Annie was thirty, devastatingly beautiful, a single mother, and the owner of a beauty salon. And her dating app had decided she was a fraud.
        Annie was straightening up her daughter Emma’s room when her phone chimed, alerting her that another hopeful paramour had found her profile on the dating app Lovebug. She ignored it while she finished her chore. Mister Right – or Mister Right Now – could wait another five minutes.
       Tucking the corners of her daughter's sheets under the mattress, Annie let out a small sigh of satisfaction. Emma was the least orderly part of Annie's life. She was messy. She was loud. She was hyper. And Annie loved her more than life itself.
       Her time with Emma's father was a mistake, but the little girl wasn't. Still, Annie appreciated Emma's weekends at Daddy's. They allowed her a moment to impose temporary order on her daughter's chaos.
       Annie picked up the phone when it chimed with an email alert.
       "I get it, Rachel. You like bitcoin--"
       But it wasn't the daily message from her financial advisor. It was a Terms of Service violation alert from Lovebug.
       Annie frowned and opened the message. "A fake account? What the hell?" Her photos weren't her own, it said. They were stolen. Numerous people had flagged them.
       "Hell yes, I want to appeal," she said, opening the app.
       The earlier alert hadn't been another guy wanting to chat with/date/sleep with her. It was Lovebug giving her the same message as the email. Annie frowned and bit her lower lip. This was a hassle she didn't need.
       She had to take a photo through the app, which would be compared to the allegedly stolen photos. She did her best to look happy. She hit 'Send,' and Lovebug told her it could take up to forty-eight hours for a response.
       Annie flopped onto her couch, dropping her phone on the coffee table with a clatter. She needed Lovebug more than she'd admit to anyone. And it wasn't just because she needed love after three years of focusing solely on her daughter. The quarantine had rendered businesses like hers nonvital and potentially dangerous, leaving her precious little contact with the outside world. Chatting with male Lovebuggers was a fun way to pass the time. She certainly had talked to plenty of them.
       Her phone chimed, and she opened the message. It had taken just over forty-eight seconds for her life to be turned upside-down.
       'Fraud.' 'Stolen photos.' 'Potential spam.' Lovebug was convinced Annie was anyone but who she said she was. Someone had done a very good job of pretending hers was a false identity.
       An icy chill ran down her spine. Annie suddenly wondered if more than her Lovebug identity had been stolen.
       Abandoning her phone for the security of her laptop, Annie opened her bank's website and keyed in her checking account number.
       Nothing.
       Annie felt a yawning chasm grow in her stomach as she entered her account number a second time. And a third. And a fourth.
       She didn't have an empty bank account. Her account didn't exist at all.
       She tried again with her savings. It, too, was nonexistent. Her business account number gave her the same error message.
       Annie leaned back against her couch as vertigo made her vision dark. She felt worse than sick. She felt violated. Worse, she had six employees who were counting on their paychecks clearing in two days. Finances were tight, but she had promised her staff they wouldn't have to worry about getting paid while the salon was shut down.
       Her bank was good. They would clear this up. Her people would get paid, and she'd have her accounts back in no time. She made a lot of promises to herself she wasn't sure her bank could keep, but she dialed their customer service line anyway.
       "Please enter the last four digits of your account number," an electronic voice commanded.
       Annie obeyed. She then entered the last four digits of her social security number when asked.
       "I'm sorry, but that information does not match any records on file."
       Annie almost dropped the phone. She hung up, took a deep breath, and tried again, watching her trembling fingers to ensure she typed the right numbers, knowing deep down inside that she did the first time.
       "I'm sorry, but that information does not..."
       Annie cut off the voice before it could tell her what she already knew. She put the silent phone on the table. The black, plastic rectangle mocked her with its presence. It was like a void, sucking up her life with horrifying speed.
       Annie stood. She sat. She stood again. She paced around the tastefully decorated living room. She poured herself a finger of whiskey and downed it in one swallow. For those few seconds, the burning was all she could focus on, and that snapped her back to the present.
