My husband insisted that we sleep in separate rooms – and one night I heard strange noises coming from his room, so I decided to go check it out…

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Part 1: The Invisible Distance
In our modern glass and steel home in suburban Seattle, silence was a kind of religion. My husband, David – a talented architect with an unusually calm demeanor – made a bizarre request shortly after our 10th wedding anniversary: ​​”I need some space to focus on the biggest project of my career. We should sleep in separate rooms, at least for a few months.”

At first, I agreed. I believed in his creativity and the pressures he faced. But six months passed, and “a few months” became a new way of life. David moved into the room at the end of the second-floor hallway, a room he had personally installed a fingerprint lock and a special soundproofing system.

We still ate dinner together, still talked about trivial things, but his gaze always drifted past me, towards that dark hallway. He had lost weight, his eyes were sunken, and his hands, once the clean hands of a desk worker, were now often stained with strange brown marks which he explained were “watercolor sketches.”

Part 2: The Midnight Sounds
Friday night, a great storm swept across the Pacific Northwest. Thunder rumbled, shaking large windows. I lay in the spacious master bedroom, feeling like a ghost in my own home.

Around 2 a.m., as the rain began to subside, I heard it.

A sound not from the storm.

Knock… knock… wheezing…

It came from David’s room. It wasn’t knocking, but more like someone scratching at the wooden floor, accompanied by a series of low, intermittent sounds like chanting or choked sobs.

I stood up, my heart pounding against my chest. I walked barefoot on the icy wooden floor, toward the end of the hallway. The faint light from the motion-activated lamp along the passageway cast long, winding shadows.

I pressed my ear against David’s door.

“Be good… almost done… just a little more…” David’s voice rang out, but it wasn’t his usual warm, deep voice. It trembled, filled with a haunting, almost frantic longing.

Then came a heavy thud, as if something fleshy had fallen to the floor.

Part 3: Climax – The Truth in the Darkness
I realized David had forgotten to close the door completely when he rushed into the room that evening. The gap was only about half a centimeter wide, but enough for me to see a part of the nightmare.

I gently pushed the door open. The soundproofing was excellent, but when the door was ajar, the horrifying sounds assaulted my ears clearly. The smell in the room wasn’t the smell of drawing paper or ink. It smelled of wet plaster, the pungent smell of oil paint, and… the acrid smell of ammonia.

David was kneeling on the floor, his back to me. He was shirtless, sweat dripping down his back, which was covered in scratches.

Before him wasn’t a building blueprint. It was a statue.

But it wasn’t an ordinary statue. It was a life-sized figure, sculpted from clay and wax, sitting in an old armchair. What almost made me scream was the statue’s face.

It was me.

But not the me of today. It was me ten years ago, on our wedding day, in a white lace dress and a radiant smile. David was using a small carving knife, meticulously embedding real strands of hair into the statue’s wax scalp.

“Almost finished, my dear Sarah,” he whispered to the statue. “She’s wasting away out there… she’s not you anymore. But here, you’ll be perfect forever. You’ll never grow old, never change, never look at me with that disappointed look again.”

I recoiled in shock, bumping into a ceramic vase in the hallway. Crash!

Part 4: The Twist – The Imposter
David spun around. His eyes were bloodshot, wild. When he saw me, he showed no fear or shame. He looked at me with blatant disgust.

“Why are you here?” He stood up, still holding the wax-stained carving knife. “I told you to stay in your room.”

“David… what are you doing? This is madness!” I screamed, tears streaming down my face. “You’re worshipping a block of wax while your wife is standing right here!”

David laughed, a bitter laugh that sent chills down my spine. “My wife? You think you’re my wife?”

He walked over, grabbed an old file from the desk, and threw it at me. “Look at yourself, Sarah. Look in the mirror!”

I picked up the file. It was my own psychiatric record from five years ago, after the horrific car accident that robbed me of my memory and required complete facial reconstruction surgery.

The bright red lettering on the cover read: “CAPGRAS SYNDROME AND COMPLICATIONS OF PARALYZED AMNESIA.”

“Ten years ago, Sarah was truly clinically dead in that accident,” David said, his voice now filled with hatred. “The doctors reconstructed your face based on old photos, but you are not her. You have a different personality, different interests, you don’t even remember how we fell in love. You are just a stranger with the face of the woman I love.”

I looked at the wax statue. It didn’t look like me.

To be more precise, I wasn’t like it. I realized I’d always felt out of place in this house, not because David slept separately, but because subconsciously I knew I was playing someone else.

“You don’t sleep separately to work,” David approached the statue, stroking its wax hand. “But because you can’t stand lying next to a flawed copy every night. You’re rebuilding her. Little by little. And when you’re finished…”

He looked at me, a cruel glint in his eyes. “You won’t need this copy anymore.”

Part 5: The Extreme Climax – The Liberation
I saw on David’s desk more than just wax and clay. There were bottles of potent chemicals and a new life insurance plan signed by me – a signature I didn’t remember signing.

