Chapter 173: A Reader Named Bailey

The hotel produced the first useful image.

A security camera had captured someone entering the room two nights before the police search.

The person wore a cap, glasses, and a medical mask.

Height suggested a woman.

Build was average.

Nothing distinctive.

She carried a canvas bag from The Open Page.

Freya immediately checked store records.

Thousands of those bags had been sold.

Mia looked offended.

"Our merchandise is helping a stalker."

"Not the marketing result we wanted."

Investigators enhanced the footage but could not identify the woman.

Then an employee remembered something.

The guest had asked whether the hotel had a business center because she needed to print a manuscript.

The business center required a room key but did not require a separate login.

Forensic specialists recovered print-spool remnants.

Most files were overwritten.

One filename survived.

BS_READER_01.

The document itself was gone.

Claire focused on the word reader.

"What if Bailey isn't claiming to be the writer?"

"The book says author," Freya replied.

"Metadata says author. The person may be using that label because that's what the system calls the account."

Mercer agreed.

In old Crosswind architecture, users could occupy different roles: author, reader, moderator, model, observer.

A corrupted migration could mislabel them.

Freya disliked where the conversation was going.

Derek searched for anyone named Bailey Shepard who had worked with Crosswind.

Still nothing.

Then Claire remembered that early beta users were sometimes allowed to choose display names without identity verification.

The surviving beta database was incomplete.

Researchers searched archived fragments.

One record appeared.

Display name: Bailey Shepard.

Account type: Reader.

Creation date: six years before Freya's awakening.

No email survived.

No legal name.

But the account had interacted with Gentle Devotion.

Freya leaned forward.

"How?"

The record showed that Bailey had opened Claire's manuscript during the brief period it existed on Mirror.

The account had also generated an unusually high number of branch requests.

Hundreds.

Claire frowned.

"That shouldn't have been possible. The book wasn't configured for that many."

Mercer examined the logs.

Bailey had apparently been testing alternative outcomes.

What if Louis did not lose Stone Holdings?

What if Serena never met Ethan?

What if Freya refused divorce?

Freya's pulse quickened.

One branch label stood out.

FREYA_WAKE_EVENT.

No one spoke.

The timestamp was two days before Freya died in her previous world.

That did not prove the account caused anything.

Freya reminded herself of that repeatedly.

But someone using the same name was now sending books.

A reader had once asked the system what would happen if Freya woke up.

Years later, Freya had done exactly that.

The mystery had acquired a person-shaped shadow.

For the first time, finding Bailey Shepard felt less like chasing a username.

It felt like finding the first reader of Freya's impossible life.

The university preserved the Bailey account record in a separate forensic image. Freya insisted nobody edit or normalize the old database, even when corrupted fields made analysis frustrating. A messy original record was more valuable than a clean reconstruction that accidentally introduced assumptions.

Freya recorded the facts separately from her assumptions and continued with the next practical step. That habit had become one of the strongest protections she possessed. A dramatic explanation could wait; evidence could not. Louis understood the difference, and together they refused to let uncertainty turn ordinary decisions into reactions to a story neither of them had chosen.

Freya recorded the facts separately from her assumptions and continued with the next practical step. That habit had become one of the strongest protections she possessed. A dramatic explanation could wait; evidence could not. Louis understood the difference, and together they refused to let uncertainty turn ordinary decisions into reactions to a story neither of them had chosen.