By the end of the week, denial had started to cost her sleep. The cheese was completely gone from the drawer—not just a slice, but the entire block, down to a tiny heel she knew she didn’t leave. Even a sandwich she’d made the night before for her lunch wasn’t in its bag.
“This is impossible,” Yelena whispered, staring into the bright, cold void of the open fridge. She stood there longer than she needed to, doing the math on her own behavior and hating the conclusion. Either she was sleepwalking in some blackout state she had no memory of, or someone else was in her home. “Please let it be sleepwalking,” she prayed aloud.
So she quietly chose to believe the first option, telling herself that work stress did strange things to the mind. It supposedly explained the scuffed butter dish and the missing bread better than anything else did. She didn’t believe it, not really. But believing the alternative meant admitting a terrifying reality, and she just wasn’t ready to face that yet.