The Missouri Footbridge Ritual

Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger. Fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details. Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress. A hoodie slips beneath a blazer. An old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season. You create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross. For the rest of the trip, check out the link in the video description. And don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more videos like this. And don't forget to share this video with your friends and family. And don't forget to like and share this video with your friends. My wife went missing on a Tuesday in October. This is what I remember of that morning. Her side of the bed was cold. I noticed it before I opened my eyes. I'd reached over, expecting the warm shape of her back. And my hand met sheet that had been empty long enough to lose body heat. The duvet was folded down on her side like she'd gotten up early and tried not to wake me. I sat up and looked at the clock on the dresser. It said quarter past ten. I almost never sleep that late. And I hadn't slept that late in twenty years of marriage to Elise. I tried to remember her getting up that morning and couldn't. I tried to remember going to bed. The night before and couldn't pin that down either. And I told myself that was because I'd been tired. I called her name and got no answer. The bathroom door was open. I got up, crossed the hall in my robe and looked in. The bathroom was the way she'd left it the night before. Her toothbrush was in the cup. The towel was folded over the rail. I went downstairs and bare feet. The kitchen was clean. The coffee maker hadn't been used. And the dishes from the night before were in the drying rack where she'd put them after dinner. I called her name again and went through the rooms one at a time. Living room. Dining room. The little office she kept on the first floor. The basement. The garage. Her car was in the garage. I came back up to the kitchen and stood there for a minute. Her phone was on the counter, plugged into the charger by the toaster. The screen was at one hundred percent. I picked it up. There were no missed calls. I put it back down. I went to the front door and found it unlocked, the deadbolt open. I checked the porch and the front lawn in the driveway. The morning was a mild October morning. Leaves coming off the sycamore in the front yard. The air smelling like wet wood. Nothing on the lawn. Nothing in the street. A neighbor's dog two houses down was barking like always. I went back inside and checked the coat closet. Her coat was on the hook by the door, the blue one she wore every day from October through March. Her shoes were lined up underneath. I don't know which pairs she owns exactly but the ones I thought of as hers were there. Her purse was on the kitchen island. I had walked past it twice already without seeing it. I looked at it for a long moment and I didn't open it. I don't know why I didn't open it. I called Diane first. Diane is her sister. She lives in Webster Groves about 15 minutes away and she picked up on the third ring. She said hello in a tone I read as already a little tired. I said, "Diane, is Elise with you?" She paused. Then she said, "No, Patrick. Why would she be?" I told her Elise wasn't at the house and I couldn't find her. Diane asked if I'd do it. She asked if I'd checked the basement and I said yes. She asked if I'd slept alright and I said I'd slept fine. She said, "Patrick, have you eaten anything today?" I told her I'd just woken up. I told her I'd call her back if I found Elise. I called Erin next. Erin is Elise's oldest friend from college. She picked up on the second ring and said the same kinds of things Diane had said in the same kind of voice. She asked if I needed her to come over and I told her not yet. I called Elise's office. She works at a small architectural firm on Manchester Road in the planning department. The receptionist put me on hold and the hold music played a full song and then the first 30 seconds of another song before the receptionist came back on the line. She said, "Mr. Holloway, Elise isn't on the schedule today. She only comes in on Mondays and Thursdays." I said, "Since when?" The receptionist hesitated. She said, "Since last spring, I think. April or May." I hadn't known that. I'd been married to Elise for 20 years and I hadn't known her schedule had changed six months ago. I put the phone down and stood at the kitchen counter and tried to remember what we'd talked about at dinner the night before. I couldn't remember what we'd eaten. I told myself I'd been distracted. I went upstairs to the spare bedroom we use as an office. Her laptop was on the desk. I sat down in her chair and opened it and the login screen came up. I typed her password without thinking about it. I don't normally know her password. The laptop unlocked. The browser was open. The history hadn't been cleared. I scrolled. The empty man. That was the search term. Over and over, going back months. The empty man legend. The empty man ritual. The empty man symptoms. There were searches I had to read twice. How do you know if your husband is sick? Neurological symptoms forum. Memory loss and spouse. What to do when your partner won't see a doctor. I sat at her desk and read through the list three times. And each time I read it more slowly. When I got to the last one, I closed the laptop. Then I opened it again. I clicked into her bookmarks. She'd