Below it, the date. November 18, 2036.

I did not think “future” at first. I assumed it was a misprint, a novelty, or some bit of promotional nonsense. Then I read the itemized list.

Bouquet of peonies.

Industrial duct tape.

One-way bus ticket to Mercy Falls.

I stood at the kitchen counter, holding the receipt, the refrigerator humming in the background. Someone laughed on the street outside. A car door slammed. The world continued its indifferent rhythms beyond my walls. The room around me shifted—bright, false, as if painted by panic.

Mercy Falls was not a place I knew. The year was incorrect. The station didn't exist.

But peonies.

My mother's favourite flowers were peonies.

She loved them with intensity, not in the lazy, sentimental way people assign a favourite blossom to the dead. Every spring, she bought armfuls and cut them too short for the vase, as if she could not bear to leave any stem between herself and their fragrance. When they opened, she would touch the petals with the back of one finger and say they looked indecent.

She vanished in June, just as the peonies were nearly gone.

I was eleven. Adults used words that created space around the facts. “Missing.” “Gone.” My father carried those phrases into the house like weather, his shoulders hunched against the invisible storm.

He is gone. I live alone. Some evenings, his habits come back: I check the lock, leave the hall light on, wake at three—listening for something I cannot name.

I flipped the receipt over. In blue ink, faint enough to miss at first glance, someone had written the number 17.

That night, I left the receipt on the table and tried to ignore it. Every few minutes, my eyes darted back to the table as if the paper might move when I wasn’t looking.

Later that night, unable to rest, I finally gave in and searched Mercy Falls.

No city. No district. No pending municipality—nothing that could explain a bus ticket or account for the station printed at the top of the receipt.

The next morning, on my way to work, I passed Mercer Florist and stopped so suddenly that the woman behind me muttered under her breath.

In the window, among hydrangeas and white roses, stood three metal buckets filled with peonies. Pale pink, overblown, extravagant, their scent pressing against the glass. A card pinned to the display read:

PEONIES: $17/STEM

Cold washed through me, as if an internal door had swung open to winter.

During lunch, I checked the local crime reports.

Three women had gone missing in neighbouring counties over the past eighteen months. Two were last seen near bus depots. One had bought flowers that morning; another appeared on surveillance footage, brown-paper bouquet in hand. At two sites, investigators recovered adhesive residue from industrial-grade duct tape.

The third case was more uncertain. A witness had seen the missing woman leaving a station with another woman whose face she could not describe clearly. She remembered only the coat: dark, belted, wool. She remembered dark hair and a narrow face.

The accompanying sketch resembled me with the hateful imprecision of poor likenesses.

There are periods I cannot remember. After my father's death, my sleep was fractured. I took prescriptions. Days blurred. My therapist called it dissociative episodes: memory fractures under pressure.

Much later, unable to sleep, I rose at two in the morning, retrieved the coat from the hall, and searched it again, this time more thoroughly. I felt every seam with my thumb and forefinger. Near the left side seam, my thumb slipped through a tear in the silk.

There was something hidden between the lining and the wool shell.

I widened the seam and reached inside.

The first object was a plastic transit card attached to a cracked lanyard clip. My own face looked back at me from beneath scratched laminate. The card bore my name, a future expiration date, and the Meridian Transit Authority insignia.

Below it, in block letters:

MERCY FALLS SOUTH TERMINAL

I sat on the floor, fingers tracing the scar on my left palm. The coat spilled around me, burdensome and suffocating.

My hand went back into the lining.

This time, I drew out a photograph.

It had been cut from a strip. In the image, beneath a station sign reading MERCY FALLS, stood my mother.

Age had touched her. Her face was thinner than I remembered, with her hair threaded with gray. Still, it was unmistakably her: the same fine bones, the same wary mouth, and the same slight tilt of her head. In her arms, she cradled a bouquet of peonies.

Along the white border, in my handwriting, someone had written:

Don't let me take her again.

For a long time, I stayed still. The sentence lingered between past and future, accusation and plea. I knew my hand as intimately as one knows their own scar—familiar, yet somehow belonging to another.

I can't recall how much time passed. The next clear moment arrived with a knock at the door. The knock brought two officers whose faces registered concern I couldn't process. I allowed them in without question, as if watching myself from a distance. I handed over the receipt, the card, and the photograph. One officer asked if there was anyone they could contact for me. The other walked around the perimeter of the apartment with quiet, professional steps.

He paused at the kitchen table before crouching.

“Ma'am,” he said.

His voice had shifted.

Beneath the table, partly hidden by the chair legs, lay a bouquet of peonies wrapped in damp brown paper. The outer petals had already started to bruise, releasing their cloying sweetness. Water darkened the floorboards underneath.

The officer reached further underneath and pulled out a grey roll of industrial duct tape.

Then I realized where he had found them.

Not hidden within a wall or placed by a stranger.

Set within reach.

As if I had put them there myself—still seeking the composure a coat like this might provide, even as I became what it was meant to hide.