The day they told me I could go home, Leon cried.

  He tried not to. He turned away, pretending to double-check the discharge papers, but his shoulders shook once, barely, the way they do when you’re trying to hold an entire ocean inside a glass.

  I watched him and felt… nothing I could name.

  Relief, maybe. Fear. A strange, distant ache that wouldn’t commit to being either joy or dread.

  The doctor said I was “doing well.”

  “Orientation is intact, motor function is returning nicely. Some dissociation and confusion is normal after a prolonged state. Give it time.”

  Give it time.

  As if time hadn’t already taken everything.

  The apartment should have felt familiar.

  I recognized the shoe rack by the door, permanently one pair short because Leon always forgot to put his inside. The chipped coffee mug by the sink with a faded cartoon fox. The plant that looked half dead but somehow kept surviving on the windowsill.

  My brain knew these things.

  My chest didn’t.

  It felt like walking into a stranger’s life—one I’d watched from behind glass, not one I had lived.

  “Careful,” Leon said, hovering beside me like a human rail. “You can sit on the bed. I changed the sheets this morning.”

  The bed. Our bed. The one we used to grumble about because the springs squeaked if you even thought about moving.

  I lowered myself onto the mattress, fingers grazing the blanket. The textures were right. The layout was right. The smell of detergent and something faintly spicy—Leon’s cooking—was right.

  So why did it all feel… overwritten?

  Like someone had taken my memories, traced over them, and left the original lines buried underneath.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  I nodded, because it felt like the correct answer.

  He moved around the room, fussing with pillows, adjusting the curtains so the sunlight wouldn’t hit my eyes directly. His hands were efficient and certain. He knew where everything was. He knew how I liked things placed.

  I watched him and a thought slid in quietly:

  This is what he always does. This is who he has always been.

  But right behind it, another thought followed—

  Then why does he feel off?

  Not wrong, exactly. Just… misaligned.

  Like the rhythm was the same, but the song had changed.

  The first night back, I couldn’t sleep.

  I lay there listening to the small sounds of our home—the refrigerator humming, a motorcycle passing outside, Leon’s footsteps moving from room to room as he pretended not to check on me every fifteen minutes.

  The ceiling looked too white.

  My body felt too present.

  Before the coma—before everything—I used to fall asleep eventually, even if it took time. Now, every time my eyelids drooped, something inside me jolted like it was refusing to go back into the dark.

  When sleep finally caught me, it was sudden, like falling through a trapdoor.

  I woke up with tears on my face.

  No images.

  No clear dream.

  Just the heavy, choking sensation of having lost something in a place I couldn’t return to.

  Leon was sitting on the chair by the window, pretending not to watch me.

  “You okay?” he asked quietly.

  I wiped my face with the back of my hand. “Yeah. Just… weird dream.”

  “What about?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  He nodded, too quickly. “It happens. Don’t worry about it.”

  That was the first night.

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  It didn’t get better.

  Every time I slept, I woke up with that same crushing ache. Sometimes with my hands fisted into the blanket so tightly my fingers throbbed. Sometimes holding the pillow like it was a person.

  I’d stare at the damp patch from my tears and wonder:

  Who did I lose in a dream I can’t remember?

  Days blurred.

  Leon tried to keep things normal. He made breakfast. He brought me books. He sat beside me while I scrolled aimlessly through my phone, pretending to read something on his own.

  I watched him move through our kitchen, open drawers, stir a pot in that lazy clockwise motion, tilt his head when he tasted soup that was too salty and fix it without thinking.

  All of it was familiar.

  And yet.

  Some mornings, when he called my name, my heart stuttered for a second—not in joy, not in fear, but in a strange, cold confusion.

  As if the voice was right, but the person behind it wasn’t.

  I tried to ignore it.

  The internet didn’t help.

  I searched everything I could think of: coma recovery emotional detachment, family feels like stranger after coma, broken recognition, why does my brother feel unfamiliar.

  I read about dissociation.

  About brain trauma.

  About something called “altered emotional tagging of memory.”

  Then the terms I already knew stared back at me again:

  Jamais vu.

  Capgras delusion.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe my brain had misfiled my emotions and was now treating my own brother as an impostor.

  Clinical. Logical.

  So why did those explanations feel like trying to stitch up a stab wound with tape?

  The dream that changed everything didn’t feel like a dream at first.

  There was no surreal landscape. No impossible colors. Just… a sensation of warmth. A hand in mine. A voice I couldn’t hear clearly, but my heart recognized.

  I leaned toward it, straining to catch a word, a breath, anything.

  And then—nothing.

  Dark.

  A cliff-drop out of sleep.

  I woke up choking on the end of a scream, the name tearing out of me before I even knew it was in my mouth.