saved a folder. The name of the folder was just a dash. Inside were links to forum threads about an urban legend. A whistle on a bridge. A short ritual with rules and warnings. And a long set of comments from people saying not to try it. I sat there for a while. I don't know exactly how long. When I looked up, the light in the room was different than it had been when I sat down. I called the police non-emergency line. The officer who took the report was patient with me. He asked how long she'd been gone and I said since last night at the latest. He said for an adult, they usually wait 24 hours unless there was a reason to think otherwise. He asked if Elise had any medical conditions. He asked if she'd been depressed. He asked if we'd argued. He asked, in a tone that was practiced and careful, if I'd been to a doctor recently. I said no. He said he'd send a unit by the house. A young officer came an hour later. He took a description and a recent photograph. He looked around the kitchen. He asked me a few more questions. He asked, with the same practiced care, if there was anyone I could go and stay with. A family member. A friend. Somewhere not the house. I said I didn't want to leave the house. He said of course. He left around two in the afternoon. The house was quiet after he was gone. I sat at the kitchen table and looked at Elise's purse on the island. And I still didn't open it. I told myself she'd be back soon. And she'd tell me where she'd been. When you shop Kroger Delivery, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door. Our refrigerated trucks keep your items fresh while our associates are committed to getting every detail right. Carefully selecting and packing your order with care. Because bringing you fresh, quality groceries is what we do best. And right now, enjoy $20 off your first online order of $75 or more. Restrictions apply. See site for details. Kroger. Fresh for everyone. First the air. Then the light. You create it layer by layer. Until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way. Find fall your way. At Ross. Three days went by. I didn't sleep well. I'd lie down on the couch living room because the bed was too empty and I'd close my eyes and then it would be three in the morning and I'd be awake with no memory of having slept. I drank coffee. I forgot to eat. I called Diane twice more. The second time, Diane was short with me. She said, Patrick, have you been to a doctor about any of this? I hung up. On the third night, I went into the bathroom around two in the morning. I stood at the sink and looked at myself in the mirror. The man in the mirror looked very tired. I didn't recognize him for a second. I turned away from the mirror and went to bed. I came home on the fourth evening from walking the neighborhood. I'd been out for an hour. I opened the front door and I knew immediately something was different. The house smelled like dinner. Garlic. Onions. Something braised. I walked into the kitchen. Elise was at the stove. Her hair was up. She was wearing the gray cardigan I'd bought her three Christmases ago and there was a wooden spoon in her hand. She turned and smiled at me and said, Where have you been? I started without you. I stood there. I said her name. What is it? Are you okay? I said, Where have you been? I said, I haven't been anywhere. I've been here. You've been gone three days. I called the police. She put the wooden spoon down on the rest by the burner. She walked over and touched my face with her right hand and her hand was warm. She said, Sweetheart, have you been drinking? I pulled away. I told her I'd called Diane and Aaron and her office. I told her about the police officer who'd been to the house. She looked at me for a long time and I couldn't read her expression. Then it softened and she said, Okay, sit down at the table. I'll get you some water. She walked to the sink and filled a glass and set it down in front of me. I looked at the kitchen island. Her purse was on it in the same place it had been for three days. I picked it up and opened it. Wallet. Lipstick. House keys. Her work badge, from the firm on Manchester. The work badge had a paper printout tucked into the plastic sleeve, the day's parking stub from the garage at her office. I read the date on the stub. It was today. I sat there holding the badge in my hand. Elise was at the sink, her back to me, drying her hands on a dish towel. I tried to remember the last three days. I tried to put them in order. I couldn't do it. I couldn't make the days connect. We ate the stew together at the kitchen table. Elise asked me how my day had been. I told her it had been long. She told me about a building permit she'd been working on and a co-worker going through a divorce. I watched her while she talked. She ate the same as always. She held her spoon the same. Her head tilted slightly before she said something funny. I couldn't point to what was different. I sat there and watched her. I didn't say anything else about the three days. I had decided, sitting at that table with her work badge in my hand, that I wasn't going to say anything else about it until I understood what I was looking at. After dinner, she did the dishes. I dried. She asked if I wanted to watch something and I said I had a headache. She kissed me on the forehead and said she was going to read in bed for a while. When I heard the bedroom door close upstairs, I went back to the kitchen island and opened her purse again. The work badge was still there. I took the stub out and held it under