Chapter 3

It was already eight in the morning when I got back to the city.

I circled the building three times, but I didn't go up.

Instead, I turned and went to the police station.

Saul had said an officer had brought him home, so I decided to take a gamble and go looking for clues.

I'd rather take the risk than share a room with a man whose background I couldn't place.

The moment the policewoman at the front desk heard my name, her eyes lit up.

"I know you. I'm the one who closed your husband's missing-persons case."

"At the time, my coworkers joked that your husband was such a hopeless romantic—four years of amnesia, and the first person he remembered was still you."

I gave an awkward laugh.

I hesitated for a while before I finally worked up the courage to ask:

"May I ask—how did you confirm that he's my husband?"

The policewoman kept working on the papers in front of her, not even looking up.

"For missing persons like this, we have professional verification procedures."

"There's no way we'd match someone by mistake."

"Is there some kind of problem?"

I hesitated again and again, then came up with a vague answer.

"Just curious."

"With so many missing persons every day, how do the police tell who's real and who isn't?"

She giggled, her voice bright and crisp.

"In this day and age, finding a person is easy."

"He came in and reported it himself, said he only remembered your name."

"We found that you'd filed a missing-persons report before, and we compared him against the photo in the ID database."

Hearing that, I couldn't stop myself from blurting out:

"But so many people look alike. Isn't it possible to make a mistake just from a photo?"

The policewoman stopped what she was doing and glanced up at me.

"Besides the photo, we also compare fingerprints."

"We only notify the community to come claim the person once everything matches."

I stared at her, my eyes going wide with shock.

"My husband's fingerprints are in the database too?"

She nodded, her gaze turning more scrutinizing.

"His aren't the only ones in the fingerprint database—yours are in there too."

"When you apply for a national ID card, they record your fingerprints."

"What, are you worried you've got the wrong husband?"

Even now, a sliver of hope still lingered in my heart.

"Could someone forge fingerprints?"

"After all, technology is so advanced these days."

She fell silent, staring hard at me, her tone wary but controlled.

"Ma'am, the fingerprint verification equipment at the police station is very advanced."

"What we scan is the subcutaneous fingerprint. If someone tried to fake it, the alarm would go off immediately."

"Are you in some kind of trouble?"

I froze, and my heart sank straight to the bottom.

It felt like a ball of fire was lodged in my throat, with nowhere to let it out.

I could hardly tell her that the husband I'd killed had come back.

As I left the police station, the policewoman's parting words still echoed in my ears.

"Don't worry, all the information was compared."

"He's definitely your husband."

But I knew better than anyone.

Even if the photos matched and the fingerprints were identical—

this man absolutely could not be Saul Dickerson!

Because the real Saul Dickerson had been killed by me four years ago!

I wandered through the streets in a daze.

Passing a fortune-teller's stall, an absurd thought even surged up in me.

Could it be that Saul's ghost had come back to take revenge on me?

But soon the cold wind blowing in my face scattered that ridiculous notion.

If ghosts were real, Saul should have come for his revenge four years ago—

not waited four years, and then bothered to invent some excuse about amnesia.

The question came right back to where it started.

Just who was the man in my house now?

I climbed the stairs with a heavy heart, only to find someone I never expected at my door.