       She couldn't panic. She couldn't fall apart. She needed to get her life back. The bank wouldn't help her. She needed her own plan.
       Rachel. Rachel knew money backwards and forwards, real and electronic. She was always talking about investing in the latest cryptocurrency, and Rachel promised they were all legit. Annie couldn't deny they drew a lot of investors.
       "Help." The email's one-word subject line should get Rachel's attention. In the body, "My bank accounts are gone. Everything is gone. Please call."
       Rachel could reply in minutes or hours. She operated on her own clock.
       Annie couldn't afford to wait. She started listing everything her sudden destitution would affect. Her utilities were paid automatically. Same with her rent. Emma's daycare would...
       Annie paled. Emma. She couldn't even afford to feed Emma. Not for the first time she was glad her daughter's father was still in the picture.
       "Hey, it's me," she said into her ex-boyfriend's voicemail. "Would you mind keeping Emma a couple extra days? Something came up. Something big and... look, could you just call? It'll be easier explaining to you in person."
       Annie hung up, not expecting a call back. He wasn't one for returning calls or even using his phone. But if it was about Emma, he might surprise her.
       Over the next twenty minutes, Annie checked her email eight times, convinced she had somehow missed an alert. She hadn't. She paced so much she worried replacing her carpet would become another unaffordable necessity.
       She needed to occupy herself. She needed to do something. Literally anything. She decided to find her identity thief.
       Realistically, Annie knew she would probably never find who had actually stolen her life, but she might be able to figure out who people thought her pictures were actually of. To her desktop, she downloaded the three selfies she had used to set up a Facebook account. She resented Lovebug for making her sign up through the social media platform.
       "More secure, my ass," she said, and not for the first time.
       The pictures on her desktop, she opened Google and did a reverse image search on the first one. In the photo, Annie was wearing a thin, red sundress, the sun shining off her long, black hair. She was seated at an outdoor table outside her favorite smoothie shop on College Street. Feeling playful and pretty, she put her smoothie's straw in her mouth and, smiling, took a photo. Just outside the frame, Emma made the same pose, and her laughing mother snapped a second shot. Annie remembered every moment before and after taking that photograph. It was a day that made her smile just thinking about it.
       The smile faded when Google told her it was a photo of Hong Kong-based social media influencer Mei-Lin Li. The snapshot was from Mei-Lin's Instagram when she was grabbing a drink while vacationing in Japan. The photo was taken in Tokyo, not Charlotte. It had more than twenty-two thousand likes.
       "No," Annie said. "It can't. It's not..."
       But despite its impossibility, there it was.
       Annie uploaded the second picture, taken underneath a waterfall in Bali. The water flowed down the rock wall and flew into the air as it collided with the river below. The spray danced around Annie, who managed to look both seductive and innocent in her brand-new bikini. It was a masterful shot. A professional photographer couldn't have done better than her then-boyfriend had. She loved him for it.
       They hadn't had Emma when they arrived in Bali, but they left with her. They just wouldn't know for another two months.
       Though things didn't end well with him, the trip was still one of the best times of her life, one she would remember forever with or without a photo.
       But according to Google, what Annie thought was a photo from six hours before her daughter was conceived was actually from Mei-Lin Li's foray into professional modeling. A Singaporean bikini designer had signed her to a very lucrative contract, and Mei-Lin was making sure all 1.3 million of her Instagram followers knew she was honoring it.
       Annie knew she would learn the third photo was not her playing with a parasol she found for Emma at the mall, but instead some carefully curated casual moment in the life of Mei-Lin Li. She didn't bother to read what the model was doing. She knew it would be something impossible that only Annie knew to be a lie.
       Annie shook. How could this Mei-Lin Li have Annie's life? How could the best moments of Annie's life be... be fan service for an Instagram model's adoring legions?
       Those were her memories. Hers. Hers and Emma's.
