Chapter 1 The Box

The box had been sitting in the corner of my living room for weeks, and for weeks I pretended it wasn't there.

It wasn't even hidden. It wasn't tucked away in a closet or shoved under the bed. It sat out in the open, beside the radiator, a taped-up cardboard cube with his name scrawled across the side in thick black Sharpie. My ex. The box glared at me like a stray dog no one wanted to claim, and yet I couldn't bring myself to get rid of it.

Every morning, I stepped over it on my way to work. Every night, I walked past it to get to the couch, balancing takeout containers and the remote. Sometimes I'd catch myself staring at it during commercials, the way you stare at a spider in the corner of the room - too afraid to squash it, too unsettled to let it be.

I told myself I'd toss it tomorrow. Tomorrow, I'd drag it down three flights of stairs and dump it on the curb. Tomorrow, I'd erase the last trace of him. But tomorrow always turned into tomorrow again.

Maybe I kept it because throwing it away meant admitting it was over. Not just the fights, not just the betrayal, but the entire messy, intoxicating stretch of time we called "us." He cheated, yes. He lied. He turned out to be cruel in ways I should have seen coming. But getting rid of the box felt like deleting a whole chapter of my life, like none of it mattered.

And tonight, after too many sleepless weeks and too much cheap wine, I decided to open it.

It was almost midnight when I dragged it into the middle of the living room. The tape peeled away with a reluctant hiss, like the box itself wanted to stay sealed. Inside, I expected the usual breakup debris - old hoodies, socks, maybe a forgotten phone charger. Junk.

And that's what I found at first.

A crumpled sweatshirt that still smelled faintly of his cologne. A cracked iPhone charger. A baseball cap from a team he never actually followed. I pulled each item out with clinical detachment, like a surgeon extracting tumors. My chest felt tight, but I kept going.

At the bottom of the box was a stack of Polaroids bound with twine.

I froze. We weren't the sentimental type. He never wanted photos together. He hated being "sappy." The only pictures I remembered were blurry ones from my phone, half-candid, half-forced smiles. Yet here was a neat bundle of instant photographs, waiting for me.

I untied the twine with trembling fingers. The first picture almost made me smile. Him and me, grinning on a beach. My hair was tangled by the wind, my eyes squinting against the sun. His arm draped casually across my shoulders, like he owned me.

But we'd never gone to the beach together.

Not once.

I stared at the photo, willing myself to remember. Maybe it was before we met? No - I was in the picture. The me in the photo was laughing, cheeks flushed from sun, hair a little longer than I remembered. My bikini top was blue, the exact shade I used to like, but I never owned one like that.

The second photo: us in front of a glowing Christmas tree, ornaments glittering. He was in a ridiculous red sweater, and I wore one that matched, green with stitched reindeer across the chest. We were laughing over mugs of cocoa, marshmallows bobbing at the surface.

We never spent Christmas together.

The first December, he went home to his family. The second, he claimed he was too busy with work. By the third, we were already unraveling. I had never worn that sweater. I had never decorated that tree.

The next few Polaroids showed moments that felt eerily familiar and completely foreign at the same time. A dinner at a candlelit restaurant I didn't recognize. A picnic in a park that wasn't our city. Vacations, anniversaries, birthdays that never happened.

I flipped them faster and faster, my stomach clenching tighter with each one. On the back of every photo was a date written in his messy scrawl. 2016. 2017. 2018.

Years before we even met.

I should have stopped. I should have shoved them all back into the box and sealed it shut forever. But I didn't.

The last photo slipped free of the stack.

And it was me.

My breath caught.

Not smiling, not posing. Just me, asleep. My face slack, lips parted. My hair spilled across the pillow in familiar waves. My lamp glowing faintly beside me. My own sheets, my own room.

The date on the back: Yesterday.

The Polaroid fluttered out of my shaking hands and landed on the carpet.

I stared at it, frozen. A numb, prickling sensation spread through my chest and up my neck. My apartment felt suddenly too quiet, too still. I glanced toward the windows, toward the dark reflection of the living room in the glass.

That's when I heard it.

A faint click.

Like the sound of a camera shutter.

I whipped around, heart pounding. The sound had come from outside - my fire escape. I squinted at the window, my breath fogging the glass.

And in the reflection, just for a second, I saw her.

Me.

Standing outside, watching.