the light. The print was real. The ink was real. The date was today. I put the stub back, closed the purse, and sat at the kitchen table for a long time. The next morning, I called the Kirkwood Police non-emergency line and asked to speak with the officer who'd taken my report. The receptionist asked for the report, but I didn't have a report number. I told her I didn't have a report number. I told her I'd filed a missing persons report on my wife three days ago. She put me on hold. When she came back, she said there was no missing persons report under my name or my wife's name. She said she'd checked the system twice. I said a young officer had come to the house. He'd taken a photograph. He'd filled out paperwork. He'd asked me where I could go and stay. Sir, I'm looking at the call line. We have no record of a unit being dispatched to your address. That's not possible. She said, Sir, if your wife is home now, that's all that matters. I hung up. I called Diane. Her voice was carefully calm. I told her Elise had come back and that I wanted to ask her about the calls I'd made earlier in the week. Diane was quiet for a long time. Patrick. You did call me. I'm not going to lie to you about that, but you weren't making sense. You called me at six in the morning on Tuesday and said Elise had been gone for three days. You called me twice more that day, the third time you didn't seem to remember the first two. I didn't say anything. She said, I drove over Tuesday afternoon. You weren't home. I rang the doorbell. I went around to the back. Your car was in the garage. I waited on the porch for an hour. You never came to the door. Elise wasn't there. The house was empty. I'm worried about you. I've been worried about you for a long time. I said I had to go. I hung up. I didn't call her back. What I did was start keeping a list. I bought a notebook at the Walgreens on Manchester, a small black one, and I kept it in the inside pocket of the jacket I wore around the house. When Elise wasn't in the room, I wrote things down. The first entry was the song. She'd been standing at the sink that morning, rinsing out the coffee pot, and she'd been humming. I didn't know the song. I've been listening to Elise hum songs for twenty years. There were maybe five songs she returned to, the same ones, year after year. This was none of them. It was something slow, in a minor key, that I'd never heard her sing before. I wrote, "She is humming a song I don't know." The second entry was the coffee. She made it like always, with the same brand, the same scoop, the same amount of water. But she'd moved the sugar. Elise had kept the sugar in the cabinet to the right of the stove for as long as I could remember. That morning I found her reaching for the cabinet to the left. I wrote, "Sugar in the wrong cabinet." She knew where it was, like she'd been doing it that way for a while. By the end of the week, I'd filled six pages. She left her shoes in the front hall instead of the closet. She drank her tea with milk instead of without. She put the toilet paper roll on the dispenser the wrong way. None of these were things I would have noticed in another woman. They were only wrong because they were Elise, and Elise had been a specific person for two decades, and the person sleeping in our bed was doing things that specific Elise didn't do. On Friday, I found a coffee mug in the bathroom upstairs. I hadn't put it there. I'd been drinking coffee that morning at the kitchen table, and I remembered finishing it and rinsing the mug and putting it in the dish rack. The mug in the bathroom had cold coffee in it. I wrote it down. I didn't ask Elise about it. On Sunday, I went into the kitchen to make a sandwich and realized I'd been standing in the kitchen for an unknown amount of time without making one. There was a clean knife on the cutting board. The bread was out. I didn't remember coming downstairs. I wrote that one in the notebook and underlined it. I told myself she was rearranging the house in small ways to see whether I'd notice. I didn't have an explanation for the time I'd spent in the kitchen without remembering it, but I told myself I was tired. I converted the spare bedroom into something else. It had been a guest room for a few years. It had a single bed against one wall, a dresser, a chair by the window. I moved the bed into the basement. I moved the chair to the desk. I bought a small padlock for the door, the kind you might use on a high school locker. I told Elise I was setting up a study for some work I'd brought home. She nodded the way she nodded when I told her anything about my job. With the polite attention you give a person talking about something you don't really care about. She didn't ask to see the room. I put the notebook in the top drawer of the desk. I put the empty man pages I'd printed off her bookmarks in a folder beside it. I added a second notebook, a larger one, to begin keeping a proper record. When I opened the second notebook to write the first entry, I noticed the inside cover already had something written on it. I wrote, It was a single line in my own handwriting that I didn't remember writing. It said, she is not the one you think she is. I stared at it for a long time. I told myself I'd written it that morning when I picked the notebook off the rack at the Walgreens and I'd simply not remembered. I told myself the handwriting was mine, which it was, and that I had no other explanation. I closed the notebook. I locked the door of the study behind me on my way out. I