       Emma's. Emma was there at the smoothie stand. The photo was her phone's wallpaper for months. Annie's thumb moved with lightning speed as she scrolled through her photo album, desperately searching for the evidence of her sanity. Why wasn't it there? Why couldn't she find it? She would never delete it. She wouldn't. She couldn't. But where the hell was it?
       And then, with a loud whoosh, Annie let out a breath she hadn't realized she held. There it was. Emma and her smoothie, her daughter posing in that silly way children can only look when they're trying to act grown-up. Emma, with straight black hair like her mother and eyes like her father. Emma, the only truth that mattered in a world of lies.
       With a cold determination, Annie googled Mei-Lin Li. The woman -- although Annie realized she couldn't be sure even of that -- had built a career out of stolen moments from Annie's life, and Annie needed to know all she could about her unknown enemy. Google, of course, brought her right back to Instagram, which in turn linked to the model's web page.
       Mei-Lin Li was born in Hong Kong twenty-two years ago. She liked swimming and traveling around Southeast Asia. Singapore was her favorite getaway, but Hong Kong would always be home. She had a Pomeranian she adored. She didn't have a boyfriend but hoped to someday! Annie grimaced at the saccharine phoniness of the exclamation point that capped off the model's biography. Of the entire biography. Of the lie she had built on the foundation of Annie's real life. She scrolled through the photos, the tension in her hand strong enough to nearly crack the screen. She didn't know how long she scrolled before she found herself, once again, staring at her smoothie photo.
       'Sooooooo pretty!' 'Kawaiiiii!' 'R U single?' 'Marry me.'
       So many comments from so many suckers who had no idea how badly they were being deceived. It was up to Annie to educate them. She clicked on the comment bar and began typing something she would punish Emma for saying when the rage boiling in her heart flash-froze in a wave of fear.
       Emma and Annie's special day out was six months ago. Mei-Lin Li's photo was dated two years earlier.
       "How...? How...?" was all Annie could choke out. She didn't notice the phone as it slipped from her fingers to the carpeted floor.
       You can't change the date on Instagram posts. You just can't. So how did Mei-Lin Li do it?
       Even as she asked, she knew the model hadn't. Couldn't. The comments. All the comments. Two years' worth. Those were also timestamped. Somehow, impossibly, Mei-Lin Li's photos were posted before Annie ever took them.
       Her mind reeled. What did it mean? What could it mean? She didn't want to think about it.
       She was Annie. Her daughter was Emma. She was a real person. They both were. She had to be. They had to be.
       Annie lurched from the couch and out the front door. She didn't grab her purse. She wasn't even sure she grabbed her keys. If it wasn't for the plastic edges biting into her fingers, she wouldn't even know if she had her phone. She wandered from her building and down the street. She barely noticed the other pedestrians.
       They certainly didn't pay her a great deal of attention. They only moved out of her way when they were about to bump into her. If they even did that. They were always surprised to see her.
       Annie moved without purpose, without direction.
       She needed Emma. But Annie had just said she needed to stay with her daddy.
       She couldn't text any of the guys she had met recently. Lovebug had seen to that. She wished she had made more friends over the last three years. She needed someone other than her daughter.
       And then a familiar chime reminded her that she did have someone. Rachel's email said something about Annie's money having been shifted to cryptocurrency.
       Two hours ago, Annie would have called Rachel out on her mistake, but two hours ago, Annie knew what the truth was. Instead of talking about money, she fired off a desperate reply.
       "My identity has been stolen, and so have all my photos, and I'm scared and confused. I don't know what's going on. Rachel please help please help please help. CALL ME!!!"
       Unsure if Rachel actually had her number, she typed it below and hit send. Then she waited. And waited. And waited.
       And waited.
       Annie's brain felt like it was buzzing with bees. Every sound was too loud. Everyone was out to get her. Her heart raced a mile a minute. Her breathing was getting intense. Was this panic? She had never felt panic before. Not true, long-lasting panic. She felt herself tremble. Then she realized it was her phone. She had shifted it into silent mode.
