Part I

The first time I heard the accusation, it rode in on the back of a question. Janelle walked into the living room in yesterday’s sweatshirt and a bun that meant business and said, “Did you hear the doorbell ring at 3:51 a.m. last night?”

I paused the TV mid-sitcom and laughed like a normal person who trusts her life. “No. Why, did you?”

Janelle didn’t laugh back. Her face was the color of old porcelain; her mouth, a thin mean line. “I knew you were a selfish pig,” she said, like she was reading from a script that had been rehearsed in a room I hadn’t been invited to. Then she turned, walked to her bedroom, and locked the door from the inside.

I sat there with the remote still hovering in my hand, the paused sitcom character smiling like a plastic saint. I told myself Janelle was on her period or hadn’t had coffee or had been up with cramps and resentment coloring the edges of time. I told myself a lot of charitable things because it’s what I do when the world feels misaligned—I sand the corners so I don’t cut my palms.

I didn’t know yet that the cuts were already there. I was just too polite to bleed in public.

In the kitchen, you could hear the hush that only comes when words have just been spoken and judgements have just been cast. Ria stood by the sink like she was guarding it. Lindsay leaned against the counter with her arms crossed, eyes fixed on the tile. My entrance sucked the oxygen out of the room.

“We can’t believe you,” Ria said finally, her voice the kind that’s used to following group chats into conclusions.

I tried to make a joke, because humor is my umbrella when it rains. “What is this, an intervention about using the last of the almond milk? Because I left a Post-it—”

“Can someone please tell me what’s going on?” I pulled a chair out to sit, some instinct for making a conversation possible, but Ria hooked it with her foot and dragged it away like I’d tried to occupy territory that wasn’t mine.

“You know exactly what you did,” she said. “I was asleep, like a normal person. You know I hate staying up late.”

“I—” I started, but my phone buzzed with a heavy insistence in my pocket. I pulled it out to escape their faces and saw it in a single blue block of light: sixteen missed calls from my mother. Sixteen. The number felt like a verdict.

I stepped back into the living room as I pressed her name. She picked up on the first ring and started sobbing so hard the sound made my body brace like it expected impact.

“I thought I raised you better,” she said between sips of air. “You promised—you told me—you promised you’d never do anything to hurt your future.”

“Mom, what are you talking about?” I said, but she was already hanging up. The red bar slid across my screen, and then the worst thing: the gray circle that meant I was suddenly a blocked number in my mother’s phone.

Back in the kitchen, Lindsay finally looked up. Her eyes were red, the rims raw, like she’d been crying on my behalf or against me. “Samuel saw you,” she whispered. “The whole basketball team saw you.”

Samuel. My boyfriend for eight months. My camera roll full of his mouth half-open in laughter. My nights tucked against his shoulder, pretending that shoulder would always be there. “Saw me what?” I asked, even though I didn’t want the noun that came after.

Lindsay didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. I opened Samuel’s chat and watched his contact photo evaporate like a magic trick. Blocked. The world was erasing me in front of witnesses.

“Even your sister called me,” Ria said, softer now. “She asked if you were okay. If you were on drugs or having a breakdown. And I told her no—you’re just a pick-me.”

The word landed in my gut like a stone: pick-me, the internet’s way of saying you want approval so bad you’ll deregulate your own oxygen.

“I have class,” I said, my voice careful, my face fixed. I didn’t want them to see me cry. I didn’t want to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me fracture. I grabbed my backpack and swung the door open like running could make the fire choose a different house.

On campus, I felt it immediately—the way air bends around scandal. People looked at me and then over my shoulder like they were scanning for cameras. I made it three steps toward my lecture hall before Dr. Rose, whose faith in me had been a lifeline all semester, intercepted me with a face like a shut door.

“The dean wants to see you now,” she said, crisp and professional, nowhere near the woman who once told me I wrote like someone who knew she was allowed to take up space.

In the hallway, whispers moved like tidewater. My phone buzzed and trembled, flooded with numbers I didn’t know: Hey remember me from Tuesday night? You said I could crash whenever. Can I come by tonight?; You promised; Where’s the key? DMs poured like a leak I couldn’t find. I switched to Do Not Disturb, but silence doesn’t unring a bell.

The dean’s office was a stage set with opposing forces: my academic adviser with a brittle smile; two security guards with arms crossed like gates; a woman from student housing whose clipboard looked heavy with offenses. When they said my name, it sounded like a case file.

“Thirty-seven complaints in two weeks,” the housing woman said, each page flip a tiny gavel. “Endangering campus safety. Letting strangers into restricted buildings at four in the morning. The dining hall. The computer lab.”

“I don’t remember any of this,” I said, honest as the inside of my mouth.

“It’s a safe space to tell us the truth,” the dean said in that oily empathetic tone people use when they’ve already decided who you are.

Security footage, they told me. They had it. They showed me nothing; they told me everything. You swiped your student ID repeatedly at 4:03 a.m. to let a group of people into the dining hall. You held the door. You stood back while they loaded backpacks with food. In the computer lab, expensive equipment had gone missing. We have logs of your access. You were there.

I kept saying, “I don’t remember,” like I could cash those words in for an alibi.

Two options, they said, delivered like mercy. Voluntary leave of absence for medical evaluation, or formal expulsion proceedings. The sentence hung between them like a tightrope. I chose the medical leave the way you choose air.

When I returned to the apartment, my life was already bagged and sweating on the front lawn. Trash bags slit, the contents peeking out like organs. Someone had unceremoniously taped EMERGENCY EVICTION on the door; the vote had taken place while I was sitting under fluorescent lights explaining that I didn’t remember. I stacked boxes in my trunk over and over until the action felt like penance.

My bank called while I stood in the noisy sanctuary of my car. “Suspicious activity,” said a woman whose concern was purely procedural. $800 ATM withdrawal at 4:27 a.m.; $600 at 3:58 a.m.; multiple days, always around the same hour. All those numbers, all those early mornings I had not visited. When she finished reading the charges, she asked me to confirm whether I recognized any of them. “I’m asleep at those times,” I said, and heard how ridiculous it sounded, like a child’s excuse: the monster did it when I wasn’t looking.

My manager called next, but she didn’t use my name like it belonged to me. She said they had footage from the store: me at 3:00 a.m., loading merchandise into bags, talking to empty air like it had a voice I could hear. “You looked possessed,” she said, and I wanted to laugh because if you can’t laugh at the horror movie you’re suddenly in, what else can you do? But no sound came out. “We have to terminate you,” she added, and I swallowed that verb whole.

Something inside me snapped taut. I marched back up the apartment stairs and pounded on the door like I didn’t care who called the cops. “Open up,” I yelled. “I know you’re in there.”

Mrs. Kathy from next door cracked her door, took one look at me with my mascara smeared and my fists on the wood, and retreated like I was contagious. After five minutes, the chain slid and Janelle’s face appeared, composed like a judge. “You need to leave before we call the cops,” she said.

“My entire life is destroyed and I don’t even know why,” I told her, my voice shaking like something trapped in a jar. “I have a right to see what you showed everyone.”

“You don’t want to see it,” she said, and there was something almost kind in her eyes for a second. “It’ll make everything worse.”

“Worse than being homeless? Worse than losing school, my job, my boyfriend, my mother?” I pressed harder against the door. “Show me.”

Behind her, I could hear the murmurs of an audience. Somebody was definitely dialing security. “I’ll stand here all night,” I said, and believed it.

“Fine,” Janelle said, yanking the door open so fast I almost fell forward. “But when this breaks you, remember you literally forced me to show you.”

She grabbed her laptop from the counter while Lindsay and Ria hovered in doorways like sentries. The desktop bloomed into a field of evidence: dozens of video files organized by date, neat as a war cemetery. Janelle clicked one from last Tuesday.

The screen showed our apartment hallway, the timestamp a brand: 03:40:12. There I was. Me—in my oversized Lakers shirt I always slept in, hair mashed to one side, eyes wide open and empty, like two lights on in a house nobody lives in. I watched myself undo the locks in the practiced sequence your hands learn: top latch, bottom chain, deadbolt. I opened the door and stood there, not moving, talking to someone just out of sight.

In the video, my mouth moved and my hands fluttered, that nervous thing I do when I explain something. I nodded. I laughed. Then I stepped aside like a hostess and a man walked in—a stranger with a baseball cap pulled low, the brim a shadow that insisted. He walked straight to the kitchen and opened our fridge while I stood there, blank-eyed and docile, like I was playing a role only he knew the lines to.

Janelle clicked to the living room camera. A second angle: the man on our couch, chewing leftover lo mein out of the carton with our communal fork. There I was beside him, holding my wallet like it was a bouquet and peeling bills out to place in his palm. I watched the bills disappear like paper birds into a dark sleeve.