went downstairs to have dinner with my wife. I began watching her at night. For the first few nights, I'd lie on my back with my eyes mostly closed and breathe like a man who's asleep. Elise read in bed for about half an hour after she turned out the overhead light. And she read at an angle that put the lamp's spill on her pillow and not on mine. She turned the pages with the dry, regular sound of a person reading something she was enjoying. She didn't look at me. She didn't get out of bed. After she put the book down, she slept like she always slept. On her left side, with her right hand under the pillow, breathing slow and quiet. She didn't move much. She didn't talk in her sleep. She didn't sit up in the dark or stand by the window or go down the hall and do something I could later write down. She slept like a tired woman who'd worked all week, and in the morning she got up and made coffee. I watched her for three nights. And got nothing. I didn't write down the nothing. I told myself she was waiting for me to relax my watch. I started designing what I thought of as tests. I'd ask her about something only the real Elise would know. The first one I tried was over breakfast on a Thursday morning. I asked her if she remembered the name of the cat she'd kept in college, the one with the chewed-up ear that her roommate had brought home from the shelter. She looked at me over her toast and said, "You mean Mr. Bingley?" Then she laughed at me and said, "Patrick, are you trying to test me?" I said no. I said I'd just been thinking about him. She passed the second test the same day. She passed the third the day after that. I asked her about the apartment we'd rented when we were first married on Lockwood Avenue. I asked her about the hospital in St. Charles where my father had died. died in 2002. I asked her about a small fight we'd been in at her cousin's wedding in 2009 that had ended in the parking lot. She answered all of them. She answered them quickly. She answered them without thinking. The version of Elise sitting at the kitchen table knew the same private histories the version I'd married had known, and she gave the answers with the slight rolling eye tone she used when she thought I was being silly. I decided she'd studied. I decided that whatever she was, she'd studied my wife thoroughly enough to imitate her without ever slipping. The fact that she passed every test was evidence of how prepared she was. First the air, then the light, and slowly the things you love begin to find each other. You create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Ugh, I hate Mondays. King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite? Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm. Hey, let's get back to work, please. But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm. King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it. I wrote this in the notebook. I tried physical tests next. I moved a small ceramic dish Elise kept on the windowsill. in the front hall, the one she dropped her keys in when she came home from work. I moved it two inches to the left. The next morning, the dish was still two inches to the left, with her keys in it. I told myself she hadn't noticed because she hadn't lived in this house long enough for the dish's exact placement to be habit. I marked a page in the novel she was reading by folding a corner over so I could see whether she'd notice and unfold it. She unfolded it within a day. Like she always did with corners she hadn't folded herself. I told myself this was a memorized response. I went into the bathroom on a Tuesday night to brush my teeth before bed and noticed, between brushing the top row and the bottom row, that I couldn't remember how I'd gotten there. I'd been in the kitchen rinsing a glass. I'd set the glass on the rack. I'd moved to turn off the light. The next thing I knew, I was standing at the bathroom sink with my mouth open. And the toothbrush in my hand, and the light over the mirror was on, and the small clock on the shelf above the toilet said it was 2:34 in the morning. I stood there for a minute. I looked at myself in the mirror. The man in the mirror had a mouth full of toothpaste, and a tired face and eyes that looked too steady. I spat into the sink. I rinsed. I turned off the light. I went back to bed. I lay next to Elise and listened to her. And listened to her breathing. I told myself I'd been awake longer than I'd thought. I told myself I'd gone downstairs at some point and forgotten, and come back up. I didn't write it in the notebook. On Friday afternoon, I went into the study and locked the door behind me and stayed in there until it was dark. I'd taken to bringing my dinner up on a plate and eating it at the desk. Elise had asked me once, gently, if I was alright. I told her work had gotten heavy, and I needed quiet. She'd said alright. She hadn't asked again. The second notebook was now half full. I'd pinned a few of the printed forum threads to the wall above the desk with thumbtacks. I'd begun a third notebook, a hardbound one I'd bought from the office supply store on Big Bend in which I was keeping what I thought of as the formal record. The first two notebooks were the field log. The third was the case file. In the case file, I'd written the dates of the three days Elise had been missing. I'd written out the calls I'd made on each day to the extent I could remember them. Some of them I couldn't remember at all. I left blanks where the gaps were. I had a section on the empty man, with