It had been an ordinary Saturday night.
My husband, John, and I hosted our friends Thomas and Shannon Watson, and their son Emmett for dinner. John is a wizard on the grill, and prepared a delicious meal of steak, potatoes, and grilled asparagus for everyone while I gossiped with Thomas and Shannon, and Emmett played video games with our boys Noah and Liam.
We ate around 6pm and then the adults played cards while the kids watched a movie in the living room. It was around 9pm when the Watsons left and John cleaned up as I got our sons ready for bed.
I remember every minute of it.
Brushing teeth, pajamas, reading stories—kissing Noah on the forehead when he finally lost the fight to keep his eyes open—secretly turning Liam’s nightlight on for him, even though he claimed that nine was too old for such things.
When I began my own bedtime preparations, John came into the bathroom and wrapped me in a hug from behind. Even after twelve years of marriage and two kids, there was a flutter in my stomach as he pulled me tightly to him. Feeling a little frisky, having had a few glasses of wine earlier, I told him to go wait in bed for me to finish up and that I was about to, “give him the ride of his life.” Which meant we were going to have very quiet, under the covers, parent sex, and pray that neither of the boys woke up.
But as I was finishing brushing my teeth, I heard John’s chainsaw-esque snores ripping through the air. During the card game, he’d been drinking some bourbon that Thomas brought over, and alcohol always made him drowsy—he passed out the minute his head hit the pillow. I chuckled as I crawled into my side of the bed and he woke briefly to tell me that he was just “resting his eyes for a minute”—knowing that he would be out cold ‘til the morning. And, laying my head on his chest, I drifted off to the rhythmic rise and fall of his breaths.
Yes, it had been an extraordinarily ordinary evening—exceedingly mundane—unequivocally average. No different from any other time we hosted the Watsons, or the hundreds of times I’d put the children bed, or the dozens of times John and I made “intimate” plans only for one of us to fall asleep. Likely, in the years to follow, it would have never stood out from the background—I would have forgotten the details.
Yet they’re seared into my memory now—I make a point to drift through them every day—to immortalize every image, taste, sound, smell…feel…
Because it was the last ordinary night I ever had.
Because it was the last time that I saw my family.
****
When I awoke the following morning, I sensed something was different before I even opened my eyes.
You know how everyone’s house has its own unique smell? A scent built up over time—permeated into the very walls—changed and personalized over the years by the various occupants. One that the inhabitants become immune to quickly, but is noticed instantly by guests. You’d never quite be able to describe your own, but you’d know instantly if it changed.
That morning, I smelled my house for the first time in twelve years—for the first time since John and I moved into it and it was new to us.
And it was wrong.
Primal instinct triggered by the change in environment put me slightly on-edge, and I reached over to John’s side of the bed for comfort, only to find it empty.
John never got up early after a night of drinking, especially not after a night of drinking bourbon. When I fell asleep the night before, I had expected to wake in the morning and hear a still-storing John next to me—even planned to sneak noiselessly out of bed to make everyone breakfast.
But there was silence in the room.
It was strange, and the feeling of unease rose more, but I told myself I was being silly.
‘Maybe he wanted to surprise me and went downstairs to make waffles,’ I hoped—they’re my favorite, and on occasion, I’d enter the kitchen to find a giant stack of them waiting for me and the kids. It didn’t account for the difference in ambient smell, but as Spring was beginning, I wondered if that might just be due to flowers blooming or trees budding outside—could have been that John opened up a window somewhere.
I rubbed the sand from my eyes, and gave a groggy yawn as I sat up in bed—a small part of me worried that when my vision came into focus, the room around me wouldn’t be the same as the one that I went to sleep in the night before. But I was relieved to find everything looked normal. The walls were still blue, the comforter over me orange, the lamps on the wooden bedside tables were white, and a photo from John’s and my wedding hung next to the bathroom door.
Checking my phone, I was shocked to see it was nearing 9am as I hadn’t slept past seven since Liam was born, and I questioned how many glasses of wine I’d really had the night before. I also saw that I’d received a text twenty minutes earlier from ‘Hubby’ and opened it to find a message that read, “Imma make you pancakes—gone to the store for eggs.”
