The Faces in My Mirror

The morning started the way most of them did lately, with my youngest tugging at my pant legs while I tried to balance a coffee mug on top of a stack of Real Estate Law notes that refused to stay in order. Daycare started at eight, and it was already seven forty, and somewhere between finding a matching shoe and reading a paragraph on adverse possession, I had lost track of which task actually mattered more.

The apartment held onto a kind of heaviness some mornings, a weight I couldn't quite name. It wasn't sadness exactly, and it wasn't dread. It felt more like something unfinished sitting in the corners, waiting for me to notice it before I left for the day. I'd felt it before, plenty of times, usually right around finals or right before a hard phone call with my mother, but this morning it sat thicker than usual, pressing against the walls like humidity before a storm that never comes.

I zipped my son's jacket and knelt down to tie his shoes, and when I stood back up I caught myself in the little tarnished silver mirror that hung crooked by the door. It had been my grandmother's, one of the few things I kept after she passed, and most mornings I barely looked at it twice. But something made me pause. The woman in the glass had my curls, my green eyes, the same crescent scar on her chin from a fall I barely remembered. And yet for one strange second, she didn't feel like me at all. She felt like someone I used to know, or someone I hadn't met yet. I blinked and the feeling passed, and I told myself it was exhaustion, because exhaustion could explain almost anything if you let it.

By the time I dropped my son off and made it to Delta College, I had maybe forty minutes before my first field inspection, just enough time to duck into the library and print the case study I'd forgotten the night before. The librarian pointed me toward the printers near the art section, and it was there, wedged between an oversized book on Renaissance sculpture and a battered copy of something on urban planning, that I saw it.

The cover alone stopped me. A woman with hollow, knowing eyes stared out from beneath a veil of dark lace, her skin pale as bone, her expression somewhere between mourning and invitation. The name beneath the title read Victoria Frances. I picked it up without thinking, the way you'd pick up a photograph of yourself you didn't remember someone taking. I flipped through the pages slowly, past image after image of gothic women draped in shadow and moonlight, and something in my chest cracked open just slightly, like a door that had been painted shut for years finally giving under pressure. I couldn't explain the feeling. It wasn't recognition exactly. It was closer to homesickness for a place I'd never been.

"You've been standing there for five minutes holding that book like it's going to bite you."

Frances Robinson leaned against the shelf beside me, her bright orange cardigan the only thing in the library that wasn't some shade of beige. She had a way of appearing right when I needed a distraction, and right when I least wanted one.

"Sorry," I said, closing the book but not quite putting it down. "Long morning."

"Aren't they all." She nodded at my stack of notes. "You look like you're one bad night's sleep away from falling asleep in Professor Deluca's lecture. Again."

"That was one time."

"It was memorable," she said, grinning. "So what's got you standing in the art aisle instead of the law aisle? Last I checked, adverse possession doesn't come with pretty pictures."

I laughed, though it came out quieter than I meant it to. "I don't know. It just caught my eye."

Frances studied me for a second longer than usual, the way she did when she sensed there was more sitting under the surface of what I'd said. She didn't push, though. She never did, not right away.

"You ever think about how insane it is that we're doing this?" she asked instead, gesturing vaguely at the library, the campus, the whole tangled mess of our lives. "Like, full time moms, full time students, and you've got the whole inspection gig on top of it."

"It's a winding road," I admitted. "Hospitality, then security, then somehow business and inspections. I keep telling myself there's a straight line in there somewhere, I just haven't found it yet."

What I didn't tell her was that lately the buildings I inspected felt like they were listening back, that certain hallways held a stillness that didn't belong to empty houses, that some rooms felt like they were holding their breath until I left. It wasn't the kind of thing you said out loud to your best friend in a library, not yet.

We talked another few minutes about deadlines and daycare pickup times before I had to go. I tucked the Victoria Frances book back onto the shelf, though something in me didn't want to let it go.

Outside, the sky had gone the color of wet concrete, and the wind carried the smell of rain that hadn't decided to fall yet. I cut through the strip of shops near campus on my way to the car, past the little music store with the faded guitar mural painted across its window. A man stepped out just as I passed, wearing a trench coat and sunglasses despite the overcast sky, his dark hair damp at the edges.

"You dropped this," he said, holding out a flyer that had blown loose from my bag.

"Thanks," I said, reaching for it.

Our fingers brushed, and the static that jumped between us wasn't ordinary. It ran up my arm like a current, sharp and cold, and for one impossible second the street around me wasn't a street at all. Cobblestones stretched beneath my feet instead of asphalt, gas lamps flickered where streetlights should have been, and the music store's window reflected something older, something draped in lace and shadow.

Then it was gone, and I was standing on the sidewalk again, my hand still holding the flyer, my heart slamming against my ribs.

"You okay?" he asked. His voice was calm, almost too calm, like he already knew the answer.

"Fine," I lied. "Static shock."

He didn't look convinced. Behind the sunglasses, his amber eyes held something knowing, something patient, like he'd been waiting for that exact moment longer than I could guess. I pulled away and mumbled a thank you, my hands unsteady as I dug for my keys.

I didn't look back until I was in the car, and even then, part of me expected the street to look different. It didn't. But I still felt him watching as I pulled away, his amber eyes following me all the way to my first inspection of the day.