I woke up with full recollection of the dream, but like most nightmares, it fades fast. And then there’s nothing left but a general feeling of uneasiness and fear.
And as I linger there in bed, half awake and listening to the sounds in the house, I hear Adam talking to Maggie downstairs.
Last night did not exactly go as planned. But it was close enough.
And anyway, I have a theory I’m working on. Adam isn’t going to be with me until he’s with McKay. It’s not really me he wants. I was just there last night.
I am Misha. God, that bothers me. But I am Misha. That’s how he sees me. Just someone to take his mind off McKay.
I have plans today though. Lots of them. And none of them have anything to do with Adam. So I stop thinking about Misha. And anyway, she’s dead.
I only asked Donovan to kiss McKay because I knew I could make Adam jealous if he saw that. And I know he wants to believe that he’s one hundred percent in control, one hundred percent of the time, but he’s not.
He can spend the day with McKay for all I care. I’m on a mission to find answers.
I have two journals these days.
This is something no one knows about. I have the one Adam gave me for my last birthday and the one I found in the law library on the third floor.
No one goes up to the third floor. The AC doesn’t work right up there and the whole place smells like mold.
I don’t know who the lawyer was in Adam’s family. I can’t picture anyone that high up in rank actually… working for a living. A real job, I mean. Because, of course, killing people is work. And whatever Adam’s father did, I’m sure that was work too. But I know he wasn’t the lawyer in the family because the books on the shelves all date back to the early nineteen hundreds.
Anyway, this is all beside the point and entirely off topic. I went up to the third-floor law library looking for a space to write in the new journal Adam gave me because I still have things to reconcile in my head. I miss my old bedroom. I’m not jealous that it now belongs to Maggie. She needs her own space. And that room was made for a little girl and I’m grown up now.
But I need my own space too. I can’t just flutter from room to room, sleeping here and there. It’s not right. The law library isn’t going to be that space. It’s dusty and hot.
So I went over to the other side of Old Home. The side we don’t use. There are a lot of bedrooms over there. It’s not two floors, though. Only one. This is the original part of the house. I’ve seen pictures of it before the main part—the big, grand part—was added sometime around the turn of the last century.
It’s really just a long hallway with a wall of windows on one side and lots of doors on the other. Kinda like an enclosed breezeway. At the end of that hallway is a big room with a beamed ceiling, a living room with a big stone fireplace and a whole wall of French doors that lead out to the back garden, which has always been neglected. But there’s a path out there that leads to the river. Nathan and I used to play on that path all the time.
This part of the house was remodeled with the rest of Old Home just before I came to live here. And it was open for a while back then. There’s a TV in there. It’s all furnished and everything. Real nice.
But we just never spent no time in there. It was too far away from everything else. So after a year or so Adam just put some white sheets on everything and shut the door to the hallway with the windows and we kinda forgot about it.
But I have now claimed it as my own. It’s maybe a little bit big for a private space. But no one else uses it, so fuck it. This wing is mine now.
I need privacy because there are a lot of inconsistencies in my head.
Such as those four missing years when no one knew where I was. That part of my memory never came back. I’m sure Donovan is happy about that because if they did, he’d have to pay a lot more attention to me than he does now. And I get the feeling that Donovan’s babysitting days are over. He spends a lot of time in his new Pearl Springs office doing his own thing. I guess he decided he needed his own space too.
Anyway, I’m going back and forth here. Getting things all twisted in typical Indie fashion.
Up in the law library—before I realized that room was not going to be my space and I was going to claim the unused wing on the other side of the house instead—I found an old journal.
It’s an empty one and the pages are all yellow and old. But I like that about it. It makes things feel authentic. I started another timeline in that journal. I want the new one, the one Adam gave me, to be about the future. About my dreams and stuff. If I ever have dreams.
But I want the old one to be about the past.
I found a bunch of shit up there, actually. All of them were old things. Dusty. And weird too. I found some World War II medals in cases lined with ratty stained satin. But the weird thing about those, they were not American medals. Not German, either. Thank God. I had a little panic attack at first imagining them to be German and all the things that would come with that. But when I read the words, I recognized them as Dutch. Also strange, because Adam’s family is French, not Dutch, but at least they weren’t German. And maybe that wasn’t so weird, anyway. Adam speaks a lot of languages and Dutch is one of them. There has to be a reason he was taught that language as a boy. So whatever. I just put them back where I found them.
There were some guns too. Ancient rifles that you have to load with powder. And one newer-looking pistol that took me a while to recognize as a tranquilizer gun, like the kind you use on wild animals.
Again, I’m off topic.
The topic is this:
Why, when Indie starts a journal about the past, does the first page always begin with the sentence Nathan St. James was the boy next door?
That’s my question. Because every time I start a new entry and go thinking about the past, that same sentence is the only thing I’m able to write.
It’s like someone has put a magic spell on me. Like I’m an unfortunate princess in a fucking fairytale.
Or… someone has PSYOPSed me. Someone put this particular sentence inside my head and the trigger is me trying to write down anything that happened before the day I was bought in that auction on the island.
The future I can write about, that’s just fine. No problem writing about the future. The missing four years aren’t affected at all. They are just one hundred percent missing.
I tried it another way too. I bought a digital recorder in the Pearl Springs drugstore. And I tried to start an audio journal.
Same thing happened.
Nathan St. James was the boy next door.
Which would be fine. Because that’s actually where the story starts. Mostly.
But I already wrote that fucking story. Word. For. Word. I saw it in the journal McKay found. Nathan St. James was the boy next door. That’s what it said. Very first line.
I didn’t panic when I first figured this out. Because I had the tapes and Donovan didn’t take them back after McKay and I listened to them all that night when the truth came out.
Those were me and Donovan talking in our own words. That was my voice. That was his voice. And there was enough information in them to corroborate the story I wrote down in the journal McKay found. Angelica was on those tapes. Wendy was on those tapes. Nathan. Me. Donovan. McKay. Maggie. The jobs. The mistakes.