Layla

“Memories fade quickly in the afterlife, especially when you don’t have a body and a brain to attach them to. You just have feelings, but you can’t connect them to anything. It’s why they’re called lost souls.”

Willow says nothing during all of this. She just listens, which isn’t hard to do because the man keeps talking, filling my head with way more information than I can keep up with.

“We call them spares,” he says. “They’re like souls who no longer have a body, but the soul isn’t quite dead, so they aren’t considered traditional ghosts. It’s very rare that the circumstances are right for something like this to occur, but it’s not unheard of. Two souls leave two bodies at once in the same room. Only one of the bodies is revived. The wrong soul attaches to the revived body, and the right soul becomes stuck, with nowhere to go.”

Willow places her palms on the table. She speaks for the first time with a curious tilt of her head. “If this is true . . . and I’m Layla . . . how and why did I end up stuck here in this house?”

“When a soul leaves a body, but refuses to move on, it usually ends up in a place that meant something to them during life. This place has no meaning to Sable. But it has a lot of meaning to you. That’s why your soul came here after it was displaced, because it’s the only place you knew Leeds might find you.”

He thinks Layla’s soul got displaced? It’s such a simple term to explain something so monumental. But no matter how simple or monumental this may be, I’ve never wanted to believe something more, while also hoping to hell it’s not true. “You’re wrong,” I say firmly. “I would have known if Layla wasn’t Layla.”

“You did know,” the man says adamantly. “It’s why you started falling out of love with Layla after her surgery. Because she wasn’t the Layla you fell in love with when you met her.”

I push back from the table. I walk across the kitchen, wanting to punch something. Throw something. I’ve been through enough already. I don’t need someone showing up here and fucking with my head even more.

“This is ridiculous,” I mutter. “What are the chances that souls could be switched?” I don’t know if I’m asking Willow, the man, or myself.

“Stranger things have happened. You said yourself you didn’t believe in ghosts before you returned here, but look at you now,” the man says.

“Ghosts are one thing. But this? This is something you’d see in a movie.”

“Leeds,” Willow says. Her voice is calm. Quiet.

I spin around and look at her.

Really look at her.

Part of me wants to believe this guy because that would explain this inexplicable pull I feel toward Willow. Even when I thought she might be Sable.

It would also explain why Layla has seemed like a completely different person since the accident.

But if he’s right, and Willow is Layla, that means . . .

I shake my head.

It would mean Layla is dead.

It would mean it’s Layla who has been stuck in this house alone.

I grip the counter, my knees weak. I try to think of a way to disprove his theory. Or prove it. I don’t even know which theory I want to be true at this point.

“I need more proof,” I say to him.

The man motions toward my seat, so I walk across the kitchen and return to the table. I take a sip of water, my pulse pounding in my throat.

“Do you know the full extent of Layla’s memory loss since the accident?” the man asks.

I try to think back to what she could remember, but I don’t have a lot to go on. She doesn’t like to talk about that night, and I avoid talking too much about the past because I don’t like to remind her of her loss of memory. I shake my head. “No. I’ve never quizzed her about it because I feel bad. But there have been things I’ve noticed that she forgot. Like on the flight here when I mentioned the name of the bed and breakfast, it was like she had no memory of it until I reminded her.”

“If Sable’s soul took over Layla’s body, she would have difficulty accessing Layla’s memories right away, because they aren’t hers. They’re there—in her brain—but they wouldn’t be so easy to get to when her spirit didn’t actually experience those memories.”

Willow speaks up. “But wouldn’t Layla know she was Sable? Sable’s memories are also there, in her head. When she woke up from surgery, she would have known she was in the wrong body, right?”

“Not necessarily,” he says. “Like you said, when you were in her head, her memories were confusing. That could be because when a person dies, they don’t normally take their entire identities with them.”