Chapter 2: Twelve Minutes Unblinking

Ethan couldn't shake the image of Lena standing in their living room like a statue carved from shadow and silk. Three days had passed since that night, and she claimed no memory of the incident. When he pressed her about it over breakfast the next morning, she'd looked at him with such genuine confusion that he'd almost convinced himself he'd dreamed the whole thing.

Almost.

But the way she'd turned her head—that mechanical, inhuman movement—played on repeat in his mind. And there were other things now, small details that his architect's eye couldn't help but catalog. The way she sometimes paused mid-sentence, her head tilted as if listening to something only she could hear. How he'd catch her staring at blank walls or empty doorways with that same intense focus he'd seen her direct at the television screen. The morning he'd found her standing perfectly still in their kitchen, coffee mug in hand, the liquid gone cold while she gazed at nothing.

Each time, when he spoke her name, she'd blink back to herself with no memory of the lapse.

"I think we should see someone," he'd suggested yesterday evening, watching her push pasta around her plate without eating. "Maybe a doctor. These episodes—"

"What episodes?" she'd asked, fork suspended halfway to her mouth.

"The sleepwalking. The... spacing out."

Lena had frowned. "I'm not spacing out. I'm just tired. Work has been stressful." She'd taken a bite then, chewing mechanically while staring at something beyond his shoulder. "Sometimes artists need to... process things differently."

But Ethan knew the difference between artistic contemplation and whatever was happening to his wife. He'd lived with her creative process for five years. This wasn't it.

That's when he'd made the decision that now felt both logical and like a complete violation of trust. The small camera she'd given him for their anniversary sat on his desk in their home office, still in its box. He'd told himself he was just going to test it out, maybe surprise her with some candid shots of their life together.

Instead, he'd spent his lunch break researching night vision settings and motion detection.

The first camera went in their bedroom, tucked behind a picture frame on Lena's dresser, angled to capture most of the room. The second he positioned in the living room, hidden among the books on their built-in shelves with a clear view of the space where he'd found her standing. The third—this one felt like crossing a line, but he did it anyway—went in the hallway outside their bedroom door.

He told himself it was for her safety. If she was sleepwalking, she could hurt herself. The cameras would help him understand what was happening, maybe even prevent an accident.

He definitely didn't tell himself he was afraid of his own wife.

The cameras recorded for two nights without incident. Lena slept peacefully beside him, turning occasionally but never leaving the bed. Ethan began to feel foolish, paranoid. Maybe he was the one who needed to see a doctor.

Then came the third night.

He'd fallen asleep easily, exhausted from a particularly difficult day dealing with permit issues on his housing project. The wine with dinner probably helped too—Lena had suggested they open a bottle of the good stuff, saying they should enjoy life's small pleasures while they could. An odd way to phrase it, but the wine had been excellent, and he'd slept deeply.

Until his phone buzzed at 2:43 AM.

The motion detection alert made his heart jump. He grabbed the phone, fumbling with the camera app, expecting to see Lena walking to the bathroom or maybe getting a glass of water.

Instead, he saw something that made his blood turn to ice water in his veins.

The bedroom camera showed their bed, and him in it, lying on his back with one arm flung over his eyes. But standing beside the bed, perfectly motionless, was Lena. She was wearing the same white nightgown she'd gone to sleep in, but in the camera's night vision, she looked like a specter, pale and translucent.

She was staring down at him.

Ethan's hands shook as he accessed the timestamp. She'd been standing there for eleven minutes already. As he watched, she didn't move, didn't sway, didn't even seem to breathe. She simply stood and stared at his sleeping form with an intensity that made his skin crawl even through the digital buffer of the camera.

Carefully, trying not to make any noise, Ethan turned his head slightly and opened his eyes. The space beside the bed was empty. He was alone.

But the camera showed her still there, still watching.

He looked back at his phone screen, then at the empty space, then back at the phone. On the screen, Lena hadn't moved. She stood like a sentinel, her face a pale oval in the green-tinted night vision, her eyes fixed on him with unwavering attention.

Twelve minutes. Thirteen. Fourteen.

Ethan realized he was holding his breath. On the screen, Lena's chest wasn't moving either. In all the time he'd been watching, he hadn't seen her blink once.

Not once.

At exactly fifteen minutes, she turned and walked out of frame with that same mechanical movement he remembered from the living room. The motion detector in the hallway should have triggered, should have picked up her movement, but his phone remained silent.

He lay in the dark for another hour, watching the empty bedroom feed, waiting for her to return. She never did. When he finally worked up the courage to get up and check the house, he found her in their bed, sleeping peacefully on her side, exactly as she'd been when he'd gone to sleep.

The next morning, Ethan said nothing about the cameras or what he'd seen. Instead, he watched Lena over breakfast, looking for some sign, some tell that would explain what was happening. She seemed perfectly normal—warm, present, herself. She kissed him goodbye before he left for work, reminded him to pick up milk on the way home, complained about a client who kept changing their mind about color palettes.

But when he checked the hallway camera's footage later, fast-forwarding through hours of empty corridor, he found something that made him question his own sanity.

At 3:47 AM, nearly an hour after he'd seen Lena disappear from the bedroom camera, a figure moved through the hallway. But it wasn't walking—it was gliding, feet not quite touching the ground, moving with impossible smoothness back toward their bedroom.

