Ezra found Jamie where he always was on Saturdays, slouched on the low brick wall outside the rec centre, headphones half on, tapping something out on his phone. A water bottle sat by his feet, and he was already slick with sweat from the heat. Ezra did not slow his pace; he simply dropped onto the wall beside him as if gravity had pulled him there.

Jamie glanced up and grinned. “You look like you’ve been run over by a Leaving Cert revision guide.”

Ezra ignored the joke. “Do you remember Willow?”

Jamie blinked. “Who?”

“Willow Archer.”

A pause. Jamie frowned slightly, as though searching the back of his mind. “Is she in our year?”

“My girlfriend,” Ezra said, too fast. “Since Halloween. You met her, like, a dozen times. She came to the pizza night when your cousin was in town. She called him ‘mini-you’. You laughed so hard you nearly choked.”

Jamie gave him a slow, wary look. “Ez… that was Melanie.”

“No.” Ezra’s voice cracked on the word. “That was not Melanie. Melanie hated your cousin. She used to say he has the eyes of a serial killer.”

Jamie snorted. “I mean… fair.”

“I’m serious.”

“You dated Melanie,” Jamie said firmly. “You broke up before last Christmas, and then you’ve just been… I don’t know, single? Quiet. Not a bad thing, mate.”

Ezra stared at him. “You’re telling me you’ve never heard of Willow Archer? Not once?”

Jamie shifted uncomfortably. “Are you okay?”

Ezra stood abruptly and started pacing in a tight circle. “She was real. You were there the night she lost her scarf on the way to the cinema, and we spent ten minutes walking backwards to find it. She had glitter boots. You made some joke about her auditioning for Strictly Come Dancing.”

Jamie looked blank. “I don’t, I swear, I think maybe you dreamt this. Or you’re mixing people up. Or… maybe it’s one of those false memory things.”

Ezra turned to him, his heart pounding. “What if it’s not a false memory? What if I’m the only one who remembers her, and something has… changed everything else?”

Jamie hesitated, then said carefully, “You mean, like… a glitch in the Matrix?”

Ezra did not laugh. “I’m being serious,” he said. “What if reality rewrote itself? What if the version we’re in now doesn’t include her, but I didn’t get reset with the rest of you?”

Jamie gave him a long look. Not mocking. Not quite pitying. Just… lost. “Mate, I think you need sleep. Or food. Or both. You sound like you’ve been reading conspiracy threads again.”

“I haven’t,” Ezra snapped. “This isn’t internet nonsense. This is real. She’s real, and I’m the only one who remembers her.”

Jamie opened his mouth, then shut it again.

Ezra sat back down. His hands were still shaking. “If no one else remembers her, does that mean she’s not real?”

Jamie rubbed his jaw. “I mean… if you’re the only one who remembers, then yeah. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe your brain made her up.”

“But what if that’s the point?” Ezra said, his voice dropping to a near whisper. “What if being remembered is what makes you real? What if memory is the only thing that keeps people here?”

Jamie was quiet.

Ezra stared straight ahead. His voice was quieter now. “People think time is linear but what if it’s not? What if it folds, like a piece of paper? What if we’ve lived this before, and Willow was erased in one version, and I’m the bleed-over? The crack?”

“That’s… a lot,” Jamie said finally.

Ezra let out a bitter laugh. “Tell me about it.”

“I think you should talk to someone,” Jamie said, not unkindly. “Properly, I mean. Not your dad telling you to unplug.”

Ezra did not answer. The trees across the street shifted in the wind. Sunlight caught on passing car windows. Everything was too ordinary. “She kissed me in the photo booth at the Halloween carnival,” Ezra said suddenly. “To shut me up. She was laughing and embarrassed, and I was being loud, and she kissed me.”

Jamie tilted his head. “There was a photo booth at Halloween, yeah. I remember that but you didn’t go with anyone.”

“I went with her.”

Jamie raised his hands. “I’m just telling you what I remember.”

Ezra stared at his own shoes. “And what if what you remember is wrong?”

“Then… I guess I wouldn’t know.”

They sat in silence for a while. A group of younger kids ran past them, chasing a football and shouting half-formed rules. The world continued. The world was indifferent.

Ezra’s chest hurt. “I just don’t understand how someone can matter that much and then vanish,” he said. “Like she never happened.”

