Chapter 4: An Eye for an Eye

The watching began that very night.

Ethan positioned himself in the chair beside their bed, laptop open on his knees, pretending to work on blueprints while keeping Lena in his peripheral vision. She lay still beneath the covers, but he could feel her awareness of his vigil—the way her breathing never quite settled into the deep rhythm of true sleep, the occasional flutter of her eyelids as if she were fighting to stay in control even in unconsciousness.

At 2:17 AM, she sat up.

The movement was fluid, too smooth, like a marionette being pulled upright by invisible strings. In the dim glow of his laptop screen, her face was serene, empty, wearing that terrible peaceful expression he'd seen on the camera feeds.

"I see you," she said, but her voice was wrong—too flat, too calm. "You're watching."

Ethan's hands froze over his keyboard. "Lena?"

She turned toward him with that mechanical precision he'd come to dread. "She told you the rules, didn't she? About watching. About never looking away."

This wasn't Lena speaking. The voice was hers, but the cadence was all wrong, the inflection foreign. Ethan kept his eyes fixed on her face, remembering her desperate plea: You have to keep watching me.

"What are you?" he asked quietly.

The thing wearing his wife's face smiled. "I'm what happens when no one's looking. I'm what fills the empty spaces." She stood from the bed, moving with that same unnatural grace. "But you're looking now, aren't you? So I can't be complete. I can only... visit."

She walked to their dresser and began opening drawers, her movements precise and purposeful. "She fights so hard to stay present when you're watching. It's admirable, really. The human capacity for resistance."

"Let her go."

"I can't let go of something that invited me in." She pulled out a small digital camera—not the one she'd given him, but another, older model. "Did you know your wife has been very busy while you were at work? Very... thorough."

Ethan's blood went cold. "What do you mean?"

Instead of answering, she turned on the camera and began scrolling through images on the small LCD screen. Even from across the room, he could see they were photographs of him—dozens of them. Him sleeping. Him showering. Him working at his desk, completely unaware he was being observed.

"She's been documenting you," the thing said conversationally. "Every unguarded moment. Every time you thought you were alone." She held up the camera, angling the screen toward him. "This one's my favorite."

The image showed Ethan asleep in their bed, but standing in the background, barely visible in the shadows, was a tall figure that definitely wasn't Lena. The shape was wrong—too angular, too elongated, like a person stretched on a medieval rack.

"You weren't looking," the thing continued, still using Lena's voice but with that alien cadence. "Someone has to."

"That's why you made her take the pictures."

"Oh, I didn't make her do anything. She volunteered." The smile that crossed Lena's face was predatory. "She was so concerned about your safety, so worried about what might happen if no one was watching you while she slept. So I offered to help."

Ethan's laptop slipped from his knees as he stood, his hands clenched into fists. "You're lying."

"Am I?" She scrolled to another image—this one showing Ethan in his home office, working late, while that same impossible shadow loomed behind his chair. "She takes very good care of you. Even when she's not entirely herself."

The room felt like it was tilting, reality shifting beneath his feet. "How long has she been taking these?"

"Since the second night I visited. She was so frightened by what she might do if she lost control completely. So we made an arrangement." The thing set the camera on the dresser and turned back to him. "She watches you. I watch her. Everyone stays safe."

"That's not how this works. You said someone had to watch you to keep you contained."

"I said someone had to be watching. I never specified who had to watch whom." The smile widened, showing too many teeth. "The game has so many more rules than she told you."

Ethan felt sick. Everything Lena had explained, everything she'd asked of him—it was all part of some larger manipulation. "What do you want?"

"What I've always wanted. To exist fully. To step completely into your world." She moved closer, and he could smell something wrong about her—not Lena's familiar scent of vanilla and paint, but something cold and metallic. "But I'm patient. I can wait. I can play the long game."

"Get out of my wife."

"She invited me in, remember? And she keeps inviting me back, every time she falls asleep, every time she lets her guard down." The thing reached out as if to touch his face, and Ethan jerked backward. "But you... you're still pure. Still untouched. Still capable of seeing me clearly."

"I see you just fine."

"Do you?" She gestured toward the window, and Ethan's eyes automatically followed the movement.

The moment his gaze left her face, everything changed.

When he looked back, Lena was herself again—confused, frightened, swaying on her feet like someone waking from a nightmare.

"Ethan?" Her voice was her own now, warm and familiar. "What happened? Why am I standing up?"

But Ethan was staring at the camera on the dresser, at the impossible photographs it contained. "Lena, I need you to explain something to me."

"What?"

He picked up the camera, his hands shaking as he showed her the images. "When did you take these?"

Lena's face went white as she scrolled through the photographs. "I... I don't remember taking these."

