THE OTHER HALF

CHAPTER 2

THE PICTURES ROOM

Lebana just looked at the note for a while. Surely while she slept Anabel had taken the body and had done something. The question was what? What did Anabel do this time?

Lebana could have called Rost, but she didn't. Anabel could have done anything, and as much as Lebana disliked the idea of sharing the same body with Anabel, it was reality. The problems of one consequently, were the problems of the other.

She thought of the first gift she received from Anabel. That was when she was fifteen. She was hospitalized in a lunatic asylum because her mother and her friends had begun to notice a disorder in her personality. Out of nowhere, she no longer remembered them, called herself Anabel and was very different from Lebana.

Both, Lebana and Anabel were slow to accept the other. Anabel took the first step: she left her a note asking her to write for an answer. The letters were different and in this way, both confirmed the existence of the other.

Thus began a relationship that promised little. Anabel was bored with life Lebana wore, so she made new friends, got a tattoo on her arm, and when she started having problems with drugs, doctors determined that Anabel was the personality they were supposed to suppress.

They gave Lebana so many drugs to control their emotions and perceptions, trying to contain Anabel, that Lebana wrote to Anabel explaining the situation. Lebana asked her to control herself, that because of her irresponsibility neither of them had a good life. Anabel promised to control herself, on the condition that all important decisions should be taken in consensus. As an offering of peace, Anabel gave her a hand-woven yellow scarf, with a note that saying:

"I hate yellow but it's your favorite color, I hate the scarves but you have millions. It's my way of saying I want to work this out"

That was the first gift. Lebana always wore that yellow scarf, for three reasons. First, yellow wasn't either her favorite color and she did not know how Anabel had come to that conclusion. Second, because she was impressed that Anabel knew how to weave and she did not, and third, because for her, that scarf represented a new age for her life. She would no longer be struggling against her disorder, but would be living with what she could not change.

And life became much easier after that scarf. Anabel was no longer an enemy, but a companion.

She just looked for the scarf to make sure it was not there. Anabel was very dramatic, and if she did not do that to apologize for killing Lebana's dog, she did it because she had seen Boris's photos with the other girl.

She drove to the address that marked the GPS, and came to an ordinary house. Why would Anabel have driven her to that place?

She got out of the car and went to investigate. As she walked toward the entrance, she saw a man with a huge camera. Even in the distance, Lebana recognized him. It was Greg, a co-worker with whom she rarely spoke.

Why had Anabel brought it to Greg's house?

For more than a minute, Lebana stood there asking if she should go and not investigate. She could not understand why Anabel had taken her there, or how Anabel knew about Greg. She told herself that whatever it was, it must have been important, and that kept her mind occupied in something more than Boris and her concern because he did not respond to calls or messages.

Obviously, the front door was locked. Lebana went to the back door and tried, but it was unsuccessful. Then she saw the windows and tried to open them. When the frame slid easily, Lebana smiled. She went through the window, looking for a quick glance before anyone discovered it and begged that Greg's partner, or some friend, was not sleeping there.

After a glance at the kitchen and the living room, Lebana thought that perhaps Anabel had played a joke. She was not going to intrude on Greg's things. She thought about leaving, but then he saw the three doors at the end of the hall. Carefully, she opened the first one: the bathroom. The second was a bedroom devoid of any decoration. Lebana opened the third with her heart racing, thinking that maybe someone was sleeping there.

But it was nothing like that. The room was actually a dark room to reveal photos. Lebana turned on the little light and watched as all the walls were full of photos of her.

At first she was in shock. She could not believe what she was watching. She did not understand anything. Some photos were taken while she was shopping at the supermarket, others while walking her late dog, some were with Boris.

Then the fury came. Every photo she saw was the distant "clicks" she felt as she walked. Some photos were really intimate, while she was in bed with Boris, while taking a shower. That was completely illegal.

Greg, her co-worker, was a stalker. Surely he had taken photos of Boris with the redhead. Lebana didn't even want to think about what Greg was doing with those photos. She was ready to call the police when some photos hanging near the door caught her eye. It was Boris leaving the hotel where he had been that day, where he was meeting with his lover, walking with a girl in a yellow scarf. Lebana remembered what the concierge told her, and ripped off the photo to see it more closely. There were several, and in one in particular, one could distinguish the woman's face. It was her. Or rather, Anabel.

That meant that Boris had been with Anabel that night, and possibly he had told her about everything. Lebana had a bad feeling. Possibly she had curled up on her couch to sleep, but Anabel had a different style to solve the problems.

She looked at all the photos that were recent and stopped at one, where Anabel appeared. She wore the same clothes as when he left the hotel with Boris, but this time he was not in the photo. Lebana recognized the place, had been there hundreds of times. It was the clearing of a forest a few miles from the city that almost nobody knew.

There was something about Anabel's body posture, which made Lebana shudder. She left the house. The denunciation would do so after she had finished figuring out what else Anabel had done last night.

She drove to the forest clearing, ran at full speed the section in which the vehicles could not access, and when she finally came, her heart racing, his breathing rattling and blood flowing through his veins in a hot way, she felt everything freezing.

It was as if the planet stopped turning, and everything stopped from one second to the next. Her heart seemed to be paralyzed, she began to sweat cold, and the feeling of wanting to flee from that place and the secrets that Anabel wanted to reveal to her.