The figure was wearing Lena's white nightgown, had Lena's silhouette, but the camera couldn't quite focus on it properly. The image was blurred, distorted, as if the lens was struggling to process what it was seeing.

That evening, Ethan couldn't concentrate on anything. He picked at dinner, made distracted conversation, and kept glancing at Lena for signs of... what? That she wasn't real? That she was something else wearing his wife's face?

"You seem tense," she observed, reaching across the table to touch his hand. Her fingers were cold. "Everything okay at work?"

"Fine," he lied. "Just tired."

"Maybe you should get some rest. You've been staying up too late recently." Her thumb traced small circles on the back of his hand. "I worry about you."

The simple tenderness of the gesture nearly broke him. This was Lena—his Lena. Whatever he'd seen on those cameras, whatever was happening during the night, it couldn't negate five years of love, of shared dreams and inside jokes and quiet Sunday mornings in bed.

But that night, he kept his phone close and his eyes on the motion detection alerts.

She got up at 1:23 AM.

This time, Ethan forced himself to remain completely still, to control his breathing, to appear deeply asleep. On his phone screen, he watched her rise from bed with fluid grace and move to stand in the same spot as the night before.

She stared at him for seventeen minutes.

Seventeen minutes without blinking, without moving, without any sign of the woman he'd married. Her face was serene in the green-tinted display, but there was something wrong with her expression—too peaceful, too empty. It was the face of someone who had gone somewhere else entirely, leaving only the shell behind.

When she finally moved, it was to lean closer. The camera angle couldn't capture exactly what she was doing, but Ethan could feel her presence suddenly, a coldness that pressed against his skin like winter air. He fought every instinct to open his eyes, to confront her, to demand answers.

Instead, he lay perfectly still and let her study him like a specimen.

The next morning brought another performance of normalcy. Lena made coffee, hummed while she got dressed, kissed him goodbye with lips that tasted of mint and something else—something metallic that reminded him of blood, though he told himself it was just his imagination.

That day at work, Ethan couldn't focus on blueprints or building codes. He kept thinking about those seventeen minutes, about the impossible stillness of her watching form. He found himself researching sleep disorders, fugue states, anything that might explain what was happening to his wife.

But deep down, he knew this wasn't medical. This was something else entirely.

The third night's footage was the worst yet.

Twenty-two minutes this time. Twenty-two minutes of Lena standing beside their bed, staring at him with eyes that never closed, never wavered, never showed even the slightest hint of the woman he loved. But this time, she did something new.

She smiled.

It wasn't Lena's smile—not the warm, slightly crooked grin he'd fallen in love with. This was something else, something that used her mouth but came from somewhere else entirely. In the night vision camera, that smile looked like a wound carved into her face.

When Ethan couldn't stand it anymore, when the sight of that terrible smile made his chest tight with panic, he did the only thing he could think of.

He blinked.

Just once, deliberately, while staring at his phone screen.

On the camera, Lena's head snapped toward the lens as if she'd heard the sound of his eyelids closing from across the room. For one terrifying moment, she stared directly into the camera, and Ethan swore he could feel her gaze burning through the digital connection, through the phone screen, straight into his soul.

Then she was gone.

Not walking away, not moving out of frame—simply gone, as if she'd never been there at all.

Ethan spent the rest of the night sitting up in bed, phone clutched in his trembling hands, watching the empty feeds and trying to convince himself that what he'd seen was real. Beside him, Lena slept peacefully, occasionally murmuring in her dreams.

When morning came, he made a decision.

"Lena," he said over breakfast, his voice carefully controlled. "I need to ask you something, and I need you to be completely honest with me."

She looked up from her cereal, eyebrows raised. "Okay."

"Do you remember getting up during the night? Any of the past few nights?"

"No," she said immediately. "I've been sleeping really well, actually. Better than I have in months." She tilted her head, studying his face. "Why? Have I been disturbing you?"

"I installed some cameras," he said, the words tumbling out before he could stop them. "Security cameras. For the house. And they... they picked up some movement."

Lena's spoon paused halfway to her mouth. "What kind of movement?"

"You," he said quietly. "Standing by our bed. Watching me sleep."

For a long moment, she didn't react at all. Then she set down her spoon with deliberate care and folded her hands in her lap.

"Show me," she said.

Ethan pulled up the footage on his phone, his hands shaking slightly as he navigated to the clearest recording—the seventeen-minute vigil from two nights ago. He turned the screen toward her and pressed play.

Lena watched in complete silence as her night-vision doppelganger stood motionless beside their bed. Her expression was unreadable, but Ethan saw her hands clench tighter in her lap as the minutes ticked by on the timestamp.

When the recording ended, she looked up at him with eyes that seemed suddenly very old.

"That's not me," she said quietly.

"Lena—"

"That's not me," she repeated, her voice gaining strength. "I don't remember any of that. I would remember standing there, watching you. I would remember being awake."

"Then what is it?"

She stared at the blank phone screen for a long time, her jaw working as if she was trying to find words for something unspeakable.

"I don't know," she finally whispered. "But you're right to be afraid."

The admission hung between them like a blade. Ethan reached across the table to take her hand, but she pulled away before he could touch her.

"Don't," she said, not meeting his eyes. "Not until we figure out what's happening to me. Not until we know it's safe."

That was the moment Ethan realized that whatever was wrong with Lena, she was aware of it. Had maybe been aware of it all along.

And that terrified him more than anything he'd seen on those cameras.