I smiled as I typed out my response, “You’re the best! Oh, and if you’re still there, grab fruit snacks for Noah; we’re out.”
Climbing out of bed, I put my phone in my pocket, stretched, and left the room anticipating the sounds of my boys playing games or watching TV downstairs—worrying about what messes they might have already made in the twenty minutes since their father left. However, my ears were met with more silence as I walked through the hall.
It was unexplainably eerie to me. There was a stillness to the morning that I hadn’t felt in the nine years since Liam had been born, and even less so in the six after Noah came along. John hadn’t mentioned taking them with him to the store in his message, but I supposed it was possible that he had. Approaching Liam’s door, I decided to poke my head in and see if he, his brother, or both of them might be inside.
“Liam?” I called, as I turned the knob. And, when I peered within, I froze.
It wasn’t Liam’s room.
At least, the contents of it weren’t Liam’s.
Where a child’s bed usually sat under the window, there was a desk with a computer. The bookshelf on the far wall wasn’t filled with toys and Lego models—it contained thick, heavy books. On the walls that should have been adorned with posters from video games, there were framed college degrees.
It was unmistakably an adult’s office.
“What the shit?” I said aloud, as I closed my eyes tightly and reopened them several times—thinking I must somehow be hallucinating and eventually Liam’s things would reappear in front of me.
But the office remained.
Backing out into the hallway, I scanned both directions to ensure I’d opened Liam’s door, but as a mother, I already knew that I had. There was no amount of tiredness, or hangover, or whatever I was experiencing that morning that would have made me mistake my own child’s room—I’d found it in the pitch-black many times before—knew the number of steps from my bedroom to his without even having to count them.
As well, we didn’t have an office in our house and never had. John’s a carpenter and I’m a nurse—we had no need for one as neither of us ever worked from home.
“Liam?! Noah?!” Anxiety rising, I shouted my son’s names, but received no answer. I ran down to Noah’s room and ripped the door open to find that it too was changed. It full of exercise equipment. No dinosaurs on the walls, no toy trucks strewn across the floor.
It was a home gym…
“What the fuck is happening…?” I whispered to myself before then screaming, “LIAM?! NOAH?! JOHN?! This is a prank, right?! Come out, now! It’s not funny!”
But even as I said the words, I didn’t believe them. There was no way that the three of them could have completely overhauled both rooms overnight without me waking for any of it.
As I was starting to hyperventilate, my phone buzzed—I got another text from ‘Hubby.’
“Who’s Noah?” It read.
Instantly, I called him, and as soon as I heard the line pick up on the other end, I launched into questions.
“John, what the hell is going on? Where are the boys? Why is Liam’s room an office and Noah’s a home gym?”
But it wasn’t John’s voice that answered me.
“Honey, slow down. Who are Noah and Liam? And did you call me John? Are you okay?”
It was Thomas—Thomas Watson was on the other line.
Suspecting I somehow hit the wrong button when I made the call, I pulled the phone away from my ear to check the Caller ID.
It said, ‘Hubby’ at the top of the screen.
“Thomas?! Why do you have John’s phone? Where is here? WHERE ARE MY SONS?!”
I was sprinting through the house checking for any sign of them as I yelled at Thomas on the phone. There wasn’t a single piece of evidence anywhere that children had ever lived there—no toys, no stains on the carpet, no height marks in the kitchen to track their growth. The wall leading down the stairs that had contained at least fifteen photos of each of them the night before was bare.
“Kara, please try to calm down. Look, I’m leaving the store now—I’ll be home in twenty minutes. Maybe you had a nightmare or something? Just try to breathe and talk to me.” He said. His tone one of reassurance.
But I could not “calm down.” My sons were missing—all traces of them lifted from my home. Everything else about the place remained the same—the furnishings, the paint colors, the decorations. Yet it was as if Noah and Liam had never existed—every picture, every drawing they’d done for me, their game systems, children’s books and movies—gone.
“Where’s John?!” I implored, “I want to talk to John. Are you with him? Does he have the boys?!”