"You don't remember? Or you don't want to remember?"

"I don't understand what you're asking me."

Ethan grabbed her shoulders, perhaps more roughly than he intended. "I need you to be honest with me. Completely honest. Have you been watching me while I sleep? Have you been following me around the house with a camera?"

Tears formed in her eyes. "No. I mean... I don't think so. Sometimes I lose time, you know that. Sometimes I'm somewhere else and when I come back, things have happened that I can't explain."

"Things like secretly photographing your husband?"

"If I did that, it wasn't me. It was..." She looked at the camera screen again, her face crumpling. "Oh god, what if it's been using me to hurt you? What if everything I told you about protecting you was a lie?"

The desperation in her voice sounded real, but Ethan found himself studying her face, looking for tells, for signs that this might be another performance by the thing that lived inside her skin.

"How do I know you're really you right now?" he asked.

The question hit her like a physical blow. "What?"

"How do I know this isn't just another manipulation? Another layer of the game?"

Lena stared at him for a long moment, and he could see her trying to find an answer that would satisfy them both. Finally, she shook her head.

"You can't know," she whispered. "That's the horrible truth of it. Once something like this gets inside you, once it starts wearing your face and speaking with your voice, there's no way to prove which thoughts are yours and which are its."

She sat heavily on the edge of the bed, the camera clutched in her hands.

"Maybe I did take these pictures. Maybe some part of me, some part that's been contaminated by that thing, thought it was protecting you. Or maybe it made me do it while I was unconscious. Or maybe..." She looked up at him with haunted eyes. "Maybe there's no difference anymore."

Ethan felt something cold settle in his stomach. "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that I don't know where I end and it begins anymore. I don't know if my thoughts are my own, or if my love for you is real, or if everything I've told you is just another way for it to get closer to you."

She stood and moved toward their closet, pulling out a suitcase.

"What are you doing?"

"Packing your things." Her movements were swift, efficient, desperate. "You need to leave. Tonight. Before this gets any worse."

"Lena, no."

"Yes." She threw clothes into the suitcase without looking at them. "I can't trust myself anymore. I can't guarantee your safety. And if something happens to you because I was too selfish to let you go..."

Ethan caught her hands, stilling her frantic packing. "I'm not leaving you."

"You have to."

"No. We're going to figure this out. Together."

Lena pulled away from him, and there was something desperate and wild in her eyes. "Don't you understand? There is no 'together' anymore. There's you, and there's whatever I'm becoming, and those things are incompatible."

"I don't believe that."

"Then you're going to get us both killed."

The finality in her voice was terrifying, but Ethan held his ground. "Maybe. But I'd rather die trying to save you than live knowing I abandoned you."

For a moment, Lena's expression softened, and he saw a glimpse of the woman he'd married—vulnerable, grateful, desperately in love.

Then her face hardened into resolve.

"Fine," she said quietly. "But if you're staying, then we do this my way. No more questions about what's real and what isn't. No more trying to figure out which version of me you're talking to. You watch when I tell you to watch, you look away when I tell you to look away, and you trust that I'm doing everything I can to keep you safe."

"And the cameras? The photographs?"

"Forget about them. They don't matter. What matters is that you're alive and whole, and that I can keep you that way for as long as possible."

She zipped up the suitcase and shoved it back into the closet.

"I'm going to make coffee," she said, her voice artificially calm. "It's going to be a long night, and we both need to stay awake. While I'm in the kitchen, you're going to delete every file from that camera and then you're going to smash it. Can you do that for me?"

Ethan nodded, though something in her tone made his skin crawl.

"Good." She kissed his forehead, a gesture that should have been comforting but felt somehow like a benediction. "I'll be right back."

As she left the room, Ethan picked up the camera and began scrolling through the images again. There were dozens of them, chronicling weeks of surveillance he'd never suspected. But as he looked more closely, he noticed something that made his blood freeze.

In every single photograph, the timestamp showed the same thing: they'd all been taken during the day, while he was at work.

Which meant Lena hadn't taken them while sleepwalking or during one of her episodes.

She'd taken them while fully conscious, fully herself, completely aware of what she was doing.

From the kitchen came the sound of coffee brewing and Lena humming softly to herself—a tune he didn't recognize, in a key that sounded almost like screaming.

Ethan deleted the files as she'd asked, then smashed the camera against the wall until it was nothing but plastic fragments and scattered electronics.

But he couldn't smash the growing certainty that his wife—his real wife, not the thing that sometimes wore her face—had been lying to him from the very beginning.

And if she'd been lying about this, what else had she lied about?

In the kitchen, the humming stopped, replaced by the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor.

Ethan decided he didn't want to know what she was doing down there.

At least, not yet.