My body remembered how to shake. Janelle opened another clip from two weeks earlier, 04:15:09. There I was again, the same Lakers shirt, now a uniform of my undoing. I dug through the drawer where we kept spare keys and batteries and menus, pulled out the spare apartment key, walked back to the hall, and handed it to the same man waiting outside. He patted my shoulder like we were old friends and I nodded like gratitude.

I pushed past Janelle, barely making it to the bathroom before I threw up everything I’d eaten, my throat on fire, my stomach an empty drum. I sat on the tile, my hands tight around the porcelain like it was the only solid thing left, the footage looping in my skull. Janelle knocked, her voice on the other side gentler than I deserved or worse than I could stand. “There’s more,” she said. “But I won’t show you unless Ria and Lindsay are here.”

“I’m here,” Ria said, sounding farther away than a few feet. “We’re here.”

I rinsed my mouth until the taste of acid was a memory. When I walked back out, the three of them were sitting on the couch like a jury trying to remember what mercy felt like. Janelle clicked through file after file while we all watched different versions of me do things I did not know my body could do without me in it.

The campus dining hall at 04:03:18: me swiping my ID over and over, holding the door as five or six strangers rushed in with empty backpacks that became full backpacks, as if hunger could legalize theft. One man stuffed entire loaves of bread into a bag. A woman piled fruit like she was making a pyramid on a game show. There I was, hands on the door, that blank look you wear when someone else is driving your face.

Lindsay made a sound like a balloon letting out its last breath. “I thought you were high,” she said, like she was confessing to a minor sin.

“In one,” Janelle said, her voice wooden, “you’re at the ATM. 03:47:52. You’re… pulling out cash. He’s behind you. His hand is on your shoulder.”

We watched it: me in slippers and a T-shirt under the brittle halo of an ATM camera. Me stabbing at buttons. The man’s hand resting on me like ownership. The cash spooling out obediently. My hand carving the air with green.

Another clip: the computer lab. Me unplugging cords, handing expensive equipment to a pair of arms just offscreen. Efficiency embodied by someone who wasn’t me.

I thought I would implode, a star folding in on itself, but instead I expanded into the worst possibilities and filled the room. “I need to figure out who he is,” I said. “What he’s been doing to me.”

“We tried,” Ria said, voice thin. “He’s not a student. He always hides his face. Campus security doesn’t recognize him from the partial shots.”

It was late, and we were all thready. Maybe that’s why when I asked for one night—one night inside, one night not alone—they nodded. Janelle found an old blanket and a pillow that smelled like the hall closet. They locked their doors. They left me the couch like a mercy or a quarantine.

I lay there on the cushions and stared up at the ceiling that I had looked at a thousand times before, safe and bored. The ceiling didn’t care. It just kept being itself. My phone vibrated like a tiny earthquake—unknown numbers asking if they could come by, reminding me of promises I had apparently made at hours I didn’t own. I set the phone face down on the coffee table like a shield.

At 05:00, I stopped pretending I could sleep and started writing in the Notes app because lists make me feel like a person. To do: Get copies of all security footage. Request bank records. Print ATM timestamps. Campus health—ask for emergency appointment. Police report. Housing appeal. Call Mom again. Please call Mom again.

By 07:00, Janelle found me still awake, the blanket tangled around my legs, my notes a nest around my knees. I asked for the videos. Please. Please. She hesitated long enough to shame me for existing. Then she uploaded everything—hundreds of megabytes of me being a stranger—to a cloud folder and gave me the password.

I spent three hours living inside the worst movie ever made about me. I made a timeline in a notebook with a purple gel pen because that’s what I had. Dates and times. Patterns emerged like mold when you pull back a couch. Two or three nights a week for three months. Always 03:00 to 05:00. Always him. Always me, awake and nowhere near awake.

My bank statement scrolled across my screen with its own private swagger: over $4,000 withdrawn during those hours, little green punctures where my life leaked out. The texts from strangers said things like You promised to get me into the lab and You said I could crash. Are you serious or what. One message contained our address, my own hand giving away the location I slept.

Everything suddenly clicked into place in the worst possible way. The accusations, the mistrust, the way my mother’s voice had sounded like a funeral. The way Samuel’s contact photo had vanished, a little murder on my screen.

The next morning, I walked into the bank with my notebook like it was a sword. They made me wait forty minutes under a painting of a sailboat that had never been in the same ocean as a storm. The fraud representative typed while I talked, her nails long enough to slow the story down. She froze my accounts, promised to pull ATM footage, slid forms across the desk for me to sign—three, four, five times my name on lines that tried to make sense of things.

Outside, in the car, I tried my mother again. This time I got her voicemail, and my voice betrayed me. I told her about the videos in a steady narrative until I reached the part where the stranger patted my shoulder, and then my steadiness cracked. “I’m scared,” I told the phone, which is to say I told no one. “Please call me back.”

The campus housing office wouldn’t let me into my old room. A woman behind glass pushed a business card toward me like it might bite me if I took it wrong. Campus Security—Ross Compton. In the basement of the administration building, Ross had the face of a man who had seen teenagers at their worst and still believed in locks. He listened while I told the story without embellishment. He pulled up footage from entrances around campus and scrubbed through timestamps with the efficiency of a surgeon.

“There,” he said. The dining hall entrance at 03:47. The man’s cap. The angle of his shoulders. “And there,” he added—another door, another hour, the computer lab. In one clip, you could see his hand on my elbow steering me when I hesitated at a corridor. The sight of that touch—a tiny contract—made me press my palms into my knees until it hurt. Ross burned everything onto a USB and slid it across his desk like a wealth I hadn’t wanted.

The campus health center said they were booked for two weeks. The woman at the desk gave me a smile that made me want to scream and scribbled sleep specialist on a sticky note like that solved any of this. The specialist’s office put me down for a date that sounded like fiction. Two weeks of nights between me and an answer.

That evening, I called Yasmin from statistics because we had once shared a study snack and I remembered she didn’t look away when people cried. I explained everything in the simplest possible language: I am not safe alone. She didn’t hesitate. “Come here,” she said. “We’ll figure it out.” At her apartment, we put my phone on airplane mode and propped it on her dresser recording the bed. She stuck a ten-dollar door alarm to the inside of her door. We were two undergrads playing at engineering a fortress.

At 03:30, the recording showed me sit up like something had poured electricity into my spine. My eyes were open and empty. I stood, reached for the door, and the little alarm started shrieking like a smoke detector with a grievance. Yasmin startled awake, grabbed my shoulders and turned me gently toward the bed. In the video, my mouth moved. I nodded. I agreed to terms no one else could hear.

In the morning, we watched the footage with our mouths going dry. “You were talking to someone,” Yasmin said quietly, like naming it would make it less monstrous. I nodded. I cried. She rubbed my back without making promises she couldn’t keep.

I took the USB to the police station, where the duty officer was bored until the man behind my shoulder appeared on the screen. Then he called a supervisor, and the room leaned forward. They took my statement and opened a case file under a name for what was happening to me that I had never heard before. They used words like exploited and vulnerable state and ongoing investigation. They said “we’ll be in touch,” and for once, it wasn’t a brush-off; it was a hope I was almost too tired to hold.

By the time I stepped back into the daylight, I knew this: whatever was happening to me lived in the space between waking and dream, but its consequences had their feet planted firmly in the real. It had taken my money, my job, my place to sleep, my boyfriend, and my mother’s confidence like trophies. But it hadn’t taken me. Not the part that makes lists and says please and asks for help and walks into offices with a notebook and a name.

When I returned to Yasmin’s, we taped bells to her doorknob because she said the sound would make her less terrified. We set our alarms in shifts. We lay in the dark and waited for the hour the videos loved.

“Did you ever hear the doorbell?” I asked, suddenly remembering Janelle’s question like a bruise pressed.

“At four in the morning?” Yasmin said, frowning. “No.”

“Janelle said—” I began, and stopped. Because I didn’t know who I believed anymore, except the screen with my face on it and the man who kept his eyes out of frame.

I closed my eyes. The dark behind my lids was busy. But Yasmin’s apartment breathed around me like a living thing, and for a while, I let it hold me. For a while, I slept.

Part II

The morning after Yasmin and I engineered our fortress from alarms and a ten-dollar siren, I walked across campus holding a paper bag of evidence like a lunch I didn’t want. It held the USB Ross had burned for me, the notebook with my purple-ink timeline, and a printed bank statement that looked like a yard of receipts glued together.

The light was sharp and indifferent. It made everything look cleaner than it felt.

Ross’s office lived in the building with the broken elevator and the smell of dust that belonged to every basement everywhere. He had coffee in a battered thermos and a desktop that looked like the bridge of a ship. When he saw the lines under my eyes—which must’ve looked like a stencil—he didn’t comment.

“You got sleep?” he asked instead, which somehow felt kinder.

“I got documentation,” I said, setting the bag on the desk between us like an offering.

