---
Julian Blackwell didn't exist.
Not in the DMV.
Not in any hospital.
Not in any birth record.
Lena stared at the computer screen in the county office, her fingers frozen above the keys.
They had driven into town that morning—first time Julian had been outside Hollow Pines since his return. She'd hoped it would feel refreshing. Freeing. Like turning the page.
Instead, they hit a wall.
A bureaucratic, identity-erasing wall.
---
They tried a different office. Then another. No matter where they went, no one could find proof of Julian's life.
No birth certificate. No social security number. No obituary. No anything.
He was a man with no past—because death had burned it away.
Even his reflection in government cameras sometimes flickered, as if reality wasn't entirely convinced he belonged in it.
Julian wasn't shaken. Not outwardly.
But Lena saw it in his eyes. That question:
> Am I still real?
---
Back at Hollow Pines, Lena called her friend Rae, a lawyer who owed her a favor.
"Can we… invent someone?" Lena asked, half-joking.
Rae laughed, until she realized Lena was serious.
"…You're in love with a guy who doesn't exist?" she asked.
Lena hesitated. "He existed once. Just not anymore."
Rae was quiet for a long time. Then: "There's always a way."
---
They spent the next week crafting an identity. A new name. A forged birth record. A history built from scraps.
Julian Blackwell became Julian Lennox—a traveler with no known living family, returning from abroad after years off-grid.
But the more they built, the more Julian withdrew.
"This isn't me," he finally admitted one night.
Lena looked up from the kitchen table, eyes soft. "It doesn't have to be perfect. It just has to be legal."
He shook his head. "I'm tired of pretending. First I was a ghost pretending to be human. Now I'm a human pretending to have a past."
"You do have a past," she whispered. "You have me. You have this house. You have us."
---
One afternoon, they visited a museum downtown—a special exhibit on the Blackwell family. Photos. Journals. Portraits of Eleanor. And one photo that stopped Julian in his tracks:
Him.
Young. Pre-death. Standing beside Aurelia, a smile that now looked like a memory behind glass.
"That's me," he whispered.
A museum attendant wandered over, smiling. "Fascinating, huh? Blackwell's heir. Died young. Mysterious circumstances."
Julian stared. "What if he didn't die?"
The man chuckled. "Trust me, he did. My grandmother said they buried him in a sealed coffin. No one ever opened it."
Julian turned away, face pale.
---
That night, he asked Lena a question she wasn't ready for.
"What if I'm not supposed to be here?"
She froze. "What do you mean?"
"What if I was meant to stay dead? What if all this… is just borrowing time?"
Lena shook her head fiercely. "Don't say that. You were given time. We fought for it. We won it."
"But how long does a miracle last?" he whispered.
---
They began noticing changes again.
Lights flickering. Glasses cracking. Shadows moving without source.
Lena felt it first: the weight in the air.
Not like before. Not a haunting.
But a countdown.
A return.
---
One night, Julian stood at the mirror in their bedroom, watching his own reflection flicker.
"I think it's starting again."
Lena wrapped her arms around him from behind. "Then we fight again. We always fight."
But the reflection didn't show her arms.
It only showed him.
Alone.
---
Author's Thought:
This chapter explores a powerful question: What does it mean to come back when the world has already moved on? Julian is alive, but not accepted—not by the system, not by time, and maybe not by fate. He struggles with his identity, with memory, with belonging. And Lena? She's fighting to keep him anchored. But something darker is stirring. Something unfinished.
In Chapter Ten, the mystery deepens: Julian's return may not have come without a cost. A tether has snapped—but to what?
Shall we continue?