       "R-rachel?" she asked.
       "Who is this?" came a hard-edged voice.
       "Rachel, it's me, Annie."
       "Bullshit," Rachel said.
       Annie was stunned. She had never heard Rachel talk like this. Come to think of it, she'd never heard Rachel talk at all. "Who are you, and what do you want?"
       "Rachel, I swear, it's Annie. My Lovebug account was suspended, and my money is gone, and now my identity has been stolen. But everyone thinks I'm someone named Mei-Lin Li, and I really, really need your help!"
       A snort. "Oh, is that what this is about? Listen, sister, this is a weird-ass game you're playing, but you knew what you were getting into from the get-go. Let the buyer beware and all that."
       "Buyer of what? Rachel, listen to me!" Annie was aware she was loud enough to turn heads. "I don't want to go to the police! If I have to, I will, but please, you're my only friend! Help me figure this out!"
       "You're welcome to try the police," Rachel sneered. "You wouldn't be the first. I'll be long gone before then."
       "Where are you going? Are you coming to help me? Do you know where I live?" Annie was aware she was rambling, but she still managed to recite her address. There was a long pause.
       "You've been in the Trade Street building?" Rachel finally said.
       "Of course! I've lived there forever!"
       "Okay, Annie," Rachel said. "We'll talk."
       "Are you coming to my place?"
       "I don't see that you've left me a choice."
       Silence was the only indication that Rachel had ended the call.

       The walk home was much easier than her ramble out. Rachel was coming to help. Everything was going to be okay, no matter how upset Rachel seemed.
       Annie's door was open when she got home. A severe looking woman who looked like she might be Annie's mother stood by the couch, staring at a laptop she had set up on Annie's coffee table. She wore a severe gray business suit that stood in stark contrast to Annie's yellow dress and her cheerful, colorful décor.
       "Rachel?" Annie asked. The startled woman looked up. Her eyes went wide as her hand went to her mouth. She backed away from Annie, never breaking eye contact.
       "Rachel, what's..."
       "Stay away," she whispered, then, louder, "stay away!"
       Annie ignored her, confused by the woman's sudden mood swing.
       Rachel continued to back up until she bumped into a small ottoman. She lost her balance and fell backwards over it, landing with a thud on the floor. That broke the spell. Whatever control Rachel had over herself was gone. She began to scream.
       "Rachel, stop!" Annie cried. "My neighbors will call the police!"
       But still, Rachel screamed. She kept screaming as Annie shushed her, as Annie waved for her to be quiet, and as Annie reached to cover Rachel's mouth.
       Then Annie's hand passed right through Rachel, who stopped screaming as the younger woman froze in shock. Slowly, she raised her hand to eye level. For a terrifying moment, she thought she could see through it.
       As Annie quieted, Rachel composed herself. "What... what are you?" Rachel asked, the steel Annie glimpsed upon arrival slowly returning.
       "I'm Annie," was all she could say. "I'm Annie."
       "Enough," Rachel said. "Whatever you are, show me your true self. Did you die here? Are you a poltergeist? Some other entity? Talk to me."
       "Rachel, please, it's me, Annie."
       "Annie doesn't exist," Rachel said. "She never did."
       Annie stared at Rachel uncomprehendingly. "What... how... no... I... I'm me."
       "I could understand you haunting this building. But I can't understand why you'd think you're Annie, of all people," Rachel said. "A term I use loosely, of course. Annie was never alive, so you can't be her."
       Annie had no idea what Rachel was talking about. "Rachel, please, stop," she begged. "You're my financial advisor. My friend, I thought. You have been since I opened my salon."
       "' Annie' owns a salon because it makes her look smart and successful and is notoriously difficult to actually pin down," Rachel said. "I have a dozen profiles who own beauty salons, and there'll be a dozen more after you. And I'm not Annie's friend. I might as well be friends with Candy Crush."