He plugged the USB in and brought up the dining hall, the lab, the hallway outside my apartment. I had already memorized my own blank face; I didn’t flinch anymore when I saw myself open doors I didn’t remember touching. Ross watched my hands the way a chess player watches rooks.

“See that?” he said, pausing the frame. He zoomed on the edge of the image until pixel blocks turned into a picture. The brim of the baseball cap. The left hand on my elbow, steering. A jagged pale line cut across the back of that hand, shorter than a finger but deliberate—some old injury or a new reminder.

“A scar,” I said, my mouth dry. “Left hand.”

“And that,” he said, shifting to a camera outside the east entrance of the library. The man was just a silhouette, but he moved like someone who never bumped into things. “People who hide their faces forget their patterns,” Ross added, more to himself than to me. “Patterns tell on you.”

He pulled up the feeds from the entrances around campus, keyed in the nights on my timeline, and scrubbed until the images started repeating. The same guy. The same hoodie under different jackets. The same damn cap. Always between three and five in the morning, the miracle window where shame doesn’t even bother to set an alarm.

“Parking lot?” I asked, feeling the question tug at something useful.

“Working on it,” he said, already typing. He split the screen in two: one camera showed the sidewalk near my building, the other watched the street that faced the lot. A rideshare sedan showed up in both frames like a recurring extra. The timestamp made a fist in my chest.

“Three-forty-one,” I read aloud.

“That car is in front of your building ten minutes before you come out,” he said, scrubbing forward to the second when the driver’s side light blinked twice like a secret. “Every time.”

“A rideshare,” I said, though he hadn’t named it yet. The sticker on the windshield caught the streetlight and flashed a little logo back at me. “So he doesn’t even risk his own car.”

“Smart,” Ross said, with grudging respect he immediately swallowed. He dragged the timeline back and forth. The same sedan, two different nights, same pattern. “Plate’s covered by glare here,” he said, frustration flicking across his jaw. “We might get a partial from the exit gate camera.”

He leaned into the monitor like he could pull information out with his breath. The exit camera caught the car slowing to make the turn. For a flicker of a second, the plate’s first three characters were legible before the angle swallowed the rest.

“I’ll ask the company for logs around these times,” he said, writing the letters down. “We can match to driver shifts.”

I nodded, the gesture turning into a swallow because everything suddenly felt too large and too small at once. I was grateful for Ross’s competence. I was also furious that I needed anyone’s competence to tell me where my body had been without me.

“Hey,” he said, not looking away from the screen. “You didn’t bring this on yourself.”

I didn’t say thank you because gratitude felt misplaced when the bar for human decency was this low. I said, “I know,” because I was trying to teach my mouth to shape the sentence even when my brain wanted to argue.

When I left his office, the stairwell smelled like bleach and old books. In the hallway, Dr. Rose passed me with a stack of papers and flinched like she’d seen a test she hadn’t studied for. We were a country of small avoidances.

The bank called while I was outside, the same woman whose nail length was inversely proportional to her empathy. “We pulled the footage from the ATMs,” she said. “We can see you clearly. Lakers shirt. Slippers. There appears to be a… companion the nights of the withdrawals.”

“Left hand,” I said, surprising myself with how certain I sounded. “Scar on it.”

She paused. “We can’t comment on details. But yes. We’ll classify the withdrawals as fraud for now and escalate. You’ll need to sign forms.”

“I’ll be there,” I said, and hung up before my voice decided to do something unhelpful.

Outside the dining hall, I stopped and watched a group of first-years shove the door open with their hips, laughing like they didn’t know yet how their own bodies could betray them. My phone buzzed again—unknown number. I let it go once. Twice. On the third buzz, I swiped because not knowing is its own kind of violence.

“Hello?” I said, squinting at nothing.

The line clicked and then the sound of breathing—faint, polite, like someone waiting for their turn.

“Who is this?” I asked.

The call cut. I redialed on reflex. The number was already out of service.

I stared at my screen until it reflected me back: hair pulled into a knot with a pencil, eyes that looked like they hadn’t seen natural light in a while. The call history was pockmarked with that same number at 03:30 something. I scrolled back. Weeks of timestamps. Ten minutes here, nine there. I took a screenshot and added it to the file I was building in my phone called fog, because that’s what it all felt like: a map of a place where visibility drops when you need to see your hands.

I tried my mother again. Voicemail. I left another message that was less explanation and more plea. “Please,” I said. “Please call me back.”

Back at Yasmin’s, we re-taped the bells because one had fallen off and landed in the potted fern. She made pasta with too much garlic because she said if I was going to cry, at least the house would smell like something having a good time. We sat on the floor and ate with our plates tilted onto our knees.

“What if you’re—” she began, and stopped, because she is a person who does not jump to the sharpest word first.

“Sleepwalking,” I finished for her. “Or something like it.” The word felt too gentle for what the videos showed. Sleepwalking sounds like a child in a nightgown with a candle, not a woman unlocking doors for a thief who referred to himself as a friend.

“Parasomnia,” she said, like she’d Googled while I was at the bank. “Complex behaviors during partial arousals. That’s what one article said. People can cook, drive—”

“Open doors,” I added. “Swipe IDs. Hand over keys.” It made a terrible, perfect kind of sense. It also made me want to scream until the word broke.

We filled out the online intake for the sleep clinic together, which felt like sending a desperate letter to a stranger you hope knows how to spell your name. The form asked whether the episodes began after a medication change, and I sat up a little too straight. “I switched birth control brands at the start of the semester,” I said. “Cheap generic at the pharmacy because my insurance changed.”

Yasmin’s eyebrows tilted up. “We write that down,” she said, already typing. “We write down everything.”

We rearranged her room like we were staging a play where the props mattered more than the acting. Bells on doorknobs. The chair wedged under the handle. My phone locked in the closet with a rubber band around it so I couldn’t pocket it in a trance. We practiced how she’d guide me back to bed if I stood up—hands gentle on my arms, not a shake (never wake a sleepwalker, the internet warned, or you risk hurting them). The care in all that prep felt like some new kind of friendship—one that doesn’t ask questions before building the barricade.

At 01:00, Yasmin dozed with her head against the headboard and her phone alarm set to check on me every two hours. I lay there watching shadow polygons sweep the ceiling. I tried to make deals with the night—If I make it to dawn, I’ll believe in mornings again—but the night didn’t negotiate.

Around 03:22, my body did whatever it does when the switch flips. I didn’t see it; I only saw it later on the footage. How I sat up like a puppet, eyes coins. How my mouth formed answers to questions no one in the room asked. How I reached out my hand as if expecting another hand to find it.

The beeping door alarm—our cheap guardian—started wailing when I reached the knob. Yasmin startled awake and was there in a heartbeat, her hands firm and kind on my shoulders. On the video, I was talking—really talking. The words, when we watched them later, made a pattern that felt like a code:

“It’s fine,” I said to empty air.
“Just me.”
“Come in.”
“No, they’re asleep.”
“Same room.”

We didn’t sleep after that. We watched the footage twice and wrote down every word. A script of my betrayal, delivered by me to nobody visible. We cried, both of us, one after the other, not at the same time because we were taking turns being stalwart so the other didn’t have to.

At 08:00, I was at the bank again signing paper like it could stitch something up inside me. At 10:00, I walked into the legal clinic because campus had pointed me at it in another email and I needed someone in a blazer to say the word rights like it belonged to me. The clinic smelled like printer toner and stale coffee. A woman with her hair scraped back in the way that means she does not have patience for chaos introduced herself as Francine Rice and asked me to tell her everything without softening any of it.

She gave me a tissue only after I finished. She did not tell me to calm down. She told me we would sort it into categories: criminal exploitation, medical documentation, institutional response. She underlined exploitation and wrote the phrase special victim in parentheses like a label that matters to the shifts in the system. When I showed her the footage, she sat very still and her jaw set in a way that made me like her more.

“We need a letter from a doctor,” she said. “And we need campus to stop talking to you like you are the perpetrator of crimes you were not conscious for.”

“They gave me a leave,” I said.

“They gave you an exit to keep their hands clean,” she countered. “We’re going to get you back inside with a door that doesn’t slam behind you.”

She helped me draft emails that sounded like I had been born knowing how to advocate for myself: Please see attached timeline and footage demonstrating nocturnal parasomnia and third-party exploitation. Requesting immediate review of disciplinary action and change to victim support status. I signed my name under sentences I couldn’t have written that morning, and felt something like a spine grow where the white-hot panic had been.

At noon, I stood in the dean’s office again, same chairs, same carpet, same framed diplomas, different posture. Francine sat next to me and placed the letters in a stack like ammunition. When the dean began his careful performance—We want to support you, we just need to ensure campus safety—Francine interrupted him with an elegance that made me want to clap.

“Campus safety includes protecting students from being exploited during medical episodes,” she said. “Here is footage. Here are timestamps. Here is a letter from campus security confirming an unidentified adult male gained access to multiple buildings using this student as a conduit. Here is the law about exploiting vulnerable adults which, you should know, your counsel will care a lot about if this is mishandled.”

