The Vanishing Hours

Dr. Lila Hensley, a renowned sleep specialist, lives a life of meticulous routine, a carefully constructed fortress against the anxieties that haunt her waking hours. The unresolved trauma of her twin sister April’s disappearance years ago casts a long shadow, driving Lila to chart the landscapes of other people’s dreams, seeking the control that eludes her in her own life.

When Francisco Jones, a tormented insomniac plagued by “missing days,” walks into her Portland clinic clutching an antique stopwatch identical to April’s, Lila’s carefully ordered world begins to unravel. The stopwatch, once a childhood trinket, now whispers of hidden dimensions of time and a chilling echo of the past. Drawn by morbid curiosity and a flicker of desperate hope, Lila agrees to take on Francisco’s case, unaware that she’s stepping into a labyrinth of fragmented memories, distorted realities, and a conspiracy far more sinister than she could have imagined.

As Lila delves deeper into Francisco’s amnesia, she notices unsettling parallels to her own life. Moments slip away, then hours, then days. Her once-precise diary becomes a disjointed chronicle of forgotten appointments and unsettling dreams of her sister. Her colleague, Dr. Kelsey Vasquez, haunted by her own past failures, attributes Lila’s erratic behavior to suppressed grief, but Lila’s gut tells her something far more disturbing is at play.

The discovery of April’s old journals, filled with cryptic symbols and disturbing drawings of distorted clock faces and shadowy figures, unveils a hidden obsession with chronomancy—the manipulation of time. A shocking twist reveals that Francisco is not merely a patient, but a pawn in a game orchestrated by a clandestine organization known as the Chronos Initiative, obsessed with unlocking the secrets of time travel. Lila realizes they are not losing time; they are being robbed of it.

In a race against a fast-approaching celestial alignment, Lila must confront not only the architects of this conspiracy but also her own haunting past. Alongside Kelsey, now a crucial ally, Lila deciphers the cryptic clues in April’s journals, leading them to a hidden room beneath an abandoned observatory, a place where time itself can be manipulated.

Lila is faced with a devastating choice: reclaim the stolen time, risking the fabric of reality, or sacrifice her own chance at healing to protect the world. As the observatory crumbles around her, Lila makes a heart-wrenching decision, one that will forever alter her understanding of time