       Annie collapsed to the ground and began to cry. Why was Rachel being so cruel? She barely noticed Rachel circling her.
       "You truly are fascinating," Rachel said. "What I could do, if I could truly find out what you are. How you exist. Are you even supernatural, or are you science? Whatever you are, you could make the conversations so much more real."
       "I am real!" Annie shouted through her sobs. "I have a job and a daughter and a life that Mei-Lin Li has stolen!"
       Now Rachel looked annoyed. "Is that what this is about? Does she want more money for her photos? Greedy bitch. As if some Instagram flash-in-the-pan is worth more than a thousand dollars. What she paid to summon you, I can only imagine."
       "Will you stop?" Annie shouted with a sudden fury. "Stop talking about me like I'm not here! I'm a fucking human being! Call me by my name! Call me Annie!"
       For a moment, it looked as if Rachel saw something Annie couldn't. For a moment, fear danced in her eyes.
       But the cold soon returned. "All right, 'Annie,' fine," Rachel said. "If you're such a human being, tell me: what's your last name?"
       Annie opened her mouth. Silence emerged.
       Rachel smirked. "Not easy to remember something you never had, is it?" she said.
       Annie swooned. She fell against her sofa, her eyes screwed tight. "I'm real. I'm real. I'm real. I'm Annie. I'm thirty. I own a salon. I have a daughter."
       "Of course you do," Rachel said. "It's hard to get horny single men to dump their savings into my crypto if they think the saleswoman is fake."
       Annie didn't know what any of that meant. She was barely listening. "I'm real. I'm real. I'm real. I'm Annie, and I'm in my home, and Emma is with her dad."
       "A dad who, I'm sure you've noticed, doesn't have a name, either," Rachel said with a cruel grin. "Men don't want to know who their love interests have had sex with, just as long as they know she's willing to have sex."
       "I'm real. I'm home. I'm real. Emma's safe. I'm real. I'm home."
       "Yes, technically, you are 'home.' And so long as you keep using my Annie persona, you'll stay here until I decide if you're more valuable to use or to send back to the Li bitch as a warning."
       Something about the way Rachel said 'home' broke through Annie's mantra. She opened her eyes. There was a flicker. Her rug was a concrete floor. Her bright green walls were peeled and gray. Her couch was a computer tower. Her apartment's front door was an office door with a dirty window. And then it was right again. And then it was wrong again.
       Annie squeezed her eyes shut again. Her home was here. Her home. Her home.
       She needed to focus on something true. She needed to look at Emma.
       She turned on her phone to see she had never closed her email browser. Her email chain with Rachel was still on the screen. But it wasn't the chain anymore. Not the same. Only her most recent email contained actual words. The others were just financial transactions followed by complex sequences of letters and numbers. They looked like they were generated automatically.
       "What is this?" Annie asked, holding held her phone up to Rachel.
       "A sign that you were doing your job correctly until this afternoon. You shouldn't even be able to edit those emails, let alone spew the panicked nonsense you did. How you're even able to access my system is another question entirely. Firewalls certainly can't keep you out. It's a concerning problem, but at least I know where to look for answers, scientific or otherwise."
       With that, Rachel plugged her laptop into Annie's couch, and her world fell away. She could no longer see her apartment. She wasn't in the chic loft she fell in love with three years ago. She was in a run-down office with very modern technology. Her furniture was gone. Her clothes were gone. Even the kitchen nook was gone. All her rooms were gone. Even...
       "Oh God," Annie whispered and ran from the room. She stumbled into the back and collapsed to her knees.
       Only a few hours ago, Annie had picked up Emma's toys, put her dirty clothes in the laundry and hung up the clean ones, and made the bed. She had dusted the shelves and replaced the flickering bulb in the bedside lamp.
       There were no toys, no clothes, no bed. There were no shelves, no lamp.
       "There's no Emma."