The dean’s face did that thing where it stays still but all the muscles beneath it panic. He asked for copies. Francine handed them over. He asked for time. She gave him a deadline. When we left, my legs shook in the hallway, but it was the adrenaline kind, not the terror kind.

The sleep clinic called at 14:00 because someone had canceled and could I come at 16:30 for intake and a consult? I said yes so fast I almost bit my own tongue. Yasmin drove me in her car that rattled when the gear shifted; she held my hand at red lights. The clinic lived in a building that looked like it belonged to a dentist, all vanilla carpet and soft art. Dr. Mercer was smaller than I expected and wore glasses that magnified her eyes so she always looked like she was listening hard.

She didn’t ask me to start at the beginning; she asked me to start at the symptoms. I told her about waking up to timelines I hadn’t lived. I told her about the videos. I told her about the left-hand scar. I told her about the birth control switch and the semester I thought stress was something you could file. She took notes so quickly it looked like she was writing other notes under the notes.

“It sounds like severe parasomnia,” she said finally. “Complex behaviors during partial arousals from non-REM sleep. Not sleepwalking; that’s too simple a word. What you’re describing is a brain state that looks awake and isn’t. You were responsive to prompting while the executive portions of your brain stayed offline. That’s why you can talk and move and open doors.”

I wanted her to say it wasn’t real, that this was some elaborate prank with a clear perpetrator and a punishment brochure. Instead she placed a plan in front of me, its edges square and reassuring:

— Overnight sleep study scheduled next week (or sooner, if they got another cancellation).
— Immediate safety measures, which we had already adopted like amateur engineers.
— Medication to dampen the nocturnal arousals.
— Letter for the university explaining a documented medical condition and recommending supervision at night and accommodations.
— Referrals to trauma counseling because what had happened lived both in my brain chemistry and in my bones.

She didn’t say it would be okay. She said it could be managed. Then she handed me a prescription and contact numbers and a page with a cartoon moon wearing a frown that made both Yasmin and me laugh, which felt like oxygen for the first time in days.

On the way out, my phone rang again—unknown, local. I nearly let it slide to voicemail. Something in me said pick up.

“Hello?” I said.

“Is this… is this you?” a man’s voice asked, smoothed into politeness like a customer service agent.

“Who is this?” I asked, and it came out sharp without my permission.

A pause. Then the line went dead. When I called back, the number was disconnected again. A burner, maybe. Or a ghost of a number, borrowed and returned.

We drove to the pharmacy. The woman behind the counter read the script and looked at me over the rims of her glasses like a person checking if you had enough money for your groceries. “This is serious,” she said, and I wanted to hug her for saying what everyone else had only implied. She explained the side effects, the way I should take it two hours before bed, how I needed someone with me when I slept. “Do you have someone?”

I looked at Yasmin. “I do,” I said, and felt my throat tighten in a grateful way.

That night we installed door wedges that screamed when moved, linked motion sensors to Yasmin’s phone, taped the bells back to the knob with an absurd amount of painter’s tape, and set my pill bottle next to a glass of water like a ritual. I took the medication at nine and we watched a cooking show on mute because all the sizzle and the chop without the narration was strangely soothing. Around eleven, my body felt like someone had turned down the volume on the static that lived under my skin.

We slept.

Nothing happened that night. No bells. No beeps. No footage of me bargaining with the air. In the morning, we celebrated with eggs and toast that tasted like a reprieve and texted Ross, who sent back a thumbs-up emoji and then, an hour later, a message that made my heart gallop: Partial plate hit on rideshare. Driver identified. Working on contact. Will update.

I pushed my phone onto the table and closed my eyes. I saw the video frames click by. I saw the scar. I saw the open doors. I saw Janelle’s face when she finally believed me. I saw my mother’s blocked ring and imagined her phone lighting up and her thumb hovering and her face as the guilt sank in, and I tried not to feel anything for anything that wasn’t right in front of me.

Right in front of me was Yasmin, sliding a second piece of toast onto my plate, her hair in a bun that meant business, because we were women doing business with the night.

Around noon, the dean’s office emailed to say my status had been moved from disciplinary to victim support services pending full review and that I had access to emergency funds. It wasn’t an apology. But it was a lever. Francine wrote back for me with sentences that sounded like law and kindness had decided to date.

By late afternoon, my mother called. I let it ring twice while I looked at Yasmin. She nodded. I answered.

She sobbed, of course. She apologized, of course. I said some things back that made us both cry harder and then laugh because only an idiot doesn’t realize the human body is partly a hydration system. I told her about the doctor, the footage, the scar, the ride share plate. I told her I was scared and stubborn and not alone.

“Can I come?” she asked. “Do I need to be there?”

“Soon,” I said, because the truth was I needed the small world I had built inside Yasmin’s apartment to hold for a few more days so I didn’t splinter into shards trying to comfort someone else.

That night, I turned my phone to airplane mode like a small act of defiance against whatever man thought three-thirty was the hour to dial me up and pull on the strings. We set the alarms again. We checked the sensors. We laughed at the bells. We slept.

At 03:51, somewhere in the building, a doorbell rang.

We shot upright in the same second, heartbeats trying to jump out of us. It wasn’t Yasmin’s bell. It was the building’s tone, muted by distance but unmistakable. We held our breath and listened. Footsteps. A door opening two floors below. Voices hushed into a single sound. A stairwell door moaned open and shut.

We didn’t move. We didn’t need to. We just listened to the sound of the night admitting someone who didn’t belong.

The next morning, Ross texted: Driver’s coming in to talk. Said he remembers you. Said guy told him he was your cousin.

My hand went cold. My mouth remembered the word cousin the way your nose remembers certain perfumes.

“Left hand,” I typed back. “Scar.”

Ross’s bubble appeared and then disappeared and then appeared again, like he was deleting the wrong sentences.

Driver says yes came through. Scar on left hand

The fog shifted, just enough for a streetlight to bring something into focus. At the window, the day was ordinary. People walked their dogs. A kid on a scooter scraped the sidewalk with a satisfying chunk. A bus hissed. There was coffee and toast and sunlight.

The night could knock. The night could ring doorbells at 3:51 and call from numbers that went dead. But for the first time since everything collapsed, I felt the floor under my feet hold.

I felt stubborn. I felt furious. I felt like I might get my life back one recorded minute at a time.

Part III

Ross texted at 8:07 a.m.: Driver’s on-site. Says he remembers you. ‘Cousin’ line. Scar, left hand. We’re pulling trip logs now. Can you come?

Yasmin drove me over because my hands were doing their new trick—shaking like they were auditioning for a part I didn’t want. The campus security office felt less like a basement war room and more like a place that might give me something back.

The driver sat in a plastic chair with his cap held low in both hands. He looked like a person who had learned to apologize before he knew what for. Ross introduced us; the driver introduced himself as Luis. He kept saying, “I’m sorry,” in the distracted way of someone measuring their own complicity by tips.

“He told me he was your cousin,” Luis said, eyes on his cap. “Said you had a sleep condition, that he helped you, you know? You looked… out of it. And he always paid cash. Big tips. Said not to worry.”

He described the man without looking at me—tall, dark hair, that scar on the back of his left hand like a white stitch. He described the smell—cigarettes, laundry detergent, the cheap cologne that sticks to elevator walls. He described the voice—calm, friendly, not in a hurry. He described the choreography—guy texts him ten minutes before; car idles; girl comes out in slippers; guy puts a hand on her shoulder; gives an address; tips big enough to buy silence.

“Do you have the numbers?” Ross asked, practical saving us from drowning.

Luis handed over a printed list of trip IDs the company had pulled for him since the inquiry. “They said they can give you more with a warrant or whatever,” he said, glancing at me for the first time. “I didn’t know. I swear.”

None of this cleaned the film off the days. But it put a handprint on it. It gave me a scar to point at. In a narrative that had been all fog, that felt like a kind of anchor.

On the way out, Ross stopped me. “We’re going to coordinate with the city,” he said. “If you’re comfortable, we’d like to set up surveillance during the hours he tends to show. We don’t want you as bait. But your pattern is the pattern he’s using.”

The word bait made my stomach pull tight. “I don’t want to open a door,” I said.

“You won’t,” Ross said. “We’ll be there. And we’re still pushing the ride share for rider account details. If he’s using cash and burner phones, it’s slower. But it’s not nothing.”

“Okay,” I said, and it surprised me how much I meant it.

By afternoon, my world had subdivided into trackable lines: calls at 3:30, doorbells at 3:51, cameras at corners, alarms at thresholds. Francine sent me a draft letter to the university that read like a spine: lists, exhibits, citations. The dean’s office replied with more speed than dignity: Status revised to Victim Support. Emergency funds available. Counseling referrals below. It wasn’t contrition. It was protection from liability wearing a cardigan. Still—money for groceries. A counselor with appointments after five. Doors that swung, finally, toward me instead of away.