Jamie said nothing.

Ezra did not expect him to. How could anyone understand? The words felt hollow, inadequate to describe the gaping void Willow had left. He needed to talk to someone who might have a sliver of an idea, someone who moved in the same circles, who might have seen her, heard something. Someone who, like him, felt the edges of the world fraying.

He found Paige sitting alone on the steps outside the library, legs crossed, bag beside her, a half-eaten cereal bar balanced on her knee. She was scribbling in a battered notebook with a pen that had been chewed nearly to death. A strand of her dark fringe kept falling across her face, and she kept blowing it away with a huff, only for it to slide back again.

She did not look up when he stopped in front of her. “I know this is going to sound completely mental,” Ezra said, his voice strained. “But I need to ask you something.”

Paige glanced up. Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Okay. Good morning to you too, I guess.”

He sat down beside her. “Do you remember a girl named Willow Archer?”

There was a pause.

Just a beat too long.

She looked at him, really looked. “Is this a test?”

Ezra turned his body to face her. “No. Just answer.”

She furrowed her brow. “The name’s… familiar. Kind of.”

Ezra’s breath hitched.

“I don’t know why, though,” Paige went on. “It’s one of those names that sounds like you should know it. Like it’s stuck in the back of your mind or something. Why?”

Ezra hesitated. His chest had gone tight again, but this time it was not anxiety. It was something that felt like fragile hope. “Because I remember her,” he said. “Really clearly, but no one else does. Not Jamie. Not my parents. Not even the school. It’s like she’s been erased.”

Paige frowned, closing her notebook. “You think someone’s erased her?”

“I don’t know what I think,” he admitted. “You remembered something just now.”

She was silent for a long moment. Her thumb brushed the edge of the cereal bar wrapper. “Sometimes I get these gaps. Little ones. Like when you walk into a room and forget what you came in for. Only it’s not a thing I forgot… it’s a person. A presence.”

“That’s exactly what this feels like.” He pulled out his phone, already open to the photo app. “I don’t have anything of her left. Everything’s gone. But this…” He scrolled back through his photos until he found it. A photo from Halloween. A group of them at the carnival, half-lit by the ride lights. Jamie in his stupid vampire cape. Himself in a hoodie with pumpkin face paint. And someone else, slightly off to the side, just enough to be blurred. Her face was smeared like a thumb had dragged through it, not digitally but physically. The edges looked glitched. Her outline was still there, and on her wrist, there was a glittering charm bracelet.

Paige leaned closer. Her head tilted. “That bracelet,” she said. “I’ve seen that before.”

Ezra’s heart skipped. “Where?”

Paige shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. Not in person, but I recognize it. I swear I do.”

“Willow wore it every day,” Ezra said. “She got it from a market in Barcelona. It had a little cloud charm because she loved storms.”

“I remember…” Paige trailed off, then shook her head. “No. That’s not right. Or maybe it is. I don’t know.”

“You do remember something,” Ezra pressed, leaning in.

Paige was staring at the phone again. Her lips were slightly parted. “It’s like déjà vu, but sharper. Like I’m about to remember something important and then it slips away.”

Ezra sat back, the phone resting in his lap. “You believe me,” he said, a fragile hope in his voice.

“I believe something weird is going on if you say you’ve looked everywhere and you cannot find any trace of someone you vividly remember,” Paige said. “I believe that name doesn’t feel like a stranger’s name, and that this photo isn’t just a glitch. I believe you’re not making it up.”

Ezra let out a shaky breath.

Paige looked at him, her voice softening. “How long?”

“Since this morning.”

“Feels longer than that, doesn’t it?”

He nodded.

She tucked her notebook away and stood, brushing crumbs off her trousers. “Okay. Let’s find her.”

Ezra blinked up at her. “What?”

“You said she’s been erased. So, let’s undo it, or at least figure out why it happened.”

“You’re serious?”

“I’ve seen weirder things on Reddit,” Paige said with a wry smile. “Besides, if someone can vanish like that, I’d want someone to remember me too and find out what happened.”

Ezra stood. The light had changed. It was softer now, more golden than white. Somewhere nearby, a bird shrieked, and the sound was sudden and loud.

For the first time all day, he did not feel completely alone.

CONTINUE READING