quotations from the forum threads, and a section on Elise's behavior since her return, and a section I'd marked simply "conclusion." The conclusion section had a single entry. It said, "Whatever came back is not the woman I married." I sat at the desk that Friday evening with all three notebooks open in front of me, and I read it like I'd read briefs at work, paragraph by paragraph, looking for inconsistencies. I didn't find any. I went and stood in the doorway. I looked at the photograph of Elise I'd taken down from the dresser. And clipped to the wall as a reference. I said it out loud, to myself, in the empty room. "I know what she is now." I closed the door behind me. I put the padlock back on. I went downstairs. Elise was in the kitchen. She'd set out two plates and was pouring wine into two glasses. She turned and smiled at me and said, "I made the chicken you like." "Thank you. That sounds good." I sat down across from her. I ate the chicken. I drank the wine. I asked her about her day. And she told me about her day. And I asked the kinds of questions a husband asks his wife after twenty years of marriage. She answered them like Elise always answered them. When we went to bed that night, I kissed her goodnight. And I lay next to her and listened to her breathing. And I waited for her to fall asleep. Then, I lay in the dark. With my eyes open. And went through, in my head, step by step, what I was going to have to do. I didn't sleep that Friday night. I lay in the dark beside Elise and put the plan together in my head like I'd built a desk from a manual, piece by piece, in order. By the time the bedroom started to lighten with the first grey of the morning, I had the whole thing built. I didn't write it down. I didn't want it on a page where it could be read by anyone. I memorized it like I'd memorized things for school exams, with repetition. Going through it from beginning to end, and then end back to beginning. In the morning, I made breakfast. Elise was already up, sitting at the kitchen table in her robe, reading the news on her phone. She said good morning and asked if I'd slept. I said I'd slept fine. She poured me a cup of coffee from the pot she'd already made and slid it away. I drank it and ate the toast she'd put in front of me. We didn't talk much. After breakfast, I told her I had errands. She said all right. She kissed me at the door on the corner of my mouth, with her hand briefly on my chest. jaw. I drove out of the driveway and turned right on Adams. I don't remember the rest of the morning. I came back to myself in the parking lot of the Home Depot on Watson, sitting in the driver's seat of my car with a paper bag from a different store on the passenger seat and a receipt folded into my shirt pocket. I didn't look in the bag. I unfolded the receipt and looked at it. It listed three items. I recognized only one of them by name. The other two were abbreviations I could read but didn't understand. The total at the bottom said $63.41. I'd paid in cash. I sat in the car for a while. I looked at the steering wheel. I looked at the bag on the seat. I told myself I'd bought the items on purpose for the plan I'd built the night before. I'd simply not been paying attention to what I was buying. I told myself this was the kind of fog that happens when you're tired and rehearsing something in your head. I drove home. I carried the bag up to the study and put it in the bottom drawer of the desk under the third notebook. That afternoon, Elise asked if I wanted to go for a walk with her in Kirkwood Park. I said I had a headache. She went without. I watched her from the front window pulling her sweater on as she stepped off the porch. The afternoon was clear and cool and the sycamore in the yard had dropped most of its leaves. When she was a block away, I went up to the study and locked the door behind me. I opened the third notebook to add to the case file. I'd been writing each evening, a summary of what I'd observed that day. When I turned to the next blank page, I found it wasn't blank. There were three pages of writing in the notebook I hadn't done. The handwriting was mine. It was clearly mine. It was unmistakable. But I didn't remember writing the pages, and what was written on them wasn't what I would have written. The pages didn't refer to Elise. They didn't refer to the empty man by that name, the way the forum threads did. The pages were a set of short-numbered steps, and I had to read them one by one. I read the first one. Stand at the sink. Look at the mirror. Don't look at the corners of the room. I read the second one. Say it three times. Say it slowly. Don't change your tone of voice. The third was the words. The words themselves weren't English. They weren't in any language I recognized. They were spelled out phonetically, like you'd spell out the lyrics to a song you were learning by ear. The first syllable had a small mark above it that indicated stress. I tried, sitting at the desk, to read the syllables to myself silently. My mouth knew them. My mouth formed them without effort. I closed my mouth before any sound came out. I told myself Elise had written the pages. I told myself she. I told myself she'd used my handwriting because she'd been studying my handwriting like she'd been studying everything else about me. I told myself this was further evidence of what she was. I didn't put it in the case file as evidence. I didn't know what to do with it. I closed the notebook and put it back in the drawer and sat at the desk and looked at the