Thomas paused momentarily, then gave a nervous sigh as he replied, “Babe, I don’t know who you’re talking about. We don’t have any friends or family named John, and you don’t have any sons. We’ve never had kids…” His voice trailed off.
“Of course we’ve never had kids! I’m married to John—and why the hell are you calling me babe?! You wait until I tell Shannon about this!” I snapped at him, indignantly; avoiding the most distressing thing he’d said as my mind wasn’t prepared to deal with it.
“Who’s Shannon?” He asked.
“Your wife, Shannon!” I wailed back.
“Kara… You’re my wife…”
I dropped the phone. Sprinting back to my bedroom, I looked more closely at the wedding photo on the wall.
The man kissing me in it wasn’t John.
I collapsed to the floor, and began to sob.
****
It made no sense. When I’d fallen asleep, I was married to John Logan—I was Kara Logan—I had two beautiful sons named Noah and Liam Logan.
Managing to pull myself back up to my feet, I dug through my bedside table where I usually kept my passport to check the name in it.
“Kara Watson.”
Date of birth was the same, place of birth the same. But there it was—on an official, government issued document; my picture, next to a different name.
Though I’d fallen asleep as Kara Logan, I’d awoken as Kara Watson. And Kara Watson was married to Thomas Watson, and Kara and Thomas Watson had no sons. The weight of it crashed into me with the force of freight train.
My hands started to shake horribly and something welled in my stomach—I ran to the bathroom and vomited profusely. Then, feeling a panic attack building, I opened the medicine cabinet and found a bottle of benzos prescribed to the other Kara. Thankfully, it appeared she suffered from anxiety just as I did, and I gratefully downed two pills with water from the sink.
Making my way back to the bed, I curled up in the fetal position and did my best to control my breathing while I waited for the medication to take effect.
But my mind was moving a million miles an hour—I had so many questions. How could this have happened? Had I slipped into an alternate universe? Had I swapped places with Kara Watson and she was with my family now?
More troublingly, I questioned who was I, really? Had I imagined my life with John and the boys? Was it possible my mind had fabricated their entire existence?
Then, I remembered Noah’s birth—the complications—the emergency C-section. I lifted my shirt and found the smallest relief when I saw the vertical scar was still present on my abdomen.
It was categorical proof that I’d carried at least one of my children, and for me that was enough to say that my life as I remembered it to this moment was all true.
But even with that confirmation, I couldn’t think of what to do next. There was a large portion of me that wanted to sprint from the house and run through the neighborhood screaming Noah and Liam’s names. To bang on every door in the county, the state, the country, until I found them.
And yet, somehow, I knew.
Somehow, I knew that it would be to no avail. Call it mother’s intuition, call it whatever you will, but wherever I was, Noah and Liam were not there with me. And I began to cry; I bawled uncontrollable tears mourning the loss of my family.
This went on until the calming effects from the benzos started to hit me. And, once my brain slowed enough for me to process information at a normal pace again, I took a moment to consider the impossibility of it all. Rationally, logically, I thought that what was happening to me could not be real. People simply did not go to bed as one person and wake up as another—people’s children didn’t just vanish from existence.
‘I must be dreaming…’ A wishful thought entered my head.
But it didn’t feel like a dream—and if it was one, why hadn’t I woken up yet? I was still trying to reconcile how any of this could actually be happening, when I heard a loud bang from downstairs, and footsteps running through the house.
“Kara?!” Thomas’ voice came loudly through the door.
He repeatedly called my name as he drew closer to the bedroom, but I didn’t have the strength to answer him. Continuing to weep softly on the bed, I just waited for his appearance.
When he came into view, his expression was of worry—he looked towards me and heaved a sigh of relief as he clutched his chest.
“Oh, thank God.” He said, “When you stopped responding on the phone, I was worried that maybe… Nevermind… Honey…are you…how are you?”
He didn’t seem to know how best to approach the situation, and I understood why. Only twenty or so minutes earlier, the woman he knew as his wife was screaming at him about a different husband and children they didn’t have.
“This is a dream—I’ll wake up soon…” I replied quietly.
