4338.209 · July 28, 2018 AD
Five Letters She Can't Unread
Louise waits alone in Interview Room Three, counting seconds like accusations. She came here for Kain and Jamie—her missing son, her missing brother. But when the door opens, it isn't Karl. Charlie slips back in with an urgency that doesn't match protocol, carrying something that has nothing to do with the investigation she came to start. She's spent thirty years building compartments in her mind. She's about to need another one.
Louise has become expert at waiting. She's counted the seconds on the institutional clock, felt each tick land like an accusation, and held herself together through sheer mathematical discipline. Kain and Jamie are missing. That's the only truth this room is permitted to hold.
Then Charlie returns—not with answers about her family, but with something else entirely. A name scrawled on torn paper. A thread connecting Thomas to shadows she's sensed but never named. They've been watching him for years. The words rise in her throat before she can stop them, and Charlie's face tells her everything his silence won't.
She's spent nearly three decades sorting her life into boxes that don't touch. The wife. The mother. The professional. The grief. Now she adds another: the woman who just learned her husband might be something other than what she believed. That Louise will have to wait—patient, contained, locked away until the moment demands her.
When Karl walks through that door, she'll be exactly what the investigation requires. A mother searching for her son. A sister searching for her brother. A woman with nothing to hide.
The other Louise knows how to be patient. She's been waiting ten years already.