Dr. Mercer called from the clinic. “We had a cancellation,” she said, like manna. “Can you be here tonight for a full study?”

We packed a bag with sweatpants and the kind of T-shirt you don’t mind being seen in under fluorescent lights. Yasmin grabbed snacks like we were going to a movie about me, which, in a way, we were. The sleep tech was gentle and quick, wires blooming from my scalp, sensors cupping my fingers, a chest band that made me think of seatbelts and car wrecks and rescue. Yasmin sat in the corner with a book she didn’t pretend to read.

At 2:03 a.m., my body did the thing it does. The tech’s note later would say complex arousal; the video would show me sitting up with my eyes at half-life and beginning to talk to a person who wasn’t in the room. “I’m ready,” I said. “It’s fine.” I gave an address. Not mine. Not Yasmin’s. The last place I’d slept before they put me on the lawn.

The tech stepped in and asked me questions you ask to gauge consciousness. My answers were astonishingly correct—name, date, last class I took. The parts of my brain that navigate small talk were awake; the parts that manage consent were not. It was a magic trick with a villain.

In the morning, Dr. Mercer rolled the chair over and showed me a graph of my brain with the tenderness of someone presenting a portrait. “Here,” she said, tapping the page. “See this? This is where you wake. This is where you don’t. Your motor cortex is responsive. Your prefrontal control is asleep. You can move. You can agree. But you aren’t evaluating or remembering.”

“Like being hijacked,” Yasmin said.

“Exactly,” Dr. Mercer said. “And because it’s tied to specific hours and stimuli—phone calls, doorbells—it’s conditioned. Someone has learned your night.”

The words sat like a weight in my lap, but weirdly, they steadied me. Being told the monster has a method is less terrifying than believing it’s chaos.

She adjusted my medication plan—no names I remember, just longer syllables, the kind you learn by living with them. She handed me letters with the full-bellied weight of medicine behind them: to the university, to my landlord (if I had one), to my bank. She talked about “sleep hygiene” and stress and how both matter until they’re dwarfed by someone else’s choices.

“You’ll get better,” she said. “Not overnight. But the brain likes patterns. We’re going to give it different ones.”

We built a new pattern. Yasmin taped the bells back after the heat loosened the adhesive; we wedged the chair under the door like a medieval barricade; we put my phone in a timed lockbox at night like a parent for my worst hours. We created a hand signal that meant “I’m here” for when she woke me gently and I was crying before I knew I was awake.

I called my mother every day at nine. Sometimes she cried; sometimes she performed small talk like it could fix a dam in a hurry. She apologized in new phrasings. I learned how to accept them without becoming an apology myself.

Samuel texted once. I’m sorry for blocking you. Hope you’re getting help. Eight months condensed to a push notification. I stared at his name until I felt foolish for staring and deleted it. I missed what I thought we were. But I refused to cultivate a museum of men who folded during fire.

Campus emailed a flyer about “wellness” that used pastel fonts and told me to breathe. I ignored it and went to the legal clinic instead, where Francine taught me how to say cease and desist without laughing. She sent the letters that made the dean’s office rearrange chairs so I could sit in them. She called Ross, and by the way she said his name, I knew we were a small, stubborn team now, knitted together by a door at 3:51.

Late one night, I sat with my sister on FaceTime and showed her the footage where I talk to empty rooms. She pressed her thumb to the screen where my face was. “I should have believed you the first time,” she said. “I’m sorry I asked Ria if you were on drugs. I wanted a reason that felt easier than this.”

“This is the reason,” I said. It sounded like a heave.

The sting—that’s what Ross called it; I called it not bait—came together with the help of city cops who had the patient look of people who know paperwork takes longer than handcuffs. They didn’t want me in the hallway; I didn’t want me in the hallway. We compromised: I would be in Yasmin’s room with two officers, the door bristling with our new ugly hardware. Another pair would be posted on the stairs; Ross would be downstairs near the buzzer with a plainclothes on the lobby couch.

We did a rehearsal we pretended was logistics but was actually for my nerves. Where do you stand if the bell rings and nothing else happens? Where does Yasmin go? How do I breathe? The cops were kind in the gruff way people are when they work with people’s worst days. “If nothing, great,” one said. “If something, we’re there.”

We gave the plan a night. Then, because this is how life works when you’re trying to anticipate monsters, everything else also happened.

The dean scheduled the review meeting for the next afternoon. Francine printed copies in triplicate and stacked them like bricks. The bank returned my call with good news that tasted like the idea of good news but didn’t feel like it yet: withdrawals labeled fraud; provisional credits issued; reversed fees in the queue. My job reached out through an HR portal—too late to un-fire me, but early enough to change the reason from misconduct to medical and offer a letter for future employers that didn’t make me a hazard sign.

Janelle texted, and for a second, the name on my screen made my stomach flip out of old habit. She wrote: I shouldn’t have called you names. We were scared. I’m sorry. I stared. You threw my life out, I typed and deleted. Thank you for letting me sleep on the couch; delete. I settled on I saw the videos too. She replied with a single crying emoji and then, Do you need a blanket or anything? It was both absurd and human enough that I said No, thank you, and that was maybe the best both of us could do.

At night, Yasmin and I lay awake at ten, then eleven, then midnight, then fell into the kind of doze that exhaustion wrestles from fear. At 3:29, my phone—the one in the lockbox—lit up with a call that couldn’t get through. The little light still found a way to cast its square on the dresser. The officers in the room shifted their weight so gently I barely heard it. At 3:50, the building was a held breath.

At 3:51, the doorbell rang.

The sound traveled through plaster and steel and my ribcage. We heard the stairwell door below creak and catch. The officer by Yasmin’s door raised a hand to say stay. From the hallway, a shuffle. Then the little chirp of the door alarm setting itself because Yasmin had turned it on; then a pause at our threshold as if someone were pressing their ear to painted wood.

“Come in,” my mouth said without my permission.

The officer’s head whipped toward me. Yasmin grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard enough to remind me we were in a room with people. The alarm kept us inside our bodies. The second officer near the window murmured into his shoulder mic. I heard a whisper in the hall and didn’t hear my own answer because I didn’t permit it this time. I kept my lips pressed together and tasted metal.

Downstairs: Ross’s text pinged on my smartwatch—Movement. Ballcap. Left-hand scar. Unit moving. Upstairs: a slow scrape. Then footsteps retreating. The stairwell door sighed. A voice on the radio: “Copy. Second team in stairwell.” Another voice, closer: “Lobby team, now.”

Then silence. A silence heavy enough to tell a story by itself.

Minutes can be animals. These were hyenas, skinny with hunger. We waited. I thought of how many times those footsteps had moved away and I had gone after them like a sleepwalker in a maze. Not tonight. Not now. My muscles trembled with a chemical impatience the medicine couldn’t touch.

The radio cracked, small and controlled: “Running east on Spruce.”

Another voice: “Turning on Fifth. Hands visible.” Then Ross: “Left hand. Confirm scar.” Then, something like triumph hidden under procedure: “Detained.”

I didn’t know I had been holding my breath until Yasmin said my name and I let air back in. One of the officers sat on the edge of the dresser and smiled without teeth. “You did good,” he said. “You stayed.”

My phone buzzed in the lockbox as if it knew the script had changed. The officers left two minutes later because forms love a prompt witness. Ross texted from the lobby: We’ll be up in five if you’re okay with ID for the record. You can say no.

“Tell him yes,” I said. “While I still feel like I can stand.”

My knees shook, but they did what knees do when asked. In the hallway, the bells on the knob winked at me like a joke we were finally allowed to laugh at. Yasmin’s hand didn’t let go of mine until the door opened.

Ross looked damp and glad to be damp. He stood aside so the plainclothes cop could display a phone screen with a photo: six men standing in a row. Number four had changed something about his hair, but you can’t cut the air out of your posture.

“That one,” I said, finger steady on the glass. “Four.”

The plainclothes tapped the screen like you do when you save a thing you never want to lose. Ross’s mouth pulled sidewise into what, on another day, could have been called a smile. “We’ll take statements. You’ll be asked things you have been asked before. You can tell me to stop whenever.”

“Okay,” I said. “But first I need a second to call my mother.”

He nodded, stepped back into the hallway with the sensitivity of a person who knows thresholds are sacred, and I closed the door, leaned my forehead against the wood, and let Yasmin wrap her arms around me.

I dialed and my mother answered on the first ring as if she had been holding the phone all night like a life jacket.

“They have him,” I said, and the sentence tasted like metal and rain and a small square of victory I could fit in my pocket and take with me to the next room.