“Babe, this isn’t a dream… Let’s just talk, okay? Can you talk to me? Tell me what’s going on.” He appeared genuinely concerned, but I recoiled as he moved to sit on the bed with me. Thomas was a good friend—actually the oldest and best friend that I had, but hearing him call me “Babe” sent a wave of disgust through my body.
Thomas and I met all the way back in grade school—on the day he saved my life. He recognized the signs of anaphylactic shock when I was stung by a bee and used his EpiPen on me when we were on the playground in the second grade. From that day forward we were “Epi-Friends,” as we called each other, and became as brother and sister. But I had never once had a romantic thought about him.
“I’m not your ‘babe’” I said. “Please stop calling me that—you’re not my husband. I’m married to Johnathan Logan.”
“Jonathan Logan?” He asked. “That guy from high school? You guys went on like one date—I don’t even know if he lives in this state anymore. Honey…” He stopped when I made an audible sound of repulsion.
“Okay then, Kara.” He continued. “I’m not sure what’s going on, but we’re going to get through this together. I think it might be a good idea for us to go the hospital, though, just to get you checked out.”
“I don’t need a hospital!” I yelled. “I need John and my sons! You don’t understand… I’m not Kara Watson, your wife. I’m Kara Logan, John’s wife.” My convictions that this was all a dream were fading—I had been internally willing myself to wake up since the minute Thomas had entered the room, but the longer I was there with him and not opening my eyes in bed with John, the more I lost faith that my life would magically return to normal.
“No!” He grabbed my shoulders firmly and stared directly into my eyes—willing me to believe him. “You are Kara Watson. We have been married for five years. We had a pact that if neither of us was married by the time we were twenty-five, we would marry each other. By some miracle, you were still single on your twenty-fifth birthday, and I finally asked you out. You said yes and we dated for two years before I built up the courage to pop the question. It was two of the best years of my life! Please try to remember!”
I did remember at least part of what he’d said. As a complete joke, sometime around when we were eleven or twelve years old, I had made that “pact” with him—but I didn’t realize he’d taken it literally.
As he continued to hold on to my shoulders, his fingers dug into me and I pushed him back, wincing in pain—the sensation providing a final confirmation that I was definitively awake.
“I’m sorry.” Thomas quickly apologized, “I didn’t mean to hurt you. It’s just… You’re really scaring me, Kara! You’re saying things that don’t make sense—look at the picture right up there on the wall from our wedding day!” He pointed to the photo of him marrying Kara Watson—of him marrying… me…
Looking then into the face of my friend, and through every emotion I was feeling about my own situation, I suddenly felt a pang of pity for him. His wife was gone just as were my husband and children—he simply didn’t realize it yet. He thought she was sitting right there in front of him, but the woman he knew as Kara Watson was no longer there.
“Thomas, please. Please, just listen to me for a moment.” I tried to remain as calm as possible as I explained. “I am not crazy, or having a mental breakdown, or losing it, or whatever you want to call it. Look, something terrible has happened. I don’t know what or why, but I am not your wife. I know I look like her, and sound like her, and everything, but I’m just not her. And, of course, that doesn’t make any sense, but I need you to believe me—this impacts the both of us.”
“Kara, I…” Thomas interjected.
“Let me finish.” I put my hand up to stop him talking. “To me, Thomas Watson is my best friend of over twenty years, but we never got married. I swear to you, that my name is Kara Logan. I married Jonathan Logan when we were twenty and we have two sons together—Noah is six and Liam is nine. You were in our wedding as a groomsman and you met your wife, Shannon, there. At least, the Thomas Watson that I know met his wife, Shannon, at my wedding—she was the violinist. You two have a son together named Emmett and he’s eight.”
I expected him to fight me more, as who in their right mind would believe such a tale? But he took a long time to consider my story, and I was surprised when he responded next.
“You’re… You’re really saying that you’re not Kara? I mean, you’re not my Kara?” He asked quizzically.
“Yes! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” I was so relieved that he might be taking me seriously, even if only a little. Maybe he just truly couldn’t fathom that I would make it all up, or that his wife’s brain had broken so badly that she now thought she was an entirely different person.