wall. I sat for what I thought was a few minutes. When I looked up at the clock above the door, it had been more than an hour. I went downstairs. Elise had come back from her walk and was in the kitchen washing an apple at the sink. She turned and smiled and asked me if I wanted half. I said no, thank you. I sat at the kitchen table and a memory came up. I hadn't had in a long time. I was on a bridge. It was night. I was alone. The bridge was the footbridge that crosses the railroad cut at the bottom of Guyer Road, the one nobody uses much because it leads only to the back of the old commercial lot. I was standing in the middle of the bridge with my hands on the railing. I was whistling. I was whistling a sequence of notes I'd read in a comment thread, three short and one long, and then waiting. In the memory, I was standing in the middle of the bridge with my hands on the railing. I couldn't tell how old it was. I had no idea what year it was or what season. I knew only that I'd been standing on that bridge in the dark, whistling by myself, and that something had whistled back. The sound had come from below the bridge, from the railroad cut, where there was nothing but gravel and rust and weeds. In the memory, when something whistled back, I'd whistled again. I don't know what happened after that. The memory ended there. The next frame was missing. I sat in the kitchen at the table and stared at the wall and tried to put the memory in order with the rest of my life. I couldn't put it in order. I didn't know when it had happened. I didn't know how I'd gotten home from the bridge, or what time of night it had been, or what I'd been wearing. I told myself Elise had put the memory in my head somehow. I told myself this was something she could do. I knew, sitting there, that I didn't really believe it. Elise asked me if I was all right. I said I was tired. She said maybe I should rest before dinner. All right. I went upstairs. I sat on the bed in the bedroom in the late afternoon light and looked at the wall and the dresser and the lamp and the bedside table that had been hers for twenty years. I thought about the items in the bag in the study. I thought about the things I saw on the pages in the notebook. I thought about the bridge. I decided that night. I'd do it at three in the morning. The hour was the one the forum threads kept mentioning. Whatever she was, that was the hour she'd be most exposed. I wouldn't give her time to defend herself. I wouldn't give her time to talk me out of it. I'd go down to the study at midnight and stay there until it was time, and then I'd do what I'd decided in bed the night before. You can even save up to thirty-five dollars on your next fill-up. Kroger. Fresh, quality food. For everyone. Restrictions apply. Seaside or store for details. Trust us. I went down for dinner at six. I ate what she'd made. I helped her clean up. We watched a half hour of a show she liked. She laughed twice at it. I laughed once because I knew where the laugh was supposed to go. She went to bed at ten. I told her I was going to read in the study for a while. She said alright and asked me to come to bed soon. I said I would. I went to the study. I locked the door behind me. I sat at the desk in the lamplight and waited for the clock to move. The hands moved slowly. The plan I'd built was complete in my head, end to end. I went through it once. I went through it again. At some point, I got up to use the bathroom in the hall. That's the last thing I remember thinking, sitting there in the study chair, looking at the lamplight on the wall. I came back to my cell. I looked out the window. I saw the light. I saw myself standing in the upstairs bathroom in front of the sink. The light over the mirror was on. The cold water tap was running thin. The clock on the shelf above the toilet said 2:34 in the morning. I was speaking. I was speaking quietly into the mirror, like a man who doesn't want to wake the rest of the house. The words weren't English. They had a stress on the first syllable and a slight rolling sound in the third. I knew the words. They were the words from the page in the notebook in the study. They were the words I'd written without remembering writing them. I was on the third repetition. My mouth was a third of the way through the second word. I stopped. I stood there with my mouth half-open. The man in the mirror had his mouth half-open too. His eyes were the eyes I'd seen in the mirror weeks ago when I was up in the middle of the night and hadn't recognized myself. They were steady. They were calm. They were watching me from inside my own face. Then I felt it. I felt it like you feel a person standing behind you when you didn't know they were in the room. Not a noise, not a touch. Just a second presence in a space I'd thought was empty. The presence was in my body. It had been in my body for a long time. Then everything I'd been refusing to remember came back at once. I remembered the bathroom six months ago. I'd been sitting on the couch downstairs with three beers and the laptop open on my knees, reading a Reddit thread about a thing called The Empty Man. The thread was a list of comments under a post that had been deleted. Some of them were warning new readers not to try it. Some of them said the warnings were part of the bit. I'd laughed at the warnings. I'd told myself I'd do it once and prove it was nothing. I'd gone upstairs at two in the morning. I'd stood at this sink in front of this mirror and said, I'd said the words three times, the way