The Liminal Hour

I woke up to river air and the wrong kind of quiet, the kind that presses against the eardrums until sound seems to be something you imagine rather than hear. My head was a low, persistent fog; the world tilted at the edges like a photograph left out in rain. I blinked and there was the dashboard, the faint glow of the emergency lights from the road behind me, the plastic smell of a car that’s kept shut too long. My hand found my throat in search of pulse and came away with a scrap of paper folded into a rectangle, damp at one corner, my handwriting on it:

Don’t trust what you remember.

I did the polite thing first: I checked my pockets for keys, wallet, phone. Keys. Phone — a cracked screen, two missed calls from a number labeled "MARTA" and a voicemail I didn’t have the patience for. My watch was in my bag, stopped at 2:17. My shoes had mud on the soles like they’d scraped something soft. There was a Polaroid tucked under the glove box mat, the glossy white border curled and yellowed at one corner. My own face in it, laughing in that small way I sometimes do when someone tells a joke I already knew. Beside me, a body turned away from the camera, blurred by motion — the silhouette of a person leaning on a fence, a bench beyond that and the river's dark surface. On the back, written in a pen I didn’t recognize: the Liminal Hour. Date: June 12.

The date meant nothing to me until the numbers rearranged themselves until they fit a file in my head I had sealed off like a drawer with a rusted lock. June 12 — the night June Marlow went missing. They’d never found her. The next morning’s headlines had been polite about it, the papers full of predictable adjectives: ‘vanished,’ ‘elusive,’ ‘remains unaccounted for.’ I had read those headlines like I read everything else — in snippets, in the gaps between work and making tea — and then put them away.

I don’t know how long I sat with the Polaroid and the card. The river lapped like a repeating thought against the bank and the world outside moved in small, indifferent accelerations: a dog barking, a distant horn, a man’s laughter swallowed by the air. My lungs had the tautness of someone who has been holding breath for a long time and then realizes they can let it out. I let it out and felt ridiculous for needing to.

People who know me would describe me as deliberate. I keep lists taped to the inside of drawers, I cross out names in ink if they have let me down, I write down what I had for breakfast like an experiment. I make rules for myself: don’t call in sick without checking the calendar; always lock the top drawer; if you wake up somewhere unfamiliar, check for injuries, then for immediate threats. I followed those rules now. I wrote "Polaroid" on the nearest napkin, under it: "2:17 watch — stopped." I wrote "call Marta?" and then crossed it out because I still couldn’t trust the sound of my own voice.

There was a small dent in the door from where someone must have knocked on the passenger side the night before, or hit it in anger, or flung something. The dent had been mended from the outside long ago, like a memory smoothed over with filler. The Polaroid’s border reflected the wan light and my smile looked like a thing I had borrowed. The back of the card had more than handwriting: a faint smear, like water had drooled over ink and the letters muttered into one another. "the Liminal Hour" — the phrase stuck to the roof of my mouth like ash. I’d seen the words in some journal, or a poster, or in a conversation I had decided not to have, and now they were here as if someone had tucked them into my life and expected me to accept them.

The first call came through just after I unlocked the car and realized my hands were shaking. The ringtone itself was ordinary: a low tone used by the city’s nonemergency line. When I answered, a voice whose edges were composed of report and habit said, "Ms. Hart? This is Detective Aaron Voss, Riverside PD. Are you Evelyn Hart?"

I told him my name. He told me he was calling about a cold file. He said "missing person" and the phrase landed like a coin on glass. There were no dramatics, no immediate accusations; he spoke as if reading from a list. "We’re revisiting a case from twelve years ago — June Marlow. We have reason to believe you may have been near her the night she disappeared. I don’t know if you remember anything. I just need to ask a few questions. Could you come down to the station?"

I told him I was fine. I told him I was on my way home. Both were true only in the narrowest sense. My mouth tasted of pinball machines and the static of radio stations that give up at two in the morning. I tucked the Polaroid into my coat and walked up from the river with the folded note in my palm, the words pressing like a tiny stone.