“But then, where is she…?” He asked the air around him more so than directly asking me.
“I don’t know—I’m so sorry, Thomas. I don’t know if we’ve swapped places and she’s with my family or what happened—it just happened. I went to bed last night with John, and then when I woke up this morning, I was here.” Though I had no control over it, I worried that he might blame me for his Kara’s disappearance.
“No…” He said. “No, this is insane. You… She… Kara Watson was here with me last night. You really expect me to believe that this morning I woke up with Kara Logan? Who, mind you, is identical to Kara Watson in every way physically, but is somehow completely different mentally? What are you supposed to be from a different dimension or something?”
“Maybe!” I responded. “Short of magic, I don’t know what else could have brought me here. But whatever did it, we need to figure out a way to reverse it. I want to go back to John and my boys just as much as I’m sure your Kara wants to get back to you.”
At this statement, his face fell down into his hands and he began to rub his temples.
“Kara, this… this is a lot… Are you sure you didn’t fall and hit your head or something?” He was looking for any answers other than the ones I’d already given him.
Desperately, I tried to think of a way that I could prove to him that I wasn’t Mrs. Watson, when it suddenly came to me.
My C-Section scar.
“Thomas, you said that you and Kara don’t have any children, right?” I asked him.
“Right…” He answered.
“Okay, Noah’s birth was problematic and they needed to do an emergency C-Section—I have a scar from it that your wife wouldn’t have then, right?” I wanted to make sure he understood the implications before I revealed it to him.
“Yea, I guess—she doesn’t have any scars in that area.” He eventually replied.
“Okay, so here…”
I lifted my shirt to show him the line running down my abdomen and he jumped up from the bed immediately.
“Holy shit…” He backed away into the wall.
“You see?!” I exclaimed. “There’s no way I could have formed a scar like this overnight—I’m not your Kara!”
“I… FUCK! What the Fuck?!” It was Thomas’ turn to scream, and I couldn’t blame him. “Who are you?! Where’s my wife?!” He shouted at me.
“I told you, I’m Kara Logan and I’m sorry, but I don’t know where your wife is! She could be with my family—she could be anywhere. Thomas, please try to calm down…” I begged him.
“Calm down?! How the hell can I calm down?! This is a joke, right? You’re her twin that she never mentioned before or something and this is all a big prank? Or the scar is a fake—it’s makeup like they do for the movies?” He tossed out his rationalizations as quickly as possible, but I don’t think he really had much faith in any of them.
“It’s real Thomas, and no I’m not Kara’s twin—I’m Kara, just a different version of her. And the sooner you accept that, the sooner we can start working together to figure out how to fix this.” I stunned myself with my rationality, but I knew that either of us panicking wouldn’t get me home any faster.
By his body language, he hadn’t relaxed one bit, but at least he stopped shouting.
“Fix it? How can we possibly fix it if we don’t even know how you got here or where she went?!” He snapped back at me.
“I don’t know! Think, Thomas. Do you have any idea why this might be happening? Did your Kara say anything to you recently that might give us a clue?” I knew that on my end, there was nothing useful I could provide. I was an ordinary woman, with an ordinary life.
Thomas suddenly looked embarrassed.
“Uh, well… Kara and I haven’t been speaking much as of late… She’s very busy with her work, you know—top secret stuff for the government, can’t really tell me what she’s doing.” He said, sheepishly.
“She works for the government? Interesting… I’m a nurse… What does she do for them?” I asked.
“Well like I said, she can’t really say, but she’s a physicist. Has a PhD and all—she works like eighty hours a week and spends most of her time at home holed up in her office.” The was a note of bitterness in his voice as he said it.
“Jesus Christ, Thomas—you didn’t think it relevant to the situation to mention that your Kara is a physicist until just now?!” I quipped.
There had to be a connection there, I thought. Maybe she was experimenting with multi-versal travel—maybe something had gone wrong.
“Well, I didn’t believe you until about five minutes ago and like I said, I have no idea what she does! She could be helping them develop a plan to colonize Mars for all I know…” The bitterness was more prevalent in these words. “We could search her office as a starting point, though, I guess.”
