She Doesn't Know She Killed Me

She stares into the mirror again. I watch her from behind the cracks.

Every morning, she tries to remember who she is.

And every morning, she forgets who I was.

She wakes up in that little apartment at the edge of the fog, where the lights from the city below flicker like dying stars. Her name is Claire—at least, that’s what they call her now. Clean clothes, blank stare, bloodless hands. Perfect on the outside. But inside?

She’s a murderer.

She doesn’t know that.

Not anymore.

The doctors say she had a breakdown. That the trauma buried the truth like a body beneath the floorboards of her mind. Neat. Clinical. Convenient. The court let her walk. “Not guilty by reason of mental defect.” A neat little bow on my unfinished ending.

But I remember.

I remember everything.

We were together. Not in a romantic way—don’t romanticize her. She wasn’t some lover scorned, no matter what the headlines said. We were roommates, thrown together by college classifieds and rent desperation. She was quiet, always scribbling in her notebook, muttering strange things under her breath. I was friendly, maybe too friendly. I thought I could save her from herself.

Then the whispers started.

She said there were voices in the walls. That someone was watching her sleep. I tried to help—God, I tried. I even called her parents. They brushed me off. “Claire’s just imaginative,” her mother said. “She’s always been sensitive.”

Sensitive doesn’t carve someone’s name into the bathroom mirror with a steak knife. Sensitive doesn’t dig a hole in the woods and call it a “plan B.”

The night it happened, the fog rolled in thick as soup. Streetlamps flickered like dying fireflies. She stood in the kitchen, barefoot, soaked in sweat, eyes wide and glassy. I barely recognized her.

“You shouldn’t have looked in the journal,” she said.

I tried to run. She was faster.

They found my body five days later, curled beneath the floorboards. She had tried to clean, to scrub the red away with bleach and lies. But guilt stains deeper than blood. The detective said she confessed in fragments, babbling nonsense about “him” making her do it.

There was no “him.”

Just me and her and the silence that followed.

Now, I watch her.

From the mirror. From the dark corners of the room. From inside the static when the TV loses signal.

I don’t know what I am anymore. Ghost? Echo? Justice delayed?

But I know what she is: free.

She walks the streets like nothing happened. Laughs in cafés. Sleeps dreamlessly.

Until tonight.

Tonight, something changes.

She looks in the mirror, and her breath catches. Her fingers tremble. Slowly, she reaches up and touches the glass where the cracks spider across the surface like veins.

“I had a dream,” she whispers. “You were there.”

I lean closer.

She closes her eyes. “You said my name.”

She pauses, a tear sliding down her cheek.

“You said... I killed you.”

For a moment, silence.

Then the lights flicker.

She opens her eyes—and sees me.

Not my full face. Just the suggestion of it. A flash. A shape. The blood on her hands.

“No,” she breathes. “No, I didn’t.”

I don’t need to scream.

She’ll remember soon.

She stumbles back, heart pounding, and grabs the notebook—the same one I wasn’t supposed to read. Pages flip wildly, like something’s alive in them.

And there it is.

My name, over and over again.

EMILY. EMILY. EMILY.

Written in red.

Her knees hit the floor.

She screams.

They’ll say it was another episode.

A relapse. An unfortunate side effect of trauma.

But they’ll never know the truth.

They’ll never hear the voice behind her mirror.

They’ll never feel what I feel—the tightness of being forgotten by the person who ended you.

But she will.

Every night.

Until she remembers the whole thing.

Until she remembers the way she laughed after I stopped moving.

Until she remembers what she whispered to me as I faded:

“You made me do this.”

Because she doesn’t know she killed me.

But she will.

And when she does...

I’ll be waiting.

[THE END]