Natalie put her hand above her head to block the sunlight coming through the apartment window. She never felt this groggy before. It was like she’d been asleep for weeks.

She rolled over and noticed Astian wasn’t in bed with her. That was weird, she thought. It was Sunday, he should be sleeping in. Maybe he was already up making breakfast. 

Natalie heard the notification bell ring on her phone. She groaned and reached over to her night stand to pick it up, expecting some stupid, irrelevant news story. 

Well, she was half-right. She did get a news story. 

But it nearly made her drop her phone.

“24 year old man, Astian Dover, in police chase after robbing a bank. Police have lost him and he’s been declared missing.”

“No.” Natalie thought. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

This had to be a joke, some kind of sick prank. It couldn’t be real. It couldn’t possibly be real.

“You won’t have to worry about Astian. He won’t wake up in your apartment. We have some level of control over your reality and will create an explanation for his absence.”

Natalie frantically scrolled down. The article had four comments at the bottom. Other people had seen this. It wasn’t something that just popped up on her phone.

A chill went down her spine. It took a concerted effort not to panic.

Everything was fine. All that stuff about magic, and the trial, and memories changing, and Astian going to jail, and her being a… you know, it was a dream. It wasn’t real. There had to be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this, she was sure of it.

Natalie quickly got out of bed and searched around her apartment. It wasn’t very big, so it didn’t take long to check every corner. 

She found nothing. Nothing here was out of the ordinary. Aside from Astian not being there, of course.

She felt a panic attack creeping in, but forced it out as she went to her phone to look at her Life360 app. Maybe Astian was at the store or something.

When she checked, he wasn’t on the app at all. He wasn’t in town, the country, or anywhere on Earth for that matter.

Did he take himself off of it? Why? Life360 was his idea in the first place.

Natalie took a seat on the living room couch. Her eyes began watering. She didn’t bother to hold it back. 

No matter how she sliced it, the love of her life was missing. No one, not even the police could find him. He was gone.

She sniffed. Would she ever see him again? 

Natalie closed her eyes and imagined Astian’s arms around her, his mouth giving the back of her neck a kiss. She could feel his hot breath on her skin.

She wanted to keep her eyes shut forever. To continue imagining Astian was right there with her, comforting her and telling her everything was going to be okay. To pretend that everything was just as it was before, and they were going to be married next year.

But illusions can never last forever.

Natalie opened her eyes and saw she was still alone, in the room, in the apartment, and in her life. She huddled her knees up to her chest.

Astian was a good man. Nice, charming, loving, as close to the idealized all-American guy as you could get. He would never commit a crime. That wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him.

Yet it was.

Why would he rob a bank? They didn’t have money problems. They weren’t about to be evicted or anything. In fact, they were already distributing money for their wedding. And planning on buying a home, a real home. A nice, big one by the lake. 

How could he do this? Desert her and run off to get lost in the middle of nowhere?

Natalie’s sadness was replaced by red, hot rage. Astian left her. He didn’t even say goodbye. He just robbed a bank and got lost for no reason. That. Fucking. Asshole. 

She was wrong about him. He wasn’t nice at all. He was a terrible, terrible man. And she hated him. She hated him so much. How could he do this to her?

…Maybe he didn’t.

When Natalie had her eyes closed, and imagined Astian holding her, there was another image she saw in her mind. One she tried her hardest to ignore.

It was the image of herself as a man. The same image she saw displayed on a screen over and over again.

The image of Nathan Parker.

No, this was ridiculous. She wasn’t about to believe all that nonsense about a magic trial and her being a man. It was all a dream. Even just questioning it was ridiculous.

Right?

Well, if it was a dream then she was remembering it oddly well. Dreams usually fade from your head pretty quick but this one was still as clear and vivid as when she woke up. And her brain still hadn’t adjusted to the time change. It really did feel like she hadn’t been in this apartment for two weeks, despite her falling asleep in bed with Astian last night.

Oh, that’s right… Astian. The man supposedly on trial. The man who got sentenced to twenty-five years in ‘magic prison’ for ‘magic abuse’. 

She wasn’t really entertaining this idea, right? That magic was real and Astian really did use magic to transform her into a woman, make her his girlfriend and soon to be wife. That was insane. It was not real. 

And she could prove it too.

Natalie went to one of her cabinets and took out an old photo album. When she opened it, she was greeted with all kinds of photos from all throughout her life, from birth to the present day. 

She flipped through the pages and skimmed through the photos. She smiled as she did. There, hard evidence she was always a woman. “Nathan Parker” never existed, that was her imagination. After all, if “Nathan” had been real, these photos would be different. She’d be a man in them.

That was it, Nathan wasn’t real.

Of course, if a spell was powerful enough to change reality, it would probably change the past as well, which would include things like birth certificates, driver’s licenses, IDs…

And photos…

So… this didn’t really prove Nathan wasn’t real. Hell, there was nothing she could do to prove he wasn’t real. It was unfalsifiable. 

But if it was unfalsifiable then she shouldn’t even bother entertaining it. She may as well believe she’s some alien in a giant tube imagining she’s human in a simulation. She couldn’t prove that false either. The only real evidence she had of Nathan being real was a dream.

…One that still hadn’t faded from her mind, even this long after waking up. She could still easily recall what the courtroom looked like, what her hotel room looked like, what that woman… Sara looked like, and she could still recall seeing Astian panic and being dragged out of the courtroom.

The part of her brain that was supposed to filter out fantastical things, to tell her it’s all fiction, was instead telling her the opposite.

…It was real, wasn’t it?

She felt it in her gut. At twenty-four years old, she knew what dreams felt like. And this wasn’t it. Dreams are never this vivid, this long, or change things in the real world. In her “dream”, Astian was arrested, and he coincidentally vanished the second she woke up.

All of this meant, of course, that she did used to be a man named Nathan. He was real. 

And if he was real, what did that make her?

If it truly was the case that Astian changed reality to make Natalie who she is now, then how could she trust any of her life experiences? These weren’t just memories, she could very plainly recall living these things out in real time. How could she trust that anything about her wasn’t artificially created by some magic spell?

Natalie returned to her photo album and looked through her pictures again. Each one put a memory in her head. A memory that for all she knew, never happened. Her breathing grew heavier and heavier as she went further into the book.

Then she reached the photo of Astian proposing to her.

Everything in the world came to a sudden halt.

Astian proposing to her was one of her favorite memories. 

Was.

She took the photo out of the sleeve and stared at it. A seething rage consumed her as she did.

This man fucking destroyed her life.

She’d never been so angry at anyone before. She didn’t just hate this man, she wanted him dead. She wanted him rotting in hell. She hoped he suffered and felt a fraction of what he did to her. If she saw his face right now, she swore she would blow it off with a revolver.

She ripped the photo to shreds and let it fall to the ground. Tears filled her eyes.

“I’m not real.”

She held her hands to her face, but it failed to contain her sobs.