“Let’s go then!” I was anxious for anything to do that wasn’t sitting around and talking, and made a beeline for what I knew as Liam’s room.
I expected the search to take hours—to need to dig through hundreds of files or even break into locked drawers hiding government secrets. But when I entered the office, I found a letter sitting squarely in the middle of the desk. A letter I hadn’t noticed when I’d peered into the space hours earlier looking for my son.
A letter addressed to me…
****
Dear Kara Logan,
I feel I owe you an explanation.
I’m sure you’re wondering what happened to son’s rooms, and more importantly, to your sons.
You see, I’ve grown weary of my life and I’m looking for a fresh start. My job is too demanding, and I’ve never really loved Thomas—he was convenient, and I had little time for dating. After we were married, I had even less time for children. So, we put it off year after year, until it finally felt to me that it was just too late to start a family of my own.
But a recent discovery of mine opens up a whole new world of possibilities, a chance for a different path. Because now, I can travel to any universe that I want.
And the universe I most want to travel to, is yours.
I envy you, Kara Logan. Your ‘Hubby’ is smoking hot. Your children are smart and well-behaved. It’s not unique amongst the Kara’s out there, but you also happen to have the exact same taste as me in home décor and I thought that might help make things easier on the both of us.
Basically, I want your life, and I’ve decided to take it.
Taking your place means that I can have the children I’ve always wanted, but skip those years of never sleeping and potty-training. It also means I won’t be in my fifties when they go to college and that I can get a new husband without having to go through a divorce and date in my thirties.
Overall, a pretty great deal for me.
Don’t worry, though, I’m not completely stiffing you. You get to have my life, and I’ve banked away plenty of money in accounts that I’ve listed on the back of this letter and you shouldn’t need to worry about working for a long time—I quit my job there anyway.
So, travel, go see the world. Do all the things you couldn’t do because you were tied down with kids. I’ll take care of your family, for now.
Who knows—maybe someday, I’ll get bored of your life and move on to a different world again. If that happens, I’ll try to remember to come get you and return you to yours.
All the best,
Kara Watson (Logan)
P.S. I’ll save you some time in trying to find a way back and tell you that I didn’t share my discovery with anyone else, and I’m bringing the tech to your universe with me.
Cheers!
****
It’s been six months since I read that letter.
Thomas and I “divorced,” and he moved out—it was too painful for him to stay in that house after he read the other Kara’s words.
I stayed behind, and every night I went to sleep in my bed hoping that I’d wake up next to John—hoping that she would eventually tire of my family, and would one day return me to them.
And I thought that that would be how I’d live out the remainder of my days—slowly trickling through the money she left me—doing nothing more than surviving. Surviving and waiting.
Waiting on a day that might never come.
Waiting alone.
It seems that Kara Watson did not have any close friends or family. No one has tried to contact her in her absence from public life. Even “my” mother has never called or texted, and I talked to “my” mother nearly every day back home. I considered reaching out to her once or twice, but I thought it would either be too difficult to pretend to be someone I’m not with her or impossible to explain the reality of the situation to her without causing her immense distress. Also, I had a feeling that it was best that no one other than myself and Thomas knew the details of my situation. Something told me it was not a good idea for that information to get out.
And then this morning, I received a message on my, or rather Kara’s, phone that proved I had been right.
It was from a private number and read…
“Check her computer.”
Not “check your computer” but “check her computer.” Like the sender knew they weren’t reaching out to Kara Watson. Of course, it could have been spam, or a typo, but for some reason I sensed that it was deliberate—that they were trying to get in touch with me.
In any case, I had nothing to lose by checking the computer, so I walked from my bedroom to the office. I hadn’t been in there since the day I read the letter—it hurt too much to enter either of the rooms that should have belonged to my boys—and I flashed back horribly on the night I discovered I was never going home as I sat down in the desk chair and booted up the machine.
When the login screen appeared, I thought, for a moment, that there might be an issue in that I did not know Kara’s password, but rather than there being a box to enter one into, the screen said, “Biometric Authentication Required.”
And next to the keyboard, I saw there was a small pad that looked to me like it could be used to scan a fingerprint. So, I took a chance and placed my left index finger on it.
