," she said.

"I made the train with ten seconds to spare."

"Ten seconds." She shook her head, but she was smiling. "One of these days you're going to miss it, and then what?"

"Then I guess you're stuck with me here forever, which honestly wouldn't be the worst thing." I dropped onto the sofa beside her and pulled the pharmacy bag from my pocket, handing it over like I did every single night. "Danny says hi, by the way."

"Sweet boy. Tell him I still owe him a batch of cookies."

"You've owed him cookies since March."

"I'm building anticipation."

I laughed, and she laughed too, the kind that used to happen all the time before things got hard and now happened just enough to remind me what we used to be like. She took her pills with the water I got her, and I watched the tight line of her shoulders loosen the way it always did once the medicine settled in, like her whole body had been holding its breath and could finally let it go.

"How was Marcus's?" she asked.

"Good. His mum made way too much garlic bread."

"There's no such thing as too much garlic bread."

"That's exactly what I said."

She reached over and squeezed my hand. "Go on. Get some sleep. You've got school in the morning."

"Night, Mum."

"Night, love."

The house was quiet in that specific late night way, where even the fridge humming sounds loud. I got myself a glass of water in the kitchen, and for a second I just stood there listening to nothing, feeling that strange, settled kind of peace that comes at the end of a long day when everything has gone right. My phone buzzed. Marcus.

Marcus: made it home safe?

Riley: Yes. mum's already asleep on the sofa, typically

Marcus: tell her I say hi

Riley: She says you owe her nothing and she owes Danny cookies. long story

Marcus: Your mum talks weird sometimes and I love it

I smiled at that, standing alone in my kitchen at midnight. I carried the warm feeling of it up the stairs with me like something I could hold onto.

My room was cold, the way it always got this time of year, and I dropped my bag by the bed and knelt down to unzip it. I needed my charger before my phone died completely, and I wanted to change out of my jeans into something that didn't feel like it was strangling me.

The zipper caught.

That was the first strange thing. My zipper never caught, I'd had this bag for two years and the thing practically glided open on its own from overuse. I tugged it, and it gave way all at once, and I reached inside for where my charger always sat, tucked into the little front pocket next to my pack of gum.

Nothing.

I frowned and dug deeper, my fingers closing around something soft and unfamiliar. I pulled it out. A black hoodie. Not mine. I didn't own a black hoodie, I hated black, said it made me look like I was going to a funeral every time I wore it.

I sat back on my heels and stared at it like it might explain itself.

"Okay," I said out loud, to no one. "Weird."

I checked the rest of the bag properly this time, methodically, the way you do when your brain hasn't caught up to what your hands already know. No charger. No notebook with Marcus's name doodled in the corner where I always forgot to erase it. No gum. Not one single thing that belonged to me.

And then it hit me, slow and cold, like water finding a crack.

The girl. Jane. The identical bag.

Somehow, somewhere on that train, we'd walked away with each other's lives, and now I was holding some stranger's black hoodie in my hands instead of my own charger, and somewhere across town she was probably staring at my things wondering the exact same thing I was.

I almost laughed. It should have been funny, the kind of story you tell people later, remember when I accidentally went home with the wrong bag.

Instead, my stomach was doing something slow and uneasy, like it already knew something my head hadn't caught up to yet.

I tipped the whole bag out onto my bed.

The hoodie fell first, then something heavier beneath it, a shirt, dark and stiff in patches that made no sense until they did, my mind searched for another explanation.

Coffee.

Paint.

Rust.

Until my brain finally let the word land. Blood. Dried, dark, unmistakable once I saw it. A ring of keys clattered onto the duvet next to it, old and heavy, nothing like the single house key I kept on a ribbon. And last, wrapped tight in a rubber band, a small stack of photographs.

My hands were shaking before I even opened them.

The first photo showed a man, ordinary, unremarkable, standing outside somewhere I didn't recognize. The second showed the same man, closer this time, his face half turned from the camera.

The third photograph slipped from my fingers before I could stop it.

Someone lying still on the ground. Lying in a way that made my whole body go cold. Dark stains pooling beneath him on pale concrete.

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. The photograph sat there on my carpet, and I stared at it like staring long enough might change what it showed.

A knock echoed through the house.

Not the gate outside. The front door.

"Riley?" Mum's voice floated up the stairs, thin with sleep. "Are you expecting someone?"

I couldn't answer. My throat had closed around every word I owned.

Another knock. Slower this time. Three deliberate taps, spaced out like whoever was on the other side of that door had all the time in the world.

Then a voice, calm, almost gentle, drifted up through the wood.

"I think you have my backpack.”