The next day was administrative ballet. Statements. Signatures. A visit to the bank where the fraud department used words like restitution and claims paid and for once, those words didn’t sound like distant cousins of justice; they sounded like cousins I could have over for dinner. The university’s review board met, and Francine was a scalpel when the dean’s office tried to suture liability with euphemism. They cleared my record. They said “sorry” like an institution trying out a new language. They offered accommodations and resources that should have been offered weeks ago. Dr. Rose waited until the room was empty and then hugged me like the professor she used to be, tears making her mascara do little brave rivers.

Campus security called to say the ride share’s logs matched the plate and that the driver’s statement filled in the missing ten minutes between my bed and the lobby. The city detective briefed me on lineups and arraignments and things that belong in dramas, except my shoes were squeaking on this particular floor.

That night, Yasmin and I slept. No bells. No doorbells. No lights humming on dressers. Just sleep. The app on my phone drew a quiet mountain of a night with a flat, unbroken top. In the morning, we made pancakes because I wanted something fluffy and dumb and sweet. We ate them sitting on the floor because chairs felt too formal for triumph.

Around noon, Janelle texted again: We heard. I’m glad. No punctuation. No explanations. I didn’t reply. Not to be unkind. To be done.

At three, Samuel texted and said, Saw the news. If you want to talk— I typed, I don’t, and deleted it, because even brevity can be a blade. I let the dots bubble and then stop. That was its own conclusion.

I met Francine in the legal clinic and signed more paper than you think fits in a day. We crafted a statement for the hearing that didn’t turn me into a cautionary tale or a heroine, just a person who had something taken and a name to give it back with. We talked about the language the court would use. Exploitation. Vulnerable adult. Predation. The words were ugly and correct. Naming ugly things is a way to keep them from pretending to be beautiful.

Dr. Mercer called in the afternoon just to see if I was sleeping. I loved her a little for that. “We’ll keep the meds where they are,” she said. “We’ll taper if you feel stable.” The word stable made me think of horses and straw and rest, not hospitals. I liked that.

In the evening, my sister drove up and sat cross-legged on Yasmin’s carpet and cried in the exact same shape as the day I fell off my bike when I was ten and skinned both knees. She brought donuts. We ate them like communion.

At 10:30, I lay in bed and tried to remember what Friday had felt like before any of this. Beer in bottles sweating on tabletops. The whirr of a blender. Samuel’s laugh at a joke that didn’t deserve it. The little life we had where the worst thing was a paper due Monday. I grieved for that girl the way you grieve for people who move away. Fondly. Not forever.

When I slept, I dreamed nothing. It was the most luxurious dream I’ve ever had.

The city moved its clumsy machinery the way cities do. The man was arraigned. The charges were a list that made my jaw tighten: theft, trespass, exploitation. They asked if I’d testify; the prosecutor guessed he’d take a deal once he saw the footage lined up with Luis’s logs and Ross’s notes and my brain waves doing their half-awake tango.

In the days between, the campus quietly rolled out “updated protocols” about “medical conditions that may affect conduct.” They emailed RAs and security guards a cheat sheet about parasomnia and consent and told them to call for help before they wrote a report. Ross forwarded me the memo with a single line: Not enough, but not nothing.

The dean sent a personal note that started with I regret and ended with we learned. I sat on it for an hour and wrote back a sentence that felt like a small hinge: Make sure the next me doesn’t have to become an expert in herself to be believed. He replied We will, and if it was a lie, it was at least a good one.

I went to the bank and watched numbers slide back into my account like stubborn fish darting upstream. Not all of it—fees vanish into the fog—but enough to buy groceries and pay Yasmin rent and send my mother a photo of a receipt for flowers I put on my kitchen table like proof.

On campus, people stopped pointing. On my phone, the unknown numbers vanished like a storm moving off the map.

On an afternoon when the light lay down across the old quad in that gold way that makes even bad buildings look like a painting, Dr. Rose jogged up beside me. “I recommended you for a summer research role,” she said, like you mention the weather. “You don’t owe me anything. I just want your brain in rooms that pay attention.”

I thanked her. Sometimes thanks is a full sentence again.

That evening, Yasmin and I walked past my old building. The doorbell didn’t ring. The lobby couch had a new stain. The world had the audacity to continue, and for once, I didn’t resent it.

At 3:51 that night, I was asleep. The bell didn’t ring in my dreams. My phone didn’t glow. The only sound in the room was Yasmin breathing evenly on the other side of a wall, the city muttering to itself beyond the glass, and my own heart doing its ancient job with a steadiness I had begun to trust again.

Part IV

They set the arraignment for a Monday morning and the sentencing for two weeks after. In between, my days filled with small, corrective motions—forms, calls, appointments—and nights that were finally just nights. No bells. No beeps. No voice coaxing mine into saying come in.

Ross emailed me the docket number. The city prosecutor—Morales, hair in a low bun, voice like she didn’t mind being underestimated—called to explain the next steps. “He’ll likely plead,” she said. “We don’t waste juries on cases with this kind of evidence unless we need to. Your identification, the rideshare logs, the campus footage… it’s strong.” She asked if I wanted to give a victim impact statement. The words felt like a hat I wasn’t sure fit.

Francine said I should write it even if I never read it aloud. “The court is where you get to arrange your own story on the record,” she said, tapping a pen against her legal pad. “We can choose the nouns. We can refuse the adjectives they try to hand you.”

So I wrote. At Yasmin’s tiny kitchen table, with the bells on the door winking like a lucky charm, I wrote the shape of what had happened to me in sentences that didn’t apologize for existing. I didn’t dwell in gore or drama. I described what it means to wake up and learn the worst things about your life from security footage. What it means to see your hands do things you didn’t consent to. What it means when the phrase “I don’t remember” stops sounding like an excuse and becomes an injury.

I wrote about the doorbell at 3:51—how a sound can colonize your nervous system. I wrote about my mother blocking me and unblocking me. About Samuel’s two-sentence apology. About Janelle’s text asking if I needed a blanket. About Yasmin’s hands steady on my shoulders at the threshold where I used to fall through.

When I finished, it was midnight and the apartment was a snow globe of quiet. I put the pages in a folder and slept without dreaming.

The dean’s review board was less adversarial this time. Francine’s letters had sharpened the edges of their attention. The vice provost with the carefully combed hair opened with the phrase “institutional responsibility,” which I didn’t trust but accepted like water at mile eleven. They wiped my record clean. They offered accommodations I had already written for them. “We’ll also be updating training for residential staff and security,” the dean said, carefully, like the words were new teeth he didn’t know how to chew with yet. “We regret…” He paused. “We regret treating you as a problem when you were a person with a problem.”

When the room cleared, Dr. Rose hung back. Her eyes were shiny and she didn’t pretend otherwise. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I should have asked one more question before sending you down that hall.” She told me about a research position she’d recommended me for. “If they have any sense,” she added, “they’ll take you.” It would have been funny if it hadn’t felt like breath.

The bank processed my claim. The provisional credits posted; fees reversed like little contritions. The rep with the long nails called to say the fraud unit had labeled the case confirmed third-party manipulation during parasomnia episodes. She had to read it off a screen to get the wording right. “You’ll need to sign one more thing,” she said, and when I arrived, she asked—awkward, sincere—if I was sleeping better. I was. I said yes.

Dr. Mercer tweaked my meds again. “We’ll hold here for a month,” she said, circling a dosage on a chart. “Then we’ll reevaluate. The brain likes stability. You’ve had enough storms for now.” She asked about the sting in the hallway and smiled a small, fierce smile when I told her the left-hand scar had matched. “He found a pattern,” she said. “So did you. You interrupted it.”

At night, my phone no longer lit up with 3:30 calls that couldn’t connect. I took it out of the lockbox before bed sometimes and laid it face down on the dresser like a peace offering to myself. The bells stayed, less talisman than habit now. I liked the way they caught light.

My mother arrived on a Thursday with two suitcases and a casserole like we were performing a sitcom about reconciliation. She cried as soon as she saw me, the kind of cathartic crying that embarrasses and cleans at the same time. We spent three days building bridges out of groceries and gossip. In the evenings, she sat across from me on the couch and asked to see the footage. I said no. She nodded. “Then tell me what you want me to know,” she said.

I told her the things that didn’t require scars. The late-night phone calls to disconnected numbers. The doorbell, precise as a metronome. The way the campus looked at me like a mirror for everyone’s worst fear. The way Yasmin taped bells to a doorknob like we were warding off evil with small bright things. My mother listened like it was her job. At the end, she said, “I’m sorry I confused fear with facts.” I forgave her because she brought her whole face to the conversation and because forgiveness felt like a gift I could afford to give without bankrupting myself.

We looked at apartments with actual locks and a doorperson who knew the names of the tenants’ dogs. I signed a lease for a one-bedroom on the third floor of a building that smelled like lemon cleaner and good intentions. The doorman—Marcus, a different Marcus than the one in the diner from another life and story—showed me how to buzz in deliveries from an app. “You’ll sleep,” he said, not as a prediction, but as a blessing.

