The Colour Between

It began with a post asking whether anyone else remembered a colour that no longer existed.

The question appeared on a forum about false memories. Most posts concerned old logos or misremembered film quotes. This one was different.

The person who started the thread could not describe it. They only remembered seeing it throughout childhood on train seats, school walls and packaging that now looked grey in every photo.

Within a day, thousands had replied. Some remembered a shade of blue. Others said it was almost black. One person described it as the colour you saw when you pressed your eyes too hard. Nobody could reproduce it. Every example uploaded looked grey to most commenters.

I read the replies for an hour before admitting I remembered it too. It had been the colour of the front door of the house where I grew up.

I could picture it clearly, even if I couldn’t explain what it looked like. It sat strangely in my memory, more like a feeling than something I had seen.

I called Mum and asked when she and Dad had painted the door grey.

“It was always grey,” she said.

“No, it wasn’t.”

I reminded her of the photos Dad took outside the house before school each year.

“The door was grey in those too.”

I went to their house the following evening and searched through the old albums. Mum watched from the hallway, insisting I had confused it with a neighbour’s door.

Then I found it.

I was six, standing between my parents in a red coat. Behind us, the front door was that colour.

“What colour is the door?” I asked.

Mum glanced at it. “Grey.”

“No, it isn’t.”

Her expression changed.

“When you came back,” she said quietly, “you kept asking why we had changed it.”

“What do you mean, when I came back?”

“You vanished when you were six.”

Mum had always said I slipped out while she was cleaning and made it halfway across town before anyone noticed.

Apparently, that was a lie.

“You disappeared from your bedroom,” she said. “The window was locked. Three days later, you were standing outside the front door.”

I waited for her to smile. She did not.

“You knew our names, your teachers and where we kept everything. But you said the house was wrong. You said your bedroom was on the other side and that we had never owned a dog.”

“We did own a dog.”

“Yes, but you said we hadn’t. The girl who disappeared also had a scar here from falling off her bike.” Mum touched my chin. “The girl who came back didn’t.”

“You thought I wasn’t your daughter?”

“You remembered being our daughter. Some details were different. After a few weeks, you stopped mentioning the door.”

She turned the photograph over. The date was three weeks after I had returned.

Above it, in Dad’s handwriting, were the words:

FOUND HER STARING AT THIS PICTURE AT 3:17 AM. SHE INSISTS THE DOOR IS THE WRONG COLOUR.

“We threw away everything connected to those three days,” Mum said. “Your father must have missed this.”

I took the photograph home despite her asking me to leave it.

That night, I posted it in the thread.

Half the commenters insisted the door was grey. The others could see the colour.

One person asked whether I had noticed the girl.

I zoomed in. Someone was standing behind the narrow glass panel beside the door. At first, I thought it was my reflection, but the angle was wrong. She was inside the house, watching my family outside.

She looked about six.

She had my face.

A small scar ran under her chin.

More people shared similar stories. Everyone who could see the colour remembered something nobody else did. A different teacher. A house with one more room than it had now.

Many had also disappeared as children.

Mum came to my apartment the following evening. She made me tear up the photograph and watched me put the pieces in the bin.

Before she left, she held my face between her hands.

“You are my daughter,” she said. “I don’t care where you came from.”

At 3:17 this morning, someone knocked on my front door.

As I approached it, the door changed colour. Not blue. Not black. That colour.

I FaceTimed Mum and switched to the back camera.

“What colour is the door?”

“Grey.”

“It isn’t grey to me.”

Her face crumpled.

Then a woman spoke from the other side. She sounded exactly like me.

“She still can’t see it, can she?”

The woman knocked again.

“Ask her about the scar.”

I kept quiet.

“She knows which one of us disappeared.”

The handle moved once, but the door was locked.

The woman outside knows things I don’t remember. A neighbour who apparently never existed, which cupboard I hid in when Mum tried to take me to the dentist and what Dad said after I broke the kitchen window. Mum confirmed everything.

But she also knows things that happened after I came back. She knew about the argument Dad and I had last Sunday. She described the coat hanging over my chair, although she said it was brown. It is black.

“I don’t know why I know those things,” she said. “You knew things about my life too.”

Mum began crying.

“Do not open that door. You’re my daughter. Your father and I raised you. Do not let her in.”

The woman was quiet for a long time.

Then she said, “I think someone knocked on my door when I was six too.”

I looked at the handle.

“What happened?”

“I opened it.”

Mum told me to move away.

The woman outside stopped knocking twenty minutes ago, but I can still feel her there, waiting, like she knows I’ll open it.

I still don’t know if I belong on this side of the door, or if I’ve been standing in the wrong place all along.