       Annie didn't turn. She didn't want to see Rachel, her arrogant grin, her hurtful eyes. She wanted to see Emma, her baby, her light, her life.
       "No, no, no," Annie said.
       "You'd think more guys would get scared off by a woman with a kid," Rachel said.
       "No, no, no, no."
       "I guess Emma made you seem just old-fashioned enough to be wife material. Well, whatever hooks the fish."
       "No, no, no, no, noooooo!"
       It wasn't a regular scream. It was primal, almost tangible, almost alive. Annie screamed with all the pain and anguish and fury that only a parent who has lost their child could possibly feel. Emma was gone, and even her memories, her photos, that day at the smoothie place, they were all a lie.
       Annie crumpled to the floor, wishing she was dead, wondering now if she was already dead, wondering what she was and if she even could die.
       And then Annie heard something else. It was a gasp followed by an absence of sound.
       She opened her eyes, and Elsa from 'Frozen,' Emma's favorite doll, stared back at her.
       Annie sat up. It was Emma's room, just as she had left it that morning. The toys, the clothes, the bed, the shelves, the lamp, all as she had left them. Though not precisely. It all looked more... 'solid' was the only word that came to mind.
       The only thing truly wrong was the fifty-year-old woman staring in fear at a rewritten reality she didn't understand. "You... what... what did you do?" Rachel said hoarsely.
       "You tried to take my daughter," Annie said as she stood. "How fucking dare you."
       "She... she's not real," Rachel whispered. "None of this is real."
       "You create people to cultivate fake relationships with people you can trick into investing in electronic money," Annie said, advancing on Rachel. "Who are you to judge what's real?"
       "Annie, please, let me help you," Rachel said, slowly backing away. "I can help you. We can help each other. I have resources. I know people."
       "People like Mei-Lin Li? Would I be worth only a thousand dollars to them, too?"
       "We can get revenge on Mei-Lin for summoning you, if that's what happened." Rachel said as panic ate away at her iron resolve. "Black magic, a séance, new science from the dark web, we'll find whatever was used. We can do whatever you want. We can find out who you are, what you really are. Please, Annie!"
       "You said my name," Annie said. "You already know who I am. And the only thing I want is my life."

       "One more, slide the hat up a little, okay, one more, one morrrrrre... perfect!"
       The photographer approached his model, excitement in his eyes. "These are amazing. Just amazing!"
       Annie donned her wrap, covering her bikini-clad body, and looked over the photographer's shoulder. "I love them. Send me those three for Insta..." She pointed at three favorites, "...and Michael and Bao can choose which ones they want for the spread."
       "Whatever you want is yours for the taking," the photographer said with a smile.
       Annie thanked him, then started a live Instagram video. "Hey, everyone, Annie Li here, coming to you live from beautiful Bali! Check out my new photos in my feed, and keep your eyes peeled for the rest of the shoot later this month!"
       As she stopped the video, she heard a familiar chime. People were surprised that she needed Lovebug when at least a million of her followers would marry her on the spot, but none of those people had any substance.
       "Mommy!" Emma cried, running from her babysitter with open arms.
       "There's my angel!" Annie shouted, swooping the child up in a bear hug. "Where's Rachel?"
       A bark answered as Annie's Pomeranian ran across the sand to her owners.
       "Good girl," Annie said, and to her daughter, "did you and Rachel have fun playing today?"
       "Yeah, but Mommy, she's always sad. Why is Rachel always sad?"
       "She just has sad eyes, sweetie. Isn't that right, Rachel? You just have sad eyes, don't you?"
       The dog barked.
       "See? You're happy exactly the way you are."
       "Mommy, I want a smoothie," Emma said.
       "You know what? So do I. Let's go get one."
       Hand-in-hand, and with their dog trotting behind them, mother and daughter walked to the beachfront in search of frozen treats.
       Annie looked down at the child as the little girl sang a nonsense song to herself. Emma, with straight black hair like her mother and eyes like her father.
       Emma, the only truth that mattered in a world of lies.