On move-in day, Yasmin and my sister carried boxes up three flights while my mother supervised the placement of lamps. We installed the door wedges for old time’s sake and then laughed and took them back up because the building’s doors locked with a satisfying thunk that made me feel like whoever designed them liked sleeping people. I put the bells on a hook by the front closet. The closet looked relieved to receive them.

Janelle texted that week and asked if we could meet. Ria and Lindsay came too. We sat at a campus Starbucks and wrapped our hands around paper cups like we could borrow their heat for courage. They apologized in halting, honest phrases that sounded like people trying to learn a new language from scratch at twenty-two. “We were scared,” Lindsay said. “And lazy,” Ria added. “It was easier to think you were awful than to consider that something awful was happening to you.” Janelle kept repeating, “I’m sorry about the bags,” and I realized she meant the trash bags on the lawn more than anything she’d called me. I accepted the apologies because they seemed to need the relief of them, and because letting go of the rope was easier than dragging it. We wouldn’t be friends again. We could be people who waved.

Samuel texted a last time the night before the hearing: I’m proud of you. It was too small and too late, but it didn’t bruise me. I didn’t respond. I didn’t need the conversation to seal anything.

Courtrooms are colder than television suggests. The ceiling lights hum. The benches creak. Everybody looks like they’re waiting for something they can’t name. Prosecutor Morales met me in the hallway with a hand on my elbow that was the opposite of the one on the ATM footage—guiding me toward myself, not away.

He pled. Of course he pled. His lawyer whispered in his ear at the table like he could twist the vowels into mercy. He stared at a spot a foot left of me. Without the cap, his face looked like a regular face. Scars lose their narrative power in fluorescent light. He had the posture of someone who lives by doors. When they asked if he understood the terms, he said “yes” in a tone I recognized from my own videos. It made my skin crawl—the mimicry of consent. He was agreeing now because refusing had stopped working.

Morales called my name. I stood. My knees felt like cutlery. I carried my pages to the lectern and placed them there like evidence. The judge nodded, a small, human gesture that said Go on.

I read. My voice didn’t shake in the first paragraph. It trembled in the second, when I said the phrase I learned my life from cameras. It steadied in the third, when I described the doorbell as a sound that taught my cells a new prayer. It broke a little when I said my mother blocked me. It came back when I said my friend taped bells to a doorknob and that was how I learned what love looks like in a crisis. I ended not with punishment but with a sentence that had arrived, fully formed, at two a.m. the night I wrote: “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life being the girl from the footage, Your Honor. I want to be the woman who got up from the couch, asked for help, and put her name back on her own body.”

The judge thanked me. Judges always thank victims. Sometimes it sounds like ceremony. This time it sounded like a person who’d seen enough to recognize a spine when someone walked in with one. She accepted the plea. Five years. Registration. No-contact orders with enough teeth to matter. Mandatory restitution schedules that would never pay for a single minute of sleep but would at least remind someone that time isn’t free.

He never looked at me. I didn’t need him to. I looked at the scar on his left hand where it rested on the defense table, pale against the wood. I had rehearsed how I would feel—satisfaction, rage, grief. What came was quieter: an exhale. Not forgiveness. Not gloating. Just the satisfying click of a door closing somewhere behind me.

In the hall, Morales shook my hand. Ross found me, somehow, even though the building was a maze. He didn’t say congratulations; he said it’s done, which was better. Francine hugged me, a brisk professional squeeze, and then stepped back and asked, “Lunch?” because people who’ve lived inside the machinery know the thing you need most afterward is a sandwich and a chair and someone to point out a stupid sign so you can laugh.

We ate at a deli that smelled like vinegar and onions. Yasmin snapped a picture of the three of us—me with my folder still on the table like a talisman, Francine mid-eye roll at Ross’s joke about campus bureaucracy, Ross pretending he didn’t just spend six weeks living in a basement for me. When I looked at the photo later, it didn’t look like a victory lap; it looked like a team.

After court, the city felt different—as if all the buildings had taken one half step back to give me room. The air tasted like a thing I could drink again. I walked by the harbor alone for the first time without scanning faces for baseball caps. The water was its usual self—dark, busy, honest. A kid threw bread at a gull and the gull performed the gull version of gratitude: a shriek and a swoop. A couple argued softly about whether to take the bus or the train. The ordinary astonished me.

I went home to my new apartment. Marcus the doorman waved. The lobby smelled like lemon again and for once I let the scent do its job—clean slate, clean floor, come in. In my kitchen, I set a mug under the kettle and watched steam curl like handwriting. The bells on the hook chimed when I bumped them with my shoulder, a tiny accidental fanfare. It made me smile.

At 3:51 that night, I was asleep in a bed that knew my name. If the building’s doorbell rang, someone else answered. My dreams were boring. When I woke, it was because the sun elbowed its way between the blinds the way it always does, entitled and generous at once.

I padded to the door and checked the peephole out of habit. The hallway gave me nothing but beige and quiet. I opened the door anyway, because the door is mine. I looked down. Someone had slipped a flyer under the seam—Support Group: Sleep Disorders & Safety, Tuesdays, Community Center. I picked it up and pinned it to my fridge with a magnet shaped like a peach. I would go. I would sit in a circle with strangers whose nights were different from mine and also the same. I would say my name when it was my turn.

When the kettle screamed, I poured and added honey and took a sip that burned in a good way. I leaned against the counter and let the morning hold me.

The doorbell could ring in a thousand other buildings. The doorbell could become someone else’s story that ended differently or better or worse. In my place, at my hour, I had my own ending for that sound: it would be a ghost that forgot my address.

I stood there until the tea cooled. Then I packed my bag for the day—notes for class, a clean copy of my statement I couldn’t throw away yet, Dr. Mercer’s appointment card, a sandwich. I slid the bells into the drawer and closed it gently. I checked the lock once. Only once.

When I stepped into the hall, I felt it again—that small click inside, the one that tells you you are in your own body, and your body is in the world, and the world is a place you can walk through without flinching. The elevator dinged. Marcus waved at the desk. The lobby doors parted like a curtain. Outside, the day didn’t know my history. It just knew gravity and light and the schedule of the bus.

I caught it. I sat, and the city moved, and I moved with it.

Part V

The first Tuesday I went to the support group, I sat in the back and kept my coat on. The room lived in the basement of a community center that smelled like crayons and chlorine. A sign on the door said Sleep Disorders & Safety in block letters that felt like a handshake. There were donuts in a pink box and a metal carafe labeled regular that someone had filled with decaf.

A woman with careful hair and a soft cardigan introduced herself as Nora, the facilitator. “We talk, we don’t diagnose, and we don’t make anyone’s worst night the most interesting thing about them,” she said. People chuckled. The rule landed in my bones: we are more than what tried to take us.

I didn’t speak that week. I listened to an older woman talk about her husband’s dementia and the way neighbors had learned his routine and “borrowed” him when he wandered. I listened to a barista who sleep-cooked omelets and set off alarms. I listened to a former EMT who had watched whole families treat a person’s night as a party trick until the night reached out and took something you need licenses to replace. We passed Kleenex and laughed in the lopsided way relief invents.

The second week, I spoke. I said my name and my hour—3:51—and the doorbells and the way my mouth said come in like it belonged to anyone who could find the hinges. I said Yasmin taped bells to her doorknob and everyone nodded like of course she did, like the world is saved by people who make noise at the right time. After, a girl with chipped nail polish pressed a paper into my hand: a list of low-cost security measures and a coupon for a pharmacy most students didn’t know offered discounts. On the back she’d written, If you ever need a dog to sleep in the doorway, I know a lazy one. I smiled the kind of smile you feel in your ribs.

Campus changed as slowly and suddenly as institutions do. “Updated training modules” went out. Ross sent me the PDF with a note: Look at page 4. There it was—Parasomnia indicators—and beneath that, a bullet I wanted to frame: Do not assume intoxication when complex behaviors present without post-episode memory. The line didn’t erase what happened to me. It made a path for the next me to walk without bleeding.

In April, Dr. Mercer emailed and asked if I’d come speak to her medical students. “We’ll handle consent like it’s sacred,” she wrote. “We’ll talk about the non-REM brain state and the way predators learn people’s nights like maps.” I said yes and spent a week practicing how to tell my story without handing over the parts that were not for public use. On the day, I stood in front of a lecture hall full of second-years with laptops open like shields and said the sentences I wished someone had said out loud where Samuel could have heard them, where my mother could have borrowed them to argue with fear: When memory fails, it doesn’t erase consent; it defines it. “I don’t remember” is not the same as “I am lying.” Treat people’s nights tenderly. Their daylight depends on it.