the thread instructed, and then I'd gone back to bed. I'd felt nothing. I'd told myself nothing had happened. I hadn't thought about it for six months. I remembered the bridge, three years before that, a different forum, a different post, a whistling pattern, three short and one long. I'd gone to the footbridge over the railroad cut at the bottom of Guyer Road and whistled. I'd heard the answer. I'd whistled again. I'd walked home through quiet streets and gone to bed. I remembered other things, too. Smaller things. Names set into closets. Doors I'd knocked on when there was nobody on the other side. None of them had worked, I'd told myself. I'd been a man who liked to scratch at the edges of things to see whether the edges scratched back. Six months ago, at this sink, the edges had finally scratched back. I hadn't come back to bed that night the way I'd gone into the bathroom. I'd come back as something a little less full. The three days Elise had been missing hadn't happened. Elise had been home. Elise had been at work. Elise had gone to bed beside me every night that week, and I'd been somewhere else inside my own life for those days, doing things I couldn't now remember and would never remember. She hadn't known where I'd gone. She'd been trying for weeks. To figure out what was wrong with her husband. She'd searched the things she searched on her laptop because she'd found my notebooks and my forum bookmarks and the things I'd begun to write down in my sleep. She'd been waiting for me to come to her. The wrong details in her. The song she didn't know. The cabinet on the wrong side. The phone, face down. The shoes in the wrong place. None of those things had been wrong. Those were the small adjustments any wife makes to a house over months. And I'd simply not been there to notice them when she'd made them. The man in the mirror in front of me had been there. The man in the mirror had been moving through my life since April while I sat in my own head and watched. I started to cry. I want to say I cried for a long time, but I don't know how long it was. I don't know if any of that time was mine. I leaned forward and gripped the edge of the sink and felt the porcelain cold under my hands. I could feel my own hands, which is a thing you don't usually need to notice, and I made myself feel them very carefully because I knew I had only a few minutes. I left the bathroom and went down the hall and into our bedroom. She was asleep on her left side, with her right hand under the pillow. I knelt next to the bed. I shook her shoulder. She opened her eyes, and she said, "I'm sorry, I didn't know you were there. You're not alone." She opened her eyes. She squinted in the lamplight. She said, "What is it, sweetheart?" "Elise, you have to listen to me. You have to get up. You have to leave the house tonight, right now. Go to Diane's. Take the car. Don't come back." She sat up part of the way. Her hair was on one side of her face. She put her hand on mine. I said, "I'm not okay." "I haven't been okay for a long time. I did something. I tried something. I read on a website, and it worked. There's something in me. It's been here since the spring. I can't keep it out for long. I don't have much time, and I need you to leave." She looked at me for what I knew was only a few seconds, but felt much longer. She said, "Sweetheart, you had a nightmare. It's the middle of the night. Come to bed. We can talk about it in the morning." "Elise, please. I'm asking you, please. Just for tonight." "Patrick, stop. You're tired. You've been tired for months. I love you. Come to bed." She lifted my hand and kissed it on the second knuckle of the ring finger where my wedding ring sat. She rolled over onto her left side and put her right hand under the pillow. I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark. I tried to keep myself in my hand, but I couldn't. I tried to keep myself in my hands. I tried to keep myself in my face. I made myself feel the cold floor under my feet and the weight of my body on the mattress and the small movement of her breathing beside me. I tried to think about my mother. I tried to think about being a child. I tried to think about anything specific enough that the thing in me couldn't stand in it. I lost. There was no moment of it. When I looked up next, that I was standing instead of sitting, and that I was looking down at my sleeping wife with a face I could no longer control. A few days passed. I'm told I laughed at a movie we watched together on the couch on Saturday night. On the fourth morning, I came back into myself for a few seconds while standing in the bathroom in front of the mirror. The razor was in my hand. One side of my face was shaved. The other wasn't. There was a small piece of toilet paper stuck to my chin where I'd nicked myself on the first side. The man in the mirror looked back. He smiled and said, "Shh." She thinks he's getting better. "Hey guys, Rex here. Thanks for letting me keep you company tonight. I don't take that for granted. I'm going to have to go to bed. I've got to go to bed. I've got to go to bed." Whether you found me on YouTube or you're listening on Spotify, I'm so glad you're here. I try to put out two uploads a week so you'll never have to wait too long for me. Close your eyes. Get some rest. Good night. And I'll be here when you get back. And with low prices on fresh quality food plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Kroger. Fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. Find fall your way at Ross.