A House Only on the Map

The address Nour texted me that afternoon would lead me to a house I'd later try to prove existed, and fail. None of that occurred to me yet — Nour does this all the time, moves, sends her new address, and within a month we forget she was ever anywhere else.

I opened the map app, typed in the address, and followed the blue line to its end: a small house at the end of a quiet street, its door open just a crack, as if it were waiting for someone.

I knocked. No one answered.

I called Nour to confirm the address. She sounded a little confused when she answered, said she had moved, but to an entirely different city, at least two hours away by car — nothing to do with the street I was standing on now.

I looked back at the house. The door was fully shut now, as if it had never been open at all. I opened the app again to double-check the location.

No house showed up at that point on the map anymore.

I stood there a long time looking at the empty space on the screen, then at the real street in front of me, where the house still clearly stood, stone walls, shut door, two dark windows. I asked a neighbor washing his car nearby if he knew who lived there.

He gave me a strange look. "No house has been there in years. That lot's been empty."

I didn't argue. I photographed the house on my phone before I left, telling myself the picture would be proof enough once I could think about this with a clearer head later.

That evening, I opened the photo. The house was there, exactly as I'd seen it — except for one detail I hadn't noticed standing in front of it: in one of the two dark windows, the shape of a person stood motionless, looking directly at the camera.

I hadn't seen anyone in that window while I stood there. I was entirely certain of that.

I tried to let it go. I didn't quite manage it, but life went on, weeks passed, until Nour messaged me again about a month later, asking if I knew her friend Reem, and could I send Reem's address — she'd "suddenly lost touch with her and needed to get something to her."

I didn't know any Reem. I told Nour so. She replied with one short, unusually clipped message: "She says she's your friend, though."

Something cold moved through me that I couldn't name. I asked Nour exactly when she'd spoken to this Reem. She said she hadn't spoken to her directly at all — the message had come from her own phone, but Nour had been asleep beside her husband at that exact hour, something he confirmed for her later when she asked.

I opened my phone, my hand no longer quite steady, and pulled up the map app out of an instinct I hadn't planned.

It was already open, to an address I hadn't searched for, a red pin dropped precisely on one point.

I looked at the address. It was my own street. My own house number.

I raised my eyes slowly from the screen toward the end of the street where I was standing, where my house sat not far off, its door impossible to make out clearly from here — I couldn't tell if it was open or closed.