A student with a messy bun stayed after and told me her brother wandered at night and woke up on the porch in winter. “He’s okay,” she said. “But I’m going to tape bells to the door anyway.” I wanted to hug her and then teach her how to wedge a chair under the handle. Instead, I handed her Nora’s flyer and said, “Come Tuesday.”

The bank finished its investigation and money crept home to my account like animals from the rain. The letters used phrases I had learned to read out loud without crying: confirmed third-party manipulation, restitution schedule, fees reversed. They could not return hours; they returned groceries. That was enough for this part of the story.

Janelle texted for coffee and brought Ria and Lindsay like a shield of remorse. We sat under the fluorescent hum of the campus Starbucks and arranged our apologies like chess pieces. “We thought we were protecting ourselves,” Ria said. “We were protecting our ignorance.” Lindsay winced when she said, “pick-me,” and I watched her watch the word leave her mouth like a bird she regretted setting free. “I still have the blanket,” Janelle added suddenly, and I nodded because some things are true and banal at once. We weren’t friends again after that. We were people who could look at each other without remembering only the worst day.

Samuel sent a last text that said, I’m proud of you. I didn’t answer. There are doors you shut once and leave shut not from anger but from a desire to live in an apartment with good air. My mother called every Sunday at nine like a ritual we agreed on without speaking. Sometimes she cried for thirty seconds as a warm-up and then asked about my plants. Sometimes she told me about a new dessert she’d tried to bake. Once, she sent me a photo of a bell she’d stuck to her own front door. “For solidarity,” she said. We laughed and then grew quiet in the same place.

The prosecutor called to say his appeal was denied. I realized I didn’t care about the outcome as much as I cared that the call didn’t change my heart rate. “Protection order still stands,” she added. “We’ll notify you at every step.” I thanked her because she had done her job in the cleanest way a person can do a hard job, and because it’s good practice to thank people in systems when they touch you gently.

June arrived like a long apology. Dr. Rose’s lab called with an offer—summer research, decent pay, a team that thought in questions instead of punishments. I took it, and for eight weeks I pipetted and counted and learned the difference between data and stories about data. At lunch I ate grapes on the steps and watched the campus exhale the way it does when undergraduates go home and the custodial crew can finally hear themselves think. Sometimes I visited Ross with iced tea and left it on his desk like an inside joke: people who live in basements deserve sunlight brought to them in liquid form.

Halfway through July, a thick envelope landed in my mailbox with no return address. Inside, a letter in looping handwriting from a woman named Sarah two states away: My sister was exploited during seizures at night. We never had proof. Your case helped us convince detectives to re-open hers. He’s in prison now. You don’t know us, but we know you. Thank you. I sat on the stairs and cried for a stranger for the exact right amount of time. Then I pinned the letter on my corkboard next to my appointment card for Dr. Mercer and a photo Yasmin had printed of the two of us in front of a plant we’d kept alive on the sill.

By August, the medication had done that quiet, heroic work good medicine does when you respect it. Episodes fell off the calendar like bad plans you stop attending. Dr. Mercer drew a line through a dosage and said, “We try this now,” like a coach who believes you can run farther. We agreed to regular check-ins and the kind of taper a person makes when they don’t confuse caution with fear.

Yasmin got a job in a bigger city where the buses ran on time and the rent threatened to make you into a new kind of adult. “Come with me,” she said on a Tuesday night when we were splitting a sandwich and trading YouTube videos our other friends would never think were funny. The idea felt like a door I could open without checking the peephole three times. We looked at apartment listings with doorpeople who knew everyone’s names and elevators that sighed like well-fed cats. We chose a two-bedroom with a kitchen window that made the whole block look like a movie you’d watch twice. On moving day, my mother cried in the doorway and then took measurements for curtains. My sister brought donuts and a toolbox and told me I was not allowed to touch the level because I only cared about vibes.

The city built a new routine around me like a hammock instead of a trap. Mornings: medication, coffee, a walk past the bakery that pretended not to know I bought the day-old croissants on purpose because they were better for dunking. Days: the lab; then a permanent offer; then a badge with my name spelled correctly. Evenings: support group on Tuesdays, yoga with Yasmin on Thursdays where an instructor said things like move your breath to your hands and somehow it worked. We installed a security system and then forgot about it. The bells hung on a hook by the door and turned into wind chimes whenever we set the AC wrong.

I spoke at another panel—this time for RAs—and apologized to no one. I helped a freshman petition housing for a medical single after her new roommate mocked her for sleep-shouting movie quotes. I stood in line at the DMV and noticed, with a kind of astonished gratitude, that standing in line at the DMV can be a sign of a healed life: tedious, ordinary, unremarkable.

One night, a year after the hearing, I woke at 3:48 and didn’t panic. I padded to the kitchen for water and stood at the window watching a man walk his dog in a T-shirt that said HOT SAUCE even though the air was chill. The only bell I heard was the elevator, and the elevator doesn’t ask to be let in; it carries you to the floor you choose. I went back to bed and fell asleep before my head finished calculating how.

On the anniversary I didn’t want to celebrate but felt the need to mark, I wrote a short piece for the student legal clinic newsletter titled What to Do When the Night Tries to Borrow You. It had five bulleted items: Call the doctor. Call a lawyer. Call a friend who will tape bells to a door for you. Don’t call yourself names. Call this what it is: someone else’s crime and your body’s bad idea of a magic trick. Francine emailed me a row of clapping hands. Ross sent a single period—as if to say full stop, which was his favorite punctuation.

I still see Janelle sometimes. We have the same grocery store. We both inspect avocados like we’re auditioning for a role. Once, she said, “I’m getting a cat.” I said, “Name her Bell,” and we both laughed like people who aren’t trying too hard to prove anything.

The man with the scar is still in prison. I get automated letters when hearings float up. The last one said appeal denied and I looked at the page and felt… nothing. Not satisfaction. Not rage. Just the absence of homework in a class I didn’t sign up for anyway. I shredded the letter and fed the scraps to the recycling bin like a good citizen.

On a Tuesday in late fall, Nora asked me to co-facilitate the support group. “You have a way of saying true things without bruising people,” she said. I said yes and brought donuts that were too fancy for our basement. A new person came in shaking and sat with her coat on and didn’t speak. During the break, I handed her a printed list of low-cost security measures someone had once handed me. On the back I wrote, If you need a dog, I still know a lazy one. She laughed in the right place. Sometimes recovery is a one-liner in a cold room.

I kept seeing Dr. Mercer. Sometimes we talked about sleep; sometimes about daylight. When she finally suggested we try stepping down the medication, I paused and scanned myself from the inside. “You’ll know,” she said. “Your body is smarter now because you taught it, and it taught you.” We lowered the dose. Nights stayed quiet. I kept a door wedge in my drawer like a superstition, not a plan.

On the longest night of the year, I stood at my window in wool socks and watched the city perform its own little symphony of survival—delivery trucks backing down alleys, a woman running in a reflective vest, a man in a knit cap singing badly but enthusiastically to his earbuds. I remembered every version of me that had stood behind glass waiting for trouble. I remembered Janelle asking, Did you hear the doorbell at 3:51 a.m. last night? and the way I had laughed to keep from breaking.

I don’t laugh at doorbells anymore. I ignore them. They ring in the distance in other people’s buildings, belong to other people’s nights. In my place, the only bells are on a hook, chiming when I leave in the morning because I forget and bump them with my bag. It sounds like a tiny parade sending me into the day.

The day, now, is full of dull errands and bright small things—appointment reminders, noodles slurped too fast, texts from my sister with pictures of donuts, voicemails from my mother reminding me to bring a sweater, Yasmin insisting we buy a plant we will absolutely kill and then somehow not killing it. At work, my boss says good eye when I catch an error on a chart. At the support group, I say good grief when someone finally names the thing that’s been chewing at their ankles. People laugh the kind of laugh that is also a breath.

On the newest anniversary—the one I mark now—I sleep through 3:51 and wake to sun bruising the blinds. I make tea and open the window and let winter clean the room. I check my motion log out of habit and smile at the blankness. I walk down to the corner and the doorman—this one’s name is Derek—waves and says, “Quiet night?” and I say, “Very,” and we both smile like people who’ve earned the right to be boring.

When I step outside, the city doesn’t know my story. It just knows light and gravity and the schedules buses keep even when they’re late. I turn left at the bakery and right at the park and keep walking because that is what bodies are for when they belong to you.

That first morning, months ago, when the video showed me opening doors I didn’t remember unlocking, I thought I had lost myself in an hour. I hadn’t. I had just been misplaced, briefly, by a night that likes to borrow people. I found myself again at a kitchen table with a friend taping bells to a door. I found myself in a basement with donuts and decaf. I found myself in a courtroom and a lab and a lecture hall and a living room with a plant I remembered to water. I found myself at a window at 3:48, unafraid.

My roommate once asked, “Did you hear the doorbell at 3:51 a.m. last night?”

A year later, the answer is simple and final.

No. And if it rang, it forgot my address.

The End.