The computer unlocked.
Now that I had it open, I was not sure what to do. The message had given me no instructions on what to “check” when I got this far. But suddenly, the cursor on the screen moved on its own—a blank text file opened and words starting appearing in it without me typing them.
Kara,
I work in IT at the agency that used to employ the other Kara—the one that’s from here.
Yes, I know you’re not her.
She had to have this computer connected to our network to allow her to work from home, so I can still log into it—it was the most secure way I could think of to send you a message. They have access to her phone and emails—they likely already flagged that text I sent you and are investigating.
But I needed to warn you.
You are in danger.
Completely by accident, when we were doing some data cleanup a few days ago, one of my coworkers stumbled across a folder that Kara had buried in our servers. One containing files on hundreds of other Karas—we think she must have been using it to transfer the information back and forth from here to her house. And there was one tagged, “Winner.”
When Kara resigned her position, she sent a note to her managers saying she no longer felt multi-versal travel was possible and that she did not want to dedicate any more of her life to trying to solve it for them. She was going to take a break from work in general and focus on starting a family. I read it when they tasked me with closing out all of her accounts—it was the last thing in her outbox.
The discovery of the folder told our management that she had lied—that she had solved the secrets of the multiverse, had kept it a secret, and had been researching different versions of herself. They wondered if maybe she’d quit her job for another purpose.
We were asked to pull everything we could on Kara from around the time she left the agency including her phone records…
They heard your call to Thomas.
They know you’re not from here.
They know you’re Kara Logan.
And they want to study you.
You’re the first being to travel here from another dimension—they’ll want to poke, prod, and test you down to the cellular level. The rest of your life will be spent in a lab—you’ll never be free again. Beyond being academically fascinating, you’re a liability—they won’t want any other nation knowing that it’s possible to crack into the multiverse.
There’s likely a van parked on your street right now—it’ll be for a florist or pest control—something nondescript.
They plan to take you the next time you leave the house.
You need to run, Kara.
I would not say I was friends with the other Kara—she was rude and condescending—but you’re innocent in all of this. From the looks of your file, you had a good life and a beautiful family. I’m sorry this has happened to you.
I have some friends that might be able to get you out of the country. Quickly, pack a bag and grab as much cash as you can. In about a half an hour, I’ll kill their surveillance for two minutes. I’m sorry, but we can’t wait longer, they may be wary of someone trying to tip you off because of my text. This is likely our only chance.
So, at exactly 10:30am, leave through the backdoor and try to get to the (Name of Motel) on (Name of Street). If you make it there, book a room under a fake name and use cash. DO NOT LEAVE for any reason. My friends will meet you in the lobby tomorrow morning at 9am—one will be wearing a blue hat so you can identify them.
Good Luck Kara.
The document closed itself out before I could respond and then the entire computer shut off.
I was terrified.
If I was to believe everything they said, I only had twenty-five minutes before I needed to flee and go into hiding—and there was no way to know how long I would need to be on the run.
Looking for some verification, I left the office and walked to a window that faced the street. At first, I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, and felt a tiny hint of relief. But then I saw it. Parked on the street three houses down. A work van for a plumbing company.
Maybe it was nothing—maybe it really was just a plumber servicing a neighbor’s home.
Or maybe it was there to take me away.
Fear rose in my chest stronger than I’d ever felt in my life before.
And so, I ran.
I followed the mysterious instructions—I packed a bag and sprinted as quickly as I could out the backdoor at exactly 10:30am. No one stopped me or followed that I could tell, and I made it to the motel where I booked a room under a false name.
There’s a computer in the lobby available for public use and I’m writing this from it—I just… I don’t know what I should do next…
Can I trust the stranger that sent the warning? Can I trust their friends that are coming to pick me up tomorrow?
What if it’s a trap?
Should I run and go into hiding on my own? Is the government even really after me? What if Kara Watson returns for me and I’m not at the house? Will she be able to find me?
Please, if anyone can help me…
My name is Kara Logan. My husband is Jonathan Logan. My children and Noah and Liam Logan.
My life was taken from me.
And I just want to go home.