Missing Time at 4:18 a.m. Part 8

The police didn’t say it out loud, but everything changed after the footage. Patrols came more

often. Unmarked cars lingered at the end of the street. They told me it

was “routine,” but I could see it in the way they checked the hedges, the bins,

the dark spaces between houses. Someone had crossed from hypothetical to real.

Two days later, they came back with a name. “Jude Jacobs,” the officer said,

sliding a printed page across the table. “American citizen. Thirty-two.

Entered the UK legally.” My stomach sank. They’d found him through a mistake he’d made years

earlier — reused language patterns, old forum posts, a username that evolved but never