  “AKAI!”

  The word hung in the air like smoke.

  I was sitting upright, fingers digging into the sheets, hair plastered to my face. My chest ached as if I’d been running.

  Leon burst into the room.

  “Airi!” He was at my side in seconds. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. You’re safe. You’re home.”

  His hand reached for my wrist.

  My body jerked back on its own.

  “Don’t—” The word escaped before I could smother it.

  His expression flickered. Hurt, confusion, panic—all tangled.

  “It’s me,” he said, softer. “It’s just me.”

  I forced myself to breathe slower. Forced myself to let him adjust the blanket around me. Forced myself not to look away from his face that was too familiar and not familiar enough.

  “I’m fine,” I lied. “Just a nightmare.”

  “What was it about?” he asked.

  I swallowed.

  The name burned in my throat like a secret I had no language for.

  “I… don’t remember.”

  He nodded again, that same too-fast nod. “Do you want water?”

  “No. I’m okay.”

  He lingered for a moment, watching me like he wanted to keep asking questions and also desperately didn’t. Finally he left, the door clicking softly behind him.

  The silence that followed felt wrong.

  Like the room was holding its breath.

  In the bathroom, I turned on the light and winced at my reflection. Pale. Hollow-eyed. There was a tremor in my fingers when I reached up to push my hair back.

  That’s when I saw it.

  A bruise on my wrist.

  Dark. Obvious.

  Shaped like fingers.

  I stared at it, turning my arm this way and that, as if a better angle might bring back the memory.

  Nothing came.

  Had someone held me down in the hospital? During a procedure? An IV issue? A nurse restraining me if I panicked?

  It was plausible.

  It just didn’t feel right.

  Because the moment I focused on the bruise, my chest clenched. The same grief as in my dreams flooded me, thick and suffocating.

  It didn’t feel like a random mark.

  It felt like the imprint of someone I had begged not to let go.

  Someone my mind refused to show me.

  The next morning, there was another bruise, faint but there, on the other wrist.

  Same shape.

  Same place.

  An echo.

  I touched it lightly and whispered, before I could stop myself:

  “Who are you?”

  The tap kept dripping. The mirror didn’t answer.

  I spent the afternoon deep in another spiral—medical journals, survivor blogs, online communities for people with “unreal” memories.

  Everything had labels.

  Night terrors.

  Sleep paralysis.

  Repressed trauma resurfacing as fragmented dreams.

  Words that tried very hard to sound like they understood.

  But none of them mentioned waking up with finger-shaped bruises from someone you couldn’t remember—and crying over a name you had no conscious association with.

  Akai.

  Just thinking it made my chest hurt.

  As if my heart knew a story my brain was refusing to tell.

  It happened around dusk.

  The room was bathed in orange light, the kind that made dust particles look like tiny planets floating between worlds. Leon was in the kitchen, humming under his breath as he washed dishes.

  I was on the bed, staring at my phone screen, not really seeing it.

  Then a notification popped up.

  No sound. No vibration.

  Just a rectangle of light at the top of the screen.

  There was no app icon.

  No sender name.

  No number.

  Just text.

  I frowned and tapped it.

  The message opened on a blank white background.

  No chat history.

  No timestamp.

  Only four lines:

  We see you, Airi.

  You might not remember us.

  But we do.

  We can answer your questions.

  Follow the Manual.

  My thumb hovered over the screen.

  There was no link.

  No button.

  No attachment.

  Just those words, sitting there as if they had always been waiting for me to look.

  The air in the room felt heavier.

  “Leon?” I called out, but my voice sounded wrong in my own ears—too thin, too far away.

  He answered from the kitchen, normal, unsuspecting. “Yeah?”

  “Nothing,” I said quickly. “It’s nothing.”

  My heart was beating too fast.

  I checked the notification panel. There was no trace of the alert. No app showing a new message. No unknown number. Nothing in emails. Nothing in any chat.

  As if the message had appeared directly on the screen, bypassing everything else.

  I looked back at the text.

  “We see you, Airi.”

  My throat tightened.

  The doctors said my brain was misfiring.

  The articles said my emotions were misplaced.

  The terms said delusion like it was a neat explanation.

  But this didn’t feel like a misfire.

  This felt like a knock.

  Slow. Polite. Patient.

  As if something—or someone—I once knew was standing just outside the door of my memory, waiting for me to decide whether to open it.

  I should have locked the phone.

  Turned it off.

  Thrown it aside.

  Instead, I kept staring, reading the lines again and again until they blurred:

  We can answer your questions.

  Follow the Manual.

  For the first time since I woke up, the confusion quieted.

  Not because I understood.

  But because something inside me whispered, with terrifying certainty:

  They’re not lying.