Chapter 23

I never thought a receipt could scare me more than a gun.

A gun is at least honest. It doesn't pretend to be part of normal life.

But a receipt is a scrap of paper you usually crumple up and toss in the first bin you pass. That's exactly why you trust it. It doesn't know how to lie. Or, more precisely, it has no reason to. It just records what happened.

All night I kept rereading one line.

Photocopying — 31 pages.

If the till had printed it, then someone really had used the photocopier. There was only one question. Who?

Helen showed up at eight in the morning, without calling ahead. She'd stopped calling ahead — that too had happened quietly, like so much else over the past weeks. At some point it had simply become obvious that no warning was needed.

"We're going there," she said, without taking off her coat.

"Where?"

"The shop."

"You think they'll remember something?"

She shrugged — brief, no wasted words.

"People rarely remember faces. But sometimes they remember something odd very well."

Outside it was damp. Not rain — just that particular London mist that never soaks your clothes but somehow, by the end of the day, has gotten into everything. We walked quickly, without talking. Helen kept her hands in the pockets of her coat — the same one she'd been wearing for four years now. I knew that, though I'd never consciously noticed it.

The stationery shop met us with the same smell of paper and cheap plastic. Behind the till stood yesterday's woman — not young, her hair neatly done, the kind of person who remembers regular customers by name and new ones by their expression.

She recognized me right away.

"Morning. Didn't like the notebook?"

I took out the receipt and set it on the counter, not sure where to start.

"Can I ask you an odd question?"

She smiled — not out of politeness, but a real smile.

"Usually the oddest questions turn out to be the most interesting ones."

"This says I made thirty-one copies." I hesitated slightly. "But I don't remember doing that."

The woman took the receipt. Looked at it for a long time — unhurried, careful, the way you look at a document that doesn't add up but should.

"No," she said finally.

"Sorry?"

"You didn't make the copies."

She was completely certain. Without a shadow of doubt.

"Then why—"

"Another man made them."

I felt something clench inside me — sharply, as if someone had yanked the air out of the room.

"What other man?"

The woman closed her eyes for a second — I could see her honestly trying to reconstruct yesterday morning, pull it out of that part of memory where ordinary days get stacked up untidily.

"He came in literally a minute before you. I remember because the machine jammed the paper — I had to open the lid, and he was standing right there. Then you came in." She paused for a moment. "I thought you two knew each other."

"Why?"

"Because you said hello to him."

Helen glanced at me quickly. I felt her look — out of the corner of my eye, without turning my head.

"Did he answer?" she asked the shop assistant.

The woman shook her head apologetically.

"I don't know. I think… no."

"Do you remember his face?"

The woman was quiet for a long time. A very long time. Her look grew more and more lost — not frightened, just lost, the way you feel when you're reaching for a word and feel it slip away right out of your grasp.

"Strange…"

"What's strange?"

"I remembered it just a second ago…"

She closed her eyes. Rubbed her temples — carefully, with two fingers, like someone with a headache they've had so long they've stopped noticing it.

"I'm sorry. I can't. It's like… it smudged."

I looked at Helen. We both already knew this symptom. We didn't talk about it out loud — we just knew.

"What was he copying?" I asked.

The woman suddenly smiled — lightly, with the relief of someone finally asked a question they actually had an answer to.

"That, I do remember. Not documents. A notebook. A thick, black one. He copied almost the whole thing."

The blood drained from my face. I felt it physically — as if something warm had suddenly dropped away somewhere down inside me.

"Did he leave the original?"

"No. He took both the original and the copies."

We went outside.

The fog had thinned a little by then. London looked almost peaceful — an ordinary morning, ordinary people, a bus on the corner, a woman with a pram at the crossing. Nothing to suggest that right now, right here, something important was falling apart.

Helen was silent for a long time. Then she said quietly:

"If that wasn't you…"

"It was me."

She stopped.

"Just not today's me." I was surprised myself at how level my voice sounded. "Look at what we've got. My handwriting. My notes. Now the notebook. The man the shop assistant saw wasn't hiding. He was just living an ordinary day. Copying his notes. Buying stationery. Saying hello to people. Exactly the way I would."

Helen said nothing.

Because there was nothing left to argue with.

We were already about to leave when the shop assistant called out to us from the door.

"Excuse me!"

We turned around at the same moment. She was holding a small clear bag, holding it out across the threshold — a little awkwardly, like someone unsure they're doing the right thing but doing it anyway.

"I think this was left behind from him. I was cleaning around the machine, found it under the tray."

Inside the bag was a single sheet. Not a document, not a photograph. Just an ordinary test print — the kind made to check the copier's settings, then thrown away without a glance.

Almost the entire sheet was blank.

Only in the very bottom corner, where the edge of the original lands during a test feed, was there a cropped fragment of text. Three words, and nothing else — the rest of the sentence had been left forever outside the edge of the page.

…don't trust memory.

I stared at those three words for a long time.

Helen stood beside me, silent. Somewhere around the corner a car horn sounded. An elderly couple walked past — he was carrying two supermarket bags, she was saying something quietly, he nodded without answering.

The most frightening thing about that note wasn't the warning.

The most frightening thing was that I didn't know who it was addressed to. Had the past Michael left it for me — or for himself? Was it a reminder — or a confession?

I carefully folded the sheet and put it in my pocket.

Next to the receipt.

10:19