David wasn’t just creating a statue. He was preparing for a second “accident.” A fire or a gass poisoning, where my “copy” would vanish, and he would live on forever with his perfect wax wife, along with the enormous insurance payout to continue his madness.

I didn’t run away.

I looked him straight in the eye, picking up the burning candle from the nearby bookshelf.

“You’re right, David. I’m not her. And I don’t want to be her anymore.”

I threw the candle into the flammable plaster and oil wax at the base of the statue. Flames erupted instantly. David screamed, rushing into the fire to save his “wife.”

I walked out of the room, slammed the door shut, and locked it with the code I’d accidentally seen him enter earlier. David’s banging on the door, the melting wax, and the crackling fire echoed like a farewell to the past.

The next morning, the police found a man dead from suffocation, clutching a completely deformed block of wax. They called it a heartbreaking accident.

I stood before the mirror, using a knife to make a small cut on my cheek – the first scar I had chosen for myself. I was no longer David’s Sarah. I was a woman without a past, emerging from the ashes of a sick love.

The ambulance siren faded into the Seattle fog. The glass house was now just a black, smoke-stained frame, a symbol of liberation. I stood across the street, watching the yellow police cordon tape flutter in the wind.

Part 1: The Death of a Name
At the police station, I identified myself as Sarah Vance. I cried at the right time, trembled at the right place. The detectives looked at me with utter pity—a poor woman who had lost her memory and now her husband in a fire caused by “occupational accident.”

But as I left the station, I stopped at a public restroom at a gas station. I looked in the mirror. The small cut on my cheek had scabbed over, a dark brown line cutting across the flawless skin that David had once admired.

I took a small pair of scissors and a bottle of jet-black hair dye from my handbag. Each strand of long, chestnut hair—which David had meticulously chosen to inlay into the wax statue—fell onto the dirty tile floor.

When I stepped out, Sarah Vance was gone. Only a woman with a stylish short haircut and eyes devoid of worry remained.

Part 2: The Madman’s Treasure
David always thought he was in control, but madmen are often careless. In my suitcase were not expensive clothes, but a complete blacklist of construction projects David had undertaken to fund his purchases of wax, chemicals, and real hair from the black market.

I didn’t use the life insurance money. I didn’t want to touch anything stained with his blood and wax. Instead, I used these documents to make a tacit agreement with David’s former partners—those who were also trembling with fear because of these wrongdoings.

“I need a new identity. Legal. Clean. And $500,000 in cash,” I told the construction company manager in a dimly lit Portland bar. “In return, all this evidence will disappear along with the name Sarah Vance.”

He looked at me, beads of sweat rolling down his forehead. He realized this “crazy” woman was actually the most venomous snake David had ever kept in his house.

“Okay. What name do you want?”

I looked out the window, where an old neon sign was flashing ‘ELARA’.

“Elara. No last name. Just Elara.”

Part 3: Climax – Meeting “Myself”

Three years later, in a coastal town in California.

I opened a small antique restoration shop. I enjoyed mending broken things, not to make them look new, but to celebrate their cracks.

One afternoon, an elegant woman walked into the shop. She carried an old photograph and a porcelain doll with a broken face.

“Can you make it exactly like the picture?” she asked, her voice full of urgency. “It’s a memento of my daughter… she’s gone.”

I looked at the photograph. My heart tightened. The woman in the picture… was my face before the accident. Not Sarah’s surgically altered face, but my original face with its bright eyes and slightly upturned nose.

“Why do you want it exactly like that?” I asked, my voice trembling.

“Because I can’t accept that she’s gone,” she sobbed. “I want something to look at every day, to see that she’s still here, unchanged.”

The Twist: The Terrifying Loop
I realized this woman was Sarah’s real mother—the one David had told me he’d cut off contact with a long time ago. She hadn’t cut ties; David had hidden her away, paid her to keep quiet and believe her daughter was being treated in isolation, so he could have complete control over molding the “copy” that was me.

But in her haunting eyes, I saw the shadow of David. Possessiveness. A denial of reality.

I picked up the porcelain doll, and then, in front of her, I dropped it to the floor again. Crash!

“What are you doing?!” she shrieked.

“You don’t need an exact replica,” I said calmly, picking up a broken piece of porcelain. “You need to face the truth that your daughter is dead. Trying to cling to a soulless form is just killing yourself every day.”

She was about to slap me, but when she looked into my eyes—the eyes of her deceased daughter, yet filled with a strangeness and hardness—she stopped.

“Elena…?” She whispered a name I’d long forgotten. My real name before the accident.

Part 4: The Final Liberation
I neither admitted nor denied it.

I gave her the address of a cemetery in Seattle, where there was an unmarked grave I’d silently tended for the past three years.

“Go there and cry your heart out. Then live your life.”

She left, staggering like someone waking from a dream. I stood in the shop, surrounded by scratched antiques. I touched the scar on my cheek.

I was no longer David’s Sarah Vance, nor the poor Elena of that other mother. I was Elara. An entity built from fragments, needing no wax perfection, needing no one’s approval.

That night, I closed the shop early. I drove along the coast, the salty wind blowing against my face. David wanted to confine me to a windowless room.