My eyes strain as they get adjusted to the bright colorless room. I look around, the room is unfamiliar. I don't know how I got here. It's small and empty except for the mattress I woke up on. I know I'm being watched, there's cameras in both corners of the room, which seems obsessive. All that I have with me is this notebook, a pen, and an empty cup. I'm wearing my own clothes, a grey hoodie, white tee and cargo pants. Basic, I know. My pockets have been emptied. Keys, wallet, grocery list, and a small drawing of a cat done by my daughter are all gone. I wish they could have at least left that. There's a small door that cannot be opened from the inside, the handle is completely gone. Broken off. I feel unusually calm, why? How long have I even been here? I looked at my wrist. Great, they took my watch too. I traced the walls for any sort of opening, button, a crack– just anything that could give me an insight. I found nothing. I don't hear a single thing. No wind or footsteps. I feel as if I'm in one of those lunatic asylums. Maybe I am? But, I promise I'm not insane. I do know I didn’t voluntarily come here. Why would I? What is this place? Who took me here?

It hasn't been that long since I last wrote. I think? My guess is that it's only been a few hours. All I've been doing is walking in circles, looking for any little thing that could help me understand where I am and why. Which is pointless of course. I've been holding in my pee since I woke up. With no sign of anyone coming, I think I have to use the cup. I haven't peed in a cup since a road trip back in college. This must be some sort of humiliation bullshit. Peeing in front of a camera? Why would anyone want to see that. I've tried calling for someone earlier and got no reply. I banged on the door and the walls for what seemed like forever. All that followed was a hollow silence, which eats at my soul more and more.

I tried to measure time at first.

I counted to ten thousand three times before I lost track and had to start over. I marked the wall with my fingernail until it bled, carving thin, crooked lines that all began to look the same. I slept, I think—but not properly. Just short, broken lapses where my thoughts dissolved and reformed into the same empty room. Hunger came and stayed. Thirst worse than that. No one is coming: I know that now. Even the silence feels thicker, like it’s settled into the corners and hardened there. At some point, I started talking just to hear something that wasn’t silence. I have filled up every page of the notebook with meaningless swirls, and recited the script of all five Indiana Jones scripts out loud twice. I don't really feel like doing it again. There is only a limited amount of time where you can listen to your own voice on repeat until it starts to sound like meaningless background noise.

It takes, by my count, two more days for anything to change. The lights. They dim so slowly I don’t notice at first. Just a soft draining of brightness before the colours shift, white to something sickly green. The walls take it poorly, absorbing the colour unevenly so that patches of shadow bloom where there shouldn’t be any.

I sit up on the mattress.

A low hum follows, vibrating through the floor before I can hear it properly. It crawls up through my legs, into my chest, into my teeth. The lights flash green again, projecting streaks of silver and red and white across the walls, smeared colour. Sound comes next, distant, like it’s traveling through water. A rush. A roar. Something mechanical, constant. It takes me a second too long to recognize it as traffic, like rush hour, cars packed close together like bodies in a stadium. The colors pull together, dragging themselves into shape, into depth—

It's her.

Kailee.

She is stood on the overpass, taller, older than I remember, teenaged frame draped across the railings, staring out over the rushing highway below. My hand flies to the fragment of the drawing in my pocket, a small tabby cat named Princess Caliope of Glitteria. I told her I'd get her a cat when she turned eight.

She looks far older than eight now. I never got to see it.

For a second, she stills. Her long blonde hair, streaked with pink flies around her like a flock of frenzied birds. Then she places one sneakered foot over the railing, spreading her arms out like an angel in motion. I rush forwards to stop her--and the wall greets me back. She falls in slow motion, her blonde hair leaving the frame last, as I stare, willing time to reverse.

Then a voice speaks: 'She has repeated her father's mistakes'