Nathan sat on the edge of his bed, staring at a photograph of her. Claire. The woman who had once been the center of his universe. Her laughter, her touch, her scent—everything about her was vivid in his mind, yet something felt… off.
He’d met Claire on a rainy afternoon in a quaint café. Or so he thought. The memory was like a film on a scratched reel—blurry, fragmented. He recalled her smile as she handed him a napkin with her number scrawled on it. But when he searched his drawer for that napkin, it was gone.
Nathan’s therapist, Dr. Miller, had warned him about this. “Trauma can distort memories,” she’d said. “Sometimes, the mind creates what it can’t bear to lose.”
As days passed, doubt began to gnaw at him. He found letters he was sure Claire had written, yet the handwriting wasn’t hers. The apartment they’d shared felt foreign, devoid of the warmth her presence would have brought. Desperate for clarity, Nathan began piecing together fragments of his past—photos, receipts, voicemails—but they led nowhere.
One night, Nathan visited the café where he believed they’d met. He asked the barista, an older woman with kind eyes, if she remembered Claire. “I’m sorry,” she said gently. “You’ve asked me before. There’s no Claire.”
Nathan’s chest tightened. Had his mind fabricated her entirely? The love, the laughter, the heartbreak—had it all been a lie?
At home, he stared at the photograph once more, his fingers trembling. Then he noticed something chilling: the background of the photo was the café he frequented, but it wasn’t Claire beside him. It was a stranger.
Nathan sank to the floor, tears streaming down his face. Memories of a lost love, or a love that had never been—either way, they haunted him.
4o
