Upstairs, in the dim quiet of his room, Aaron sat at his desk, his computer screen casting a cold blue glow across the room.

  The house was silent, and his room was pitch black save for the computer screen’s light. He stared at the screen for a moment, his fingers hovering above the keyboard, but he didn’t type anything. Not yet.

  Finally, he took a deep breath and typed one word into the search bar: changeling.

  The word hung in the air between him and the screen. He wasn’t sure why he typed it, but it felt like the right thing to do. It felt like the thing he needed to understand.

  The search results came up slowly, the cursor blinking in the silence as the pages loaded. Aaron clicked through a few links, each article more bizarre than the last. Myths. Folk tales. Creatures that weren’t quite human.

  Something about them didn’t sit right with him. It wasn’t just the stories, it was the feeling. The feeling that had been growing inside him ever since the morning after the coldest night.

  He scrolled through more pages, his eyes scanning the words quickly, but his mind was elsewhere.

  It was hard to focus. Hard to piece together what he was feeling. Something in him knew that the girl sitting downstairs, the one calling herself Celia, wasn’t the same person he had known.

  It was in the way she moved, the way she talked, the way her laugh didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  Aaron leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, his hands still resting on the keyboard. The weight of the situation pressed down on him. It was the same feeling he had when he had first seen her again—something was wrong. Something was... off.

  He couldn’t ignore it.

  A small part of him, the part that had always been the observer, had already started to put the pieces together.

  But the rest of him? The part that didn’t want to believe it, the part that wanted everything to just be normal again? That part was still trying to suppress the thoughts, trying to push them back down where they couldn’t be found.

  The search results blurred in front of him, and his mind drifted back to the moment at the dinner table.

  The small slips, the lapses in memory, the way she fumbled for words. And the way she couldn’t remember the simplest things, the small details that only Celia would have known.

  For the first time since Celia gave him that special cocoa, he felt his heart race. His mind spun in circles. Could she really be a changeling?

  The idea was absurd, impossible, something out of a bad fantasy novel. But deep down, Aaron knew the truth.

  Something wasn’t right. And whether it was Celia or not, whatever she was... it wasn’t the person they had welcomed back into their home.

  But if that wasn’t his stepsister, who could it be?

  And where was the real Celia?

  Aaron sat at his desk for a long time, the blue light of the monitor painting shadows under his eyes. The search bar blinked back at him.

  "Changeling myth real?"

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  "Signs someone has been replaced?"

  "Folklore—fairy switch?"

  He didn’t click on those links. He couldn’t. Just typing it out made his chest tighten with something he couldn’t name. Guilt, maybe. Fear. A betrayal he hadn’t committed.

  But the thought wouldn’t leave him. The way Celia laughed a second too late at their dad’s dry jokes, the way she froze at the dinner table like she was waiting for a cue, the way her eyes flickered, trying to remember what room she was in.

  Like she didn’t know them at all.

  He swallowed hard and closed his computer, pushing it aside with a quiet scrape. The room felt still. Too quiet.

  He got up and crossed the floor to his bed, sat at the edge, then dropped back into the mattress. He sank deep into it, wishing it could pin everything down and make it make sense.

  The ceiling above him hadn’t changed in years. Same water stain in the corner, same little glow-in-the-dark star Celia stuck up there as a joke two birthdays ago.

  He stared at it now, unmoving, chest rising and falling in slow, shallow breaths. It was cold in the room. His sweater sleeves didn’t help. But the cold didn’t come from the walls, the window, or the constant, perpetual winter-like weather in this city.

  It was in him.

  The idea that something might have happened to Celia made him feel like he’d stepped into a world tilted to the left. If he looked too hard, maybe the truth would peel back like wallpaper. And underneath would be something terrible.

  He sat up suddenly and dropped to his knees beside the bed. He reached underneath and pulled out the small brown box he hadn’t touched in months.

  It was dusty. The latch stuck for a second before it popped open.

  Inside, on top of a few old coins, a movie stub, and a paperclip chain Celia made during a snowstorm blackout, was a photo.

  Their first Christmas dinner together as a new family, three years ago.

  Aaron looked younger: tighter around the mouth, his hair longer and always falling into his eyes. He was standing stiffly beside Celia, who was grinning with her whole face in an ugly Christmas sweater she swore she’d burn, but never did.

  Her arm was around his shoulders in the picture. He hadn’t noticed her do it at the time. What he remembered was that two days before they were both sick with a flu that knocked them out for days.

  He could still taste the cocoa she’d made him. She was pale and sniffly and should’ve been in bed, but she made it anyway. She sat next to him, blanket over both their shoulders, despite never really talking before.

  She was smiling in the photo, wide and bright, not just with her mouth but her eyes, too. And he was smiling quietly next to her. A little shy, but real.

  He hadn’t known what to say to her before then. People told him it was just nerves, or that he was shy. But that wasn’t the real reason.

  He carefully placed the photo aside and dug beneath it until his fingers found another one: an older, smaller picture with edges frayed from time.

  A young, kind-faced woman was smiling in it, sitting on a bench at a park, her coat half-zipped and hair tangled from the wind. She was pushing a little boy on a swing. The boy was barely four, mid-laugh, head thrown back, cheeks round from the cold.

  Aaron held it for a moment, then whispered, “What would you do, Mom?”

  The silence after that was cruel.

  He sat there, fingers tightening around the photo, his throat aching. The thing was, his mom would’ve known what to do. She always had.

  When she was sick, she never let it show. Even when he found her crying once in their laundry room, she wiped her eyes, kissed his forehead, and told him she was just missing the warmth of her hometown. He never asked again.

  But now, she wasn’t here to tell him what to do. She wasn’t here to look at Celia and tell him whether something was wrong, or if he was just imagining it. And that uncertainty felt like grief all over again.

  He stood slowly, legs stiff from kneeling too long, and walked to the nightstand. His phone lay face down. He picked it up and typed with trembling fingers:

  "Precinct 41 Lower East End non-emergency contact"

  It came up immediately. A simple number. A direct line.

  His thumb hovered over it.

  One press.

  Just one.

  But he didn’t. Not yet.

  He dropped the phone back down with a quiet thud and sat on the edge of the bed again. His hands came up to his face, pressing against his eyes, pushing the tears back in before they started.

  He lay back down, this time curling onto his side. His hand slipped under the pillow, finding the corner of the photo box again, like an anchor.

  The room was cold.

  And Aaron had never felt more alone.