Missing Time

The radiator in Rosia’s apartment hummed like a low-frequency panic attack. She sat on the edge of her bed, staring at the leather-bound diary with the tree symbol. It had arrived in a plain box with no return address, containing a broken key and a keychain with two tiny, mocking bells.

Ding-dong.

The sound of the doorbell yesterday still echoed in her ears. Since that delivery, time had become a fractured mirror. She remembered opening the door. She remembered the delivery man’s face. But she didn't remember the three hours between her "nap" at the art gallery and waking up with a bruised knot on the back of her skull.

"Rosia? You in there?"

The voice belonged to Shaun. He was leaning against her doorframe an hour later, looking at her with a mix of pity and intensity.

"I’m fine, Shaun. Just a bit of a headache," she lied, pulling her sleeve down to hide a faint, dark smear on her wrist. Was it crimson paint? Or was it something that had once pulsed with a heartbeat?

At the exhibition, the air was thick with the scent of expensive wine and underlying tension. Rosia moved through the crowd like a ghost. Her twelve paintings were hung in a row—ethereal, haunting landscapes. But as she stood before them, a cold shiver climbed her spine. One of the paintings—a forest scene with a weeping willow—had a stroke of deep, jagged black across the trunk that she didn't remember adding.

"Beautiful work, Rosia," a voice whispered.

It was Mrs. Sara Holmes. She didn't look at the art; she looked at Rosia. "A shame about James Wood, isn't it? The police were at his studio this morning. Vanished. Not a trace, except for an argument someone heard yesterday. Something about a stolen idea?"

Rosia’s heart hammered against her ribs. She remembered the argument. James had screamed at her, accusing her of copying his style. He had been cruel, looming over her. She remembered feeling a surge of white-hot protective rage—and then, nothing. A gap. A hole in the world where the next two hours should have been.

"I... I’m sure he’ll turn up," Rosia managed to say, her voice paper-thin.

As the night wore on, she felt eyes on her. Kimo, a fellow artist, stood by a pillar, rhythmically clicking a pen. He didn't approach. He just watched. Every time she looked at him, he seemed to be documenting her every flinch.

When she got home, the paranoia bloomed. She found the diary again. She flipped to the back pages, which had been blank before. Now, there were drawings. Crude, violent scribbles of a man slumped in a chair. The man had no face, but he wore a watch exactly like the one James Wood had been wearing at the gallery.

"I'm losing it," she whispered to the empty room. "I have another version of me. A dark one. A protector."

She began to find "evidence" everywhere. A pair of muddy shoes in the back of her closet she didn't recognize. A receipt for a heavy-duty cleaning agent. She became convinced she had DID—that a secondary personality had emerged to "delete" the threat James Wood posed to her career. She started "protecting" herself, hiding the shoes, burning the diary pages, and scrubbing the phantom stains from her floor. She was a woman cleaning up her own crimes, fueled by the terrifying gaps in her memory.

The breaking point came a week later.

She followed a hunch—a set of coordinates scribbled on a napkin she found in her coat pocket. It led her to an abandoned warehouse three miles from the gallery. Her head throbbed; the "bump" she’d felt earlier was now a dull, constant ache.

Inside the warehouse, the smell of turpentine and rot was overwhelming. She saw a figure sitting in the center of the room, surrounded by unfinished canvases. It was James. He wasn't dead, but he was bound, his eyes wide with a terror that broke her heart.

"I'm sorry," Rosia sobbed, reaching for the knots. "I didn't know I did this. I’ll let you go, I’ll turn myself in—"

"Rosia, get away from him."

She spun around. Shaun stood in the doorway. He wasn't the warm, supportive friend she knew. His eyes were vacant, his posture slumped in a way that felt entirely alien. He held a heavy artist’s mallet in his hand.

"Shaun? What are you doing here? I did this... I have a problem, I think I'm sick..."

"You didn't do anything, Rosia," Shaun said, his voice shifting into a higher, child-like register. Then, it dropped into a growl. "We did it. For you. Because he was mean. Because he was going to take your light."

The realization hit her like a physical blow. The "missing time" wasn't her own dissociation—it was her brain’s refusal to process what she was witnessing. Every time Shaun’s "other" side came out to "protect" her, her mind shut down to keep her innocent. The bump on her head? Shaun had pushed her when she tried to stop him the first time. The diary? He’d sent it to her as a "gift" from his other side, a way to share his secret without speaking it.

She wasn't the monster. She was the witness who had been gaslit by her own loyalty.

Shaun stepped forward, the mallet swinging loosely. "He saw the tree, Rosia. He saw the symbol in the diary. Now he has to stay in the forest."

Rosia looked at the "protector" standing before her. She had spent weeks trying to hide her own tracks, only to realize she had been an unwitting accomplice to a man who had fractured his soul to keep her safe.

"Shaun," she whispered, stepping between him and the bound man. "I know who you are. All of you."

The tiny bells on the keychain in her pocket jingled as she trembled. She wasn't saving herself anymore. She was looking into the eyes of a broken man she loved, realizing that to save James, she would have to destroy the only person who had ever truly tried to "protect" her.