I have been a forensic artist for twelve years. Faces are my job. Every line, every scar, every freckle tells me something about a person. I can sit opposite a witness and sketch a stranger they only saw for a few seconds. Most people notice a face. I study it.
That is why this morning has made no sense to me at all. The first thing I noticed was the man sleeping beside me. That is not my husband. My heart pounded as I scrambled backwards until my back hit the headboard. The movement woke him instantly. He rubbed his eyes before smiling at me, the same smile I had seen every morning for the last eight years. "You alright?" he asked. His voice. It was Danny’s voice.
I stared at him, trying to understand what I was seeing. Danny had a crooked nose from breaking it as a teenager. His jaw was sharper than this man's. His eyebrows were thicker. The tiny scar beneath his left eye had disappeared. Every feature did not sit as it should. "I... who are you?" I whispered. His smile faded. "Very funny." "I'm serious." He frowned. "Melody?" The way he said my name sent a chill through my body. Only Danny says it like that.
I reached for my phone on the bedside cabinet. The lock screen was a photograph of us on holiday. Me smiling into the camera while Danny wrapped an arm around my shoulders. Except the man in the picture was the stranger sitting beside me. I dropped the phone. "No." "Mel, you're starting to worry me." I ignored him and rushed into the bathroom. My reflection stared back exactly as I remembered. Brunette hair tied into a loose ponytail. Blue eyes. Small scar above my eyebrow from falling off my scooter when I was twelve.
I was still me. So why wasn't anyone else them? I left the house before Danny could stop me. The streets looked normal. Children walked to school. Cars filled the roads. A woman walked her dog past me, smiling politely. I had never seen her before. Then she waved. "Morning, Mel." How did she know me. I forced a smile before hurrying away.
By the time I reached the police station, I was shaking. Surely someone would notice. Surely somebody would say something. Instead, every familiar face had become unfamiliar.
The receptionist smiled. "Morning." I knew her voice at once. Ella. We had worked together for six years. But Ella had always had curly brown hair framing a round face. The woman behind the desk had straight hair and high cheekbones. Everything else was the same. The same laugh. The same perfume. The same chipped purple mug beside the computer. Only her face had changed. "You look pale," she said. "I didn't sleep much." She nodded sympathetically before returning to her paperwork. No confusion. No panic. Nothing. I hurried into my office.
Family photographs lined my desk. Every one of them was wrong. My parents. My sister. Even my grandparents. The people were strangers wearing the lives of the people I loved.
There was a knock at my door. Detective Harris stepped inside. Or at least I assumed it was Harris. His height was right. His grey suit was the same one he wore every Tuesday. He balanced a coffee in one hand exactly as he always had. "You ready?" he asked. "Ready for what?" "The interview." My stomach tightened. "The witness from yesterday?" He nodded. "You've forgotten already?" I forced myself to nod back. "Right. Of course."
The interview room felt colder than usual. A young woman sat waiting for me. She looked terrified. I sat opposite her and opened my sketchbook. "Can you describe the man you saw?" She nodded. "He had a small nose." I sketched. "Medium sized eyes." I sketched again. "A rounded jaw." Piece by piece the face appeared. Except I could not picture it. Every feature felt disconnected from the next. For the first time in my career, I was not drawing a person. I was drawing instructions. When I finished, I turned the pad around. She frowned. "No." "What do you mean?" "That's not him." I looked back at the drawing. It matched every detail she had given me. "His eyes were smaller." "You said they were small.” "I know... but not like that. "She looked confused. "The nose isn't right either." "You said it was long." "It is."
My hands started shaking. Every description contradicted itself. Nothing fitted together anymore. Detective Harris took the sketch from my hands. "Looks good." I stared at him. "It doesn’t. “He looked between me and the witness. "It looks exactly like the man on CCTV." "What CCTV?" He pointed towards the screen mounted on the wall. The suspect appeared walking through a supermarket.
My breath caught. I could not recognise him. Not because I had never seen him before. Because I could not separate him from anyone else. Every face looked equally unfamiliar. Every person had become a stranger. I left the interview room before anyone could stop me. Back in my office I pulled every case file from the shelves. Hundreds of faces stared back at me. Victims. Witnesses. Suspects. Missing people.
I knew every single one of them yesterday. Today they meant nothing. Then I noticed something impossible. One file had not changed. It was a sketch I had completed three months earlier. The face looked the same as I remembered. Every line. Every shadow. Every scar. It had not changed. Written across the top of the folder were three words.
Identity Unknown.
I stared at the sketch for several minutes before realising what made it different. It was not that the drawing had not changed. It was that I recognised it. It was the only face in the world I could still find.
Someone knocked gently on my office door. "Melody?" I looked up. Another stranger stood there. "You've got another witness waiting." I looked back at the sketch. For the first time that day, I was not interested in solving the murder. I wanted to know why one face had survived whatever had happened overnight. Because if every other face in the world had changed...
Whoever this person was had somehow escaped it.