The ceiling creaked with Daniel's weight, each footstep deliberate and wrong. Mara knew his walk—the slight drag of his left foot, the careful placement of his right. This was different. Heavier. Like someone else wearing his body.
She climbed the stairs, pausing at the landing. The attic ladder groaned under shifting weight, and dust motes danced in the hallway light. Daniel never went up there. In two years of marriage, he'd claimed the attic held nothing but childhood junk and water damage.
"Daniel?" Her voice cracked the silence.
No response. Just the scrape of cardboard against wood, the rustle of paper.
She gripped the ladder's metal rungs, testing their stability. The wood was warped, bolts loose in their brackets. One wrong step and she'd crash through the ceiling into the living room below.
The attic stretched longer than she'd expected, following the house's Victorian roofline. Boxes lined the walls like tombstones, their contents bleeding through water-stained cardboard. Christmas decorations. Old textbooks. A child's rocking horse with one eye missing.
Daniel knelt in the far corner, his back to her. He'd pulled a wooden crate from behind the insulation, its contents scattered across the plywood floor. Photograph albums. Medical journals. A manila envelope thick with documents.
"What are you doing up here?"
He didn't turn around. Didn't acknowledge her presence. His hands moved methodically through the items, sorting them into piles with the precision of someone following orders.
"Daniel."
Still nothing. She crept closer, avoiding the exposed joists and electrical wiring. The floorboards sagged under her weight, threatening to buckle.
The crate bore a child's handwriting in faded marker: 𝘋𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘺'𝘴 𝘚𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 - 𝘋𝘰 𝘕𝘰𝘵 𝘛𝘰𝘶𝘤𝘩. Inside, she glimpsed report cards, finger paintings, a teddy bear with surgical scars where its stuffing had been removed and sewn back in.
But it was the cassette tape that made her blood freeze.
Daniel held it up to the light, examining the label. His lips moved silently, reading the words printed in careful block letters: 𝘊𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘺 – 𝘚𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 4 – 𝘚𝘶𝘣𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵: 𝘋. 𝘒𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘭𝘦𝘳, 𝘈𝘨𝘦 8.
"Where did you get this?" The words escaped before she could stop them.
Daniel's head snapped toward her, eyes wide and unfocused. For a moment, he looked like a child caught breaking something precious. Then awareness flooded back, and he blinked rapidly.
"Mara? What... how long have you been there?"
"A few minutes. You were—" She gestured at the scattered contents. "You were going through this box."
He looked down at the cassette in his hands, confusion creasing his forehead. "I don't remember coming up here. I was lying down, and then..." He shook his head. "The headache's getting worse."
"What's on the tape?"
"I don't know." He set it down carefully, as if it might explode. "I haven't seen this stuff in years. My mother packed it all away before she went into the hospital."
Mara knelt beside him, studying the other items. The medical journals were annotated in a woman's handwriting—Daniel's mother, she assumed. Notes in the margins referenced dissociative episodes, memory fragmentation, experimental treatments.
"Your mother was a doctor?"
"Nurse. Psychiatric nurse." Daniel's voice was flat, distant. "She worked at Haven Creek before... before her breakdown."
The name hit Mara like a physical blow. Haven Creek. The facility where she'd been treated as a teenager. Where she'd met—
"Daniel, I need to tell you something."
But he was already reaching for another item in the box: a photograph of a young boy standing beside a hospital bed. The child's face was Daniel's, but his eyes were wrong. Empty. Hollow as a ventriloquist's dummy.
"I remember this picture," he whispered. "She took it after one of my sessions. I'd been having episodes—losing time, waking up in strange places. The doctors said it was trauma response from witnessing her suicide attempt."
"What kind of sessions?"
"Therapy. Group therapy with other children." He traced the photograph's edge with his fingertip. "We called it the cleaving room. I never understood why."
Mara's chest tightened. She knew what cleaving therapy was—had read about it in psychology journals. An experimental treatment for childhood trauma, involving the deliberate fracturing of memory and identity. The idea was to separate traumatic experiences from the core personality, creating mental compartments that could be sealed off.
It had been banned in the early 1990s after multiple patient suicides.
"Daniel, what year was this taken?"
"1997, maybe? I was eight." He flipped the photograph over. His mother's handwriting covered the back: 𝘈𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘚𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 4. 𝘚𝘶𝘣𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘸𝘴 𝘦𝘹𝘤𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘶𝘨𝘨𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. 𝘔𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘣𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨. 𝘙𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵.
"Your mother was experimenting on you."
"What?" He looked up sharply. "No, she was helping me. She was trying to help me forget the bad things."
"The bad things like what?"
"I don't... I can't..." His hands pressed against his temples. "It's all fragmented. Pieces. A woman screaming. Blood on the bathroom floor. My mother's face in the bathtub, her eyes..."
"Daniel, stop. You're hurting yourself."
But he was already reaching for the cassette tape, his movements jerky and mechanical. "I need to hear it. I need to understand what she did to me."
"No." Mara grabbed his wrist. "We should take this to someone qualified. A proper therapist."
"I am a proper therapist." His voice was sharp, defensive. "I know what I'm doing."
"You don't remember treating Clara Nguyen."
"That's different."
"Is it?"
He pulled free from her grip, clutching the tape. "This is my childhood. My trauma. I have a right to know what happened to me."
"And what if it makes things worse? What if it triggers another episode?"
"Then maybe I'll finally remember killing that girl."
The words hung in the dusty air like smoke. Mara felt the truth of them in her bones, the weight of confession and dread.
"You didn't kill Clara."
"How can you be sure?"
"Because..." She swallowed hard, tasting copper and fear. "Because I was there."
Daniel's face went blank. The cassette tape slipped from his fingers, clattering against the plywood floor.
"What did you say?"
"I was at the cliffs that night. I saw what happened." The lie came easily, practiced. "You weren't there, Daniel. You were home with me."
"Then who—"
"I don't know. But it wasn't you."
He stared at her for a long moment, searching her face for truth. Finally, he nodded slowly.
"Okay. I believe you." He reached for the tape again. "But I still need to hear this. I need to understand what my mother did to me."
"Then we listen together."
"No." His voice was firm. "This is something I need to do alone."
Mara watched him gather the items back into the crate, her pulse hammering in her throat. The cassette tape gleamed in the dim light, its promise of revelation both terrible and irresistible.
She knew what was on that tape. Had heard her own voice on recordings like it, young and terrified and desperate to please. The voice of a child learning to fracture herself into manageable pieces.
The voice of a patient who had learned to become something else entirely.
Daniel was already heading for the ladder, crate in his arms. In an hour, he'd be in his study with a tape player and headphones, listening to the systematic destruction of his childhood psyche.
And when he heard the second voice on that recording—the voice of his young therapist-in-training, the girl who'd been given a new name and a new identity and permission to practice on the other broken children—he would finally understand what she'd helped them both become.
The floorboards creaked as Mara followed him down the ladder. Behind them, dust settled over the empty space where the crate had been, and something small and metallic caught the light.
A cassette tape. Not the one Daniel had taken, but another, labeled in the same careful handwriting: 𝘚𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 4 - 𝘚𝘶𝘣𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵: 𝘔. 𝘓𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘸𝘰𝘰𝘥, 𝘈𝘨𝘦 16.
She pocketed it quickly, her hands shaking.
In the distance, she heard Daniel's study door close with a decisive click.