I started a new job last month and everyone there thinks I have worked with them for nine years

I am writing this from my car in the company parking lot. I do not want to go inside. I do not know if I can keep going inside. I need someone to tell me what is happening because I am running out of explanations and the explanations I have left are getting worse.

I started a new job four weeks ago. Mid-sized company. Marketing department. I went through a normal interview process. Three rounds. I got the offer email on a Tuesday. I signed the paperwork on a Friday. My start date was the following Monday. I have the email chain. I have the signed offer letter. I have the first paycheck. Everything is dated within the last month.

On my first day a woman from accounting hugged me at the coffee machine and said “welcome back, we missed you.” I assumed she was being friendly to a new hire. I laughed and said thank you. She looked confused and said “what do you mean new, you have been here since I started.”

I let it go. People misspeak. First day nerves on both sides.

By the end of the first week I had collected six similar incidents. A guy from IT asked me how my dog was doing. I do not have a dog and have never had one. A woman in HR asked me if I was bringing my husband to the company picnic. I am not married. The director of my department referenced a project I led in 2019, four years before I knew this company existed.

I started checking things.

I logged into the company directory. There is a photo of me. The photo is mine but I have never taken it. I am wearing a shirt I do not own. The hire date listed under my name is January 2017. Almost nine years ago.

I went to HR. The woman at the desk pulled up my file. She showed me the new hire paperwork I signed last month. Then she scrolled through and showed me nine years of performance reviews, salary adjustments, training certifications, and benefit elections. All in my name. All with my signature. The signatures match mine. I have never signed any of it.

I asked her if there were two employees with my name. She checked. There is only one. Me. She said “honey, did you hit your head or something.”

I left HR and went to my desk. My desk has photos on it. Three framed photos that were not there at the end of last week. One is of me at what looks like a company event from years ago. One is of me with two children I have never seen before. One is of me holding a small white dog at a beach I have never visited.

The kids in the photo look like they could be mine if I had children. There is something in their faces. I sat at my desk holding that photo for a long time and I could not stop looking at the older one because she has my eyes exactly.

That was last Tuesday.

For the rest of last week I tried to act normal. I did the work I was actually hired to do. I responded to emails about the projects I am actually assigned. But people kept referencing things I have never done. A coworker asked me if I wanted to grab lunch like we used to. The receptionist asked how my mother was recovering from her surgery. My mother is fine. She has not had any surgery. I have not even spoken to her in three weeks because we are in the middle of an argument.

On Friday the IT guy stopped by my desk and said “hey, your old laptop finally died, want me to pull anything off it before I wipe it.” I asked what he meant. He showed me a laptop in his cart with my name on a label. Service tag dated 2018. He said it had been my work machine until last year when I switched to the one I have now. I asked if I could see what was on it. He plugged it in. The desktop loaded. The wallpaper was a photo of me with the same two children