Genre: Psychological thriller | Protagonist: A forensic archivist who suspects she has solved a cold case — about herself | Conflict: The more evidence she uncovers, the less she can trust her own memory | Tone: Claustrophobic and unreliable | Story Goal: Leave the reader uncertain whether the protagonist is villain or victim The file had been misfiled for eleven years. Mara knew this because she had misfiled it herself — or at least, that is what she told herself when she found it, alone in the archive on a Tuesday that smelled like old paper and something older. The girl in the photograph had her eyes. That was the first thing. The second thing was the date on the coroner's intake form: August 14th, 2003. The night Mara had no memory of. The night she had always told herself she spent at her sister's apartment in Croydon, eating takeaway and watching something forgettable on the television. Her sister had died in 2009. Car accident, ruled accidental. Mara had identified the body. She remembered the shape of her sister's hands on the steel table, how familiar they looked, how she had thought — just for a moment, in that cold white room — that they looked like her own hands. She closed the file. She opened it again. The girl in the photograph was still there, still wearing Mara's eyes, still dead in a field in Shropshire on a night no one could account for. Mara was very good at her job. She had spent her career finding the things people buried. She had never once considered what she might find if she dug in the right direction. She picked up her phone to call her supervisor. She put it down. She picked it up again and called no one, because somewhere beneath the clean professional surface of her mind, something very old and very quiet said: not yet.