Sleeping with a Stranger

Dinner with friends I hadn't seen in forever. I slid into the booth next to my best friend, pure muscle memory. Her fork clattered to the table after our elbows brushed.

She snapped her head toward me, eyes flashing. "Quinn, you know I'm lefthanded. Why do you always have to sit right next to me?" My hand froze halfway to the dropped fork.

Hazel was lefthanded. But she’d made a promise to me years ago. Whenever we ate together, she’d strictly use her right. If she ever used her left… it wouldn't be her.

It was a stupid internet trend a few years back. Some viral post claimed true soulmates always sat on the same side of the booth.

Hazel saw it and immediately declared we were doing it from then on. I laughed in her face. "You're a lefty.

Our elbows are going to be throwing punches the whole meal." She tilted her head, eyes lighting up with that stubborn spark of hers. "Easy fix.

From now on, when I eat with you, it's right hand only." I gave it three days, tops. Chapter 1 But she actually pulled it off for two straight years.

Every single time we grabbed a bite, she kept her left hand firmly planted in her lap.

If she ever slipped and reached out with her left, she’d yank it back like she touched a hot stove, sticking her tongue out at me like a kid caught stealing candy.

She even made a whole dramatic declaration about it. "If you ever catch me using my left hand at dinner, Quinn, run.

Because that bitch isn't me." The deadpan, serious look on her face when she said it burned the moment into my brain. Yet here she was.

Gripping a new fork in her left hand, effortlessly spearing a piece of chicken. I stared at her fingers for three agonizing seconds before finally ducking under the table.

My hands shook. Violent, uncontrollable tremors. Was the woman sitting inches away from me… not Hazel? Or was this just some twisted, sick prank?

I forced my head up, pasting on a stiff smile. "My bad. I'll take the other side. Chill out." I grabbed my plate and slid into the opposite booth.

Hazel’s face smoothed out instantly, and she went right back to complaining about her toxic boss while stabbing at her food.

The pitch of her voice, the eye rolls, the sarcastic drawl. It was flawless. Perfect. I told myself I was just sleepdeprived, losing my grip on reality.

But the ice water pooling in my gut refused to thaw. Declan, her boyfriend, walked back from the restroom and slid into the booth beside her.

The rest of the dinner played out like a perfectly rehearsed sitcom. Hazel whined about his mom constantly pushing for a wedding.

Declan just grinned, dropping a cherry tomato onto her plate, promising they’d lock it down by December. Everything looked painfully, suffocatingly normal.

Until Hazel dug into her salad, casually scooping up a forkful laced with crushed peanuts, and swallowed. My lungs stopped working. "Why are you eating peanuts?" I choked out.

Declan blinked, his forehead wrinkling as he looked at her. "Yeah, babe.

I thought you hated nuts?" Hazel froze for a fraction of a second before rolling her eyes, her tone dripping with annoyance. "It's your mother's fault.

She sneaks peanuts into half her recipes. I guess I just got used to it." Declan rubbed the back of his neck, laughing sheepishly before leaning in to kiss her cheek.

A cold sweat broke out across my spine. Declan always thought Hazel avoided peanuts because she was a picky eater. But I knew the truth. Sophomore year.

She accidentally took a single bite of a cookie baked with peanut butter. Less than sixty seconds later, she went into severe anaphylactic shock.

I watched doctors perform chest compressions in the ER for three hours straight just to keep her breathing. She hadn't touched a peanut since. You can mimic a personality.

You can steal a voice. But a fatal biological trigger? The body doesn't lie. Chapter 2 By the time the check arrived, Hazel hadn't shown a single sign of an allergic reaction.

Not a single hive, no wheezing. She even snagged another peanutlaced lettuce wrap off Declan's plate and swallowed it whole. Ice crystallized in my veins.

The woman sitting across from me was a carbon copy. I was staring at a stranger wearing my best friend's skin. So where the hell was the real Hazel?

I hit my mattress hard the second I got back to my apartment, staring at the ceiling until the shadows bled together in the dark. I needed a timeline. When did the shift happen?

A week ago, right before her solo trip down to Cabo, everything was fine. She left a voicemail the morning she drove to the airport. "Quinn, I'm heading out!

Text me if you want me to bring back any cheap tequila." Once she landed, she fired off updates daily.

Photos of the sapphire ocean, the loaded fish tacos she devoured, the starry night view from her resort balcony. I jolted upright and snatched my phone off the nightstand.

I scrolled frantically through our chat history, swiping all the way back to the first day of her trip. I tapped on a video she’d sent from the beach.

The camera jerked wildly, the audio crackling with heavy sea wind. She screamed over the gale, "Quinn, this is insane! We're totally coming back here!" I looped the clip.

Five times. Ten times. That was her face. Her raspy laugh. Nothing looked tampered with. But the more I watched, the tighter my chest squeezed.

It didn't feel like a friend sharing a vacation. It felt like a calculated performance. A digital breadcrumb trail deliberately left behind to prove she was there.

If the Hazel eating peanuts tonight was a fake… was the Hazel sending these videos the real one? And Declan. Did he even realize he was sharing a bed with a stranger?

Sleep never came. At the crack of dawn, I slammed through the heavy glass doors of the local police precinct. "I need to report a missing person.

My friend is gone." I dumped the entire story on the desk. Hazel acting like a completely different species since she got back from Cabo. The wiped habits only the two of us knew.

The miraculously cured peanut allergy. The cop’s fingers stopped over his keyboard. He gave me a slow, deadpan look. "We just ran her name, ma'am.

Hazel is currently at her residence." He tapped his monitor. "Her cell is active. Social media accounts are posting regularly. She uploaded an Instagram story last night.

Correct?" I gave a stiff nod. "Then we have no grounds to open an investigation." I slammed my palms on the counter. "Because that's not Hazel!

The woman in that house is an imposter!" He leaned back, staring at me like I was a textbook paranoid schizophrenic. "Listen to yourself, Quinn.

You’re claiming she’s a fake, but her digital footprint, social circle, and ID all match perfectly.

Do you have a single shred of physical evidence proving she isn't who she says she is?" My jaw locked. I had nothing. I had gut instinct. I had a pact made in a diner booth.

I had a missing allergic reaction. None of that held up in a court of law.

The cop stood up, his voice dropping into a flat, authoritative drone. "If you keep causing a scene, I'll have to escort you out for disrupting a precinct." The heavy precinct doors clicked shut behind me.

The morning sun stabbed my retinas. Three years ago, a drunk driver wiped out Hazel's parents. I was the only real family she had left.

If she was still breathing, she was out there waiting for me to pull her out of hell. And if she was already… gone. I would find her body. I would bring her home.

Chapter 3 My phone buzzed on the counter. A new text from Hazel.

It was a photo of a sad desk salad with a caption: [ The cafeteria food is literal garbage today. ] Just her usual daily complaining.

I stared at the screen, my fingertips turning to ice. The imposter had her phone. If the real Hazel was trying to reach me, if she needed to warn me… A jolt hit my spine.

I sprinted back to my apartment and tore through my closet. Deep in a shoebox, I found my busted college phone.

Years ago, Hazel—a coding nerd—had built a private, encrypted messaging app just for us. We upgraded phones and eventually forgot it existed.

I jammed the charger into the port, my hands shaking. The cracked screen flickered to life. I swiped to the old, grayedout icon. Tapped it.

A single unread notification sat in the inbox. Sent: Seven days ago. 3:12 PM. Three words. [ Hide and seek. ] Blood pounded in my ears. Seven days ago. 3:12 PM.

According to her itinerary, Hazel was supposed to be thirty thousand feet in the air, flying to Cabo. Her phone would have been in airplane mode. Zero signal.

Zero way to send a message. Unless… she never got on that plane. I grabbed my current phone and dialed the airline. "I need to check a flight from a week ago.

Did a passenger named Hazel fail to board?" The rep tapped away on her keyboard. Yes. A passenger named Hazel checked her bags but never scanned her boarding pass at the gate.

The air drained from my lungs. Hazel never went to Cabo. Yet I received that video of her on the beach that exact same afternoon.

Which meant the real Hazel was taken before she ever made it to the terminal. And those three words—Hide and seek—were her breadcrumb trail.

I stared at the screen, burning a hole through the text. Hide and seek. We played it obsessively as kids.

In her childhood backyard, she always squeezed behind the rusted rain barrel by the azaleas. I always caught her first. But that was too obvious.

If she meant her old house, she would have just sent an address. What was the hidden layer? I squeezed my eyes shut, digging through a decade of memories.

The old neighborhood was bulldozed years ago. The diner by our middle school was boarded up. The arcade near our dorms was now a strip mall.

I crossed them out mentally, moving to places perfect for actually hiding. Abandoned factories, halfbuilt subdivisions, overgrown state parks… They all fit, but none felt right.

I opened Google Maps, dragging the screen around the county borders, zooming in and out blindly. Then a name pinned on the map caught my eye. Hidden Ash Springs. HAS.

Hide And Seek. A violent jolt of pure instinct hit me. Hazel was there. I pinched the screen, zooming in hard.

Hidden Ash Springs was a deadend ghost town shoved deep in the eastern mountains. A desolate blip off the grid without even a paved road leading into it. Completely isolated.

The ultimate blackout zone to stash a body. Or a prisoner. I dropped the phone onto my lap. It was a long shot. A wild, unproven guess strung together by three letters.

But if there was even a fraction of a percent chance she was breathing in that ghost town, I was going in.

Chapter 4 To keep the imposter from getting spooked, I shot her a quick text. [ Emergency work trip. I'll be out of town for a few days.

Let's grab food when I'm back. ] She replied in seconds. [ Sounds good! Be safe! ] The tone was sickeningly sweet. Exactly like Hazel's.

I tossed a heavyduty flashlight and a power bank into a duffel bag and hit the interstate. Hidden Ash Springs was even more desolate than the map suggested.

The paved highway degraded into a cracked state route, which bled into a nameless dirt road choked with gravel and dust.

Four hours later, my headlights washed over a crumbling stone marker at the edge of the town. Right then, a slick layer of cold sweat coated my spine. I had been here before.

Two years ago. A weekend road trip with Hazel and Declan. The GPS had supposedly glitched, sending us deep off the main route.

Hazel had been riding shotgun, pointing out the window at the rotting cabins, joking that it looked like the perfect set for a slasher flick.

If Hazel was trapped here against her will, there was only one explanation. Declan was involved. Declan drove that day. Declan programmed the GPS.

Declan made that accidental wrong turn. He was the only one who knew this dead zone existed. I slumped against my leather steering wheel, struggling to drag air into my lungs.

Declan and Hazel had been together for three years. He was the ultimate golden retriever boyfriend. He waited up no matter how late her shifts ran.

He showed up with an umbrella the second the sky bruised over. When her cramps got bad, he brought her heating pads and hot tea in bed. They were locking down a December wedding.

The engagement shoot was booked for next month. Why would he do this? And who the hell was the fake Hazel sleeping in his bed?

I dug my nails into my palms, forcing the spiraling thoughts down. Finding Hazel was the only thing that mattered right now.

I shoved the car into park near the entrance and stepped out into the dirt. A few older locals were sitting on their rotting porches.

Their eyes tracked me with heavy, hostile suspicion. I approached them one by one, asking if they’d seen a strange couple roll through a week ago.

But their thick mountain drawl was basically a foreign language. After an hour of useless pantomiming, I had zero leads.

The sun dipped below the tree line, casting long, jagged shadows.

A grufflooking guy in a stained trucker hat finally walked up to me. "You looking for a guy traveling with a pretty girl?" My head snapped up. "Yes.

You saw them?" I shoved my phone in his face, displaying a photo of Declan and Hazel. The man squinted at the screen. He didn't say a word.

Just rubbed his dirty thumb and index finger together. I ripped open my wallet and shoved every bill I had—maybe six hundred bucks—into his rough palm.

He weighed the stack of cash, his eyes drifting down to my wrist. To the solid gold bangle my mom bought me for my twentyfirst birthday. A piece I never took off.

I unclasped it and slammed the gold into his chest. A greedy smirk cracked his face.

He pointed a dirtcaked finger toward the heavily wooded ridge looming behind the town. "They went up the mountain." According to him, a sleek sedan rolled into the mud a week ago, right after a heavy storm. "Car sat too low for these logging roads.

Got stuck on an incline," he rasped. "I helped the guy push it out of the ditch.

Slipped me a crisp fifty for the trouble." He paused, his eyes narrowing. "There was a girl riding shotgun." My breath hitched. "Didn't catch her face.

But the hair color and the vibe? Looked exactly like your picture." Chapter 5 A cold knot twisted in my gut.

I stepped closer. "Which way did they go?" "That one." He jutted his dirty chin toward the east. "Cross over that ridge and you hit the next county.

There's an old logging site up there. The roads are totally shot. Nobody goes up there unless they have to." "Did you see them come back down?" He shook his head. "Nope.

Zero cell service up there. Ain't no reason to stick around." I stood frozen, staring at the black silhouette of the mountain. My pulse hammered against my ribs.

Night had already swallowed the tree line. Going up blind on completely unfamiliar logging roads was a death sentence.

I retreated to my car, locked the doors, and cranked the driver's seat all the way back. Sleep never came. The shadows in the cabin kept morphing into Hazel's face.

Little Hazel with pigtails, laughing hard enough to show off her crooked incisors.

Middle school Hazel, fuming for three straight days because the principal mistook her boyish haircut for a dress code violation.

College Hazel, crying so hard she threw up after her first real breakup. I walked her around the campus track for thirty laps straight while she swore she was done with men forever.

Then she met Declan, and the walls came down again. She told me Declan was different. That he actually, truly cares. I buried my face in my folded arms against the steering wheel.

Wet heat soaked my sleeves. Declan. What the hell did you do to her? At first light, I slammed the car into drive.

I bypassed the ghost town entirely and floored it to the nearest state trooper barracks. "I need to report an emergency." I gripped the edge of the front desk. "My best friend and I got separated in the woods up by the ridge.

She hasn't come down." I lied through my teeth. It was the only way to force them to launch a search party. It worked. The desk sergeant immediately hit his radio.

In less than thirty minutes, six officers and two K9 units were loading into SUVs. The guy running point was a grizzled, sunbaked veteran named Donovan.

The K9s hit the tree line and immediately lost their minds. They dragged their handlers deep into the dense, rotting underbrush.

The deeper the shadows swallowed us, the tighter my throat closed. The air tasted heavy and metallic. If Hazel was really out here… was she still breathing?

Suddenly, both dogs erupted into a deafening, frantic frenzy. They lunged forward, snapping their leashes taut. I couldn't keep up.

Branches whipped my face as I scrambled behind the officers.

I ripped through the final wall of thorns, bursting into a small clearing just as one of the rookies shouted. "We got a body!" In the dead center of the dirt patch lay a halfuncovered corpse.

Wild animals had dug it up. It didn't even look human anymore. The flesh was bloated, stained a sickening purpleblack. The facial features were completely erased.

Hollow eye sockets swarmed with white larvae. A thick, sweet, suffocating stench of rot coated my throat. But I knew. It was my Hazel.

She was wearing the custom hoodie I ordered for her birthday. Around her wrist, tangled in the decaying skin, was the braided string bracelet I bought at a temple.

Three years ago, I tied it around her wrist myself. This is for protection. You're going to live to be a hundred. She was twentyseven. She was so obsessed with being beautiful.

She spent an hour and a half doing her makeup every morning. She always spun in front of the mirror three times before walking out the door.

Now she was a bloated, infested shell rotting in the mud. My knees hit the dirt. My stomach violently revolted. I dryheaved, my empty stomach cramping as I clawed at the dirt.

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't scream. Donovan's heavy hand clamped onto my shoulder. "Let's get you back to the station." I trailed behind him in a blind, suffocating fog.

The coroner's van hauled Hazel's remains back to the county morgue. Donovan said they needed to cut her open to find out exactly how she died.

The rest of the day blurred into an agonizing string of whitenoise.

The only thing that pierced the static was Donovan leading me into a sterile interrogation room. "We found something inside the victim's stomach," he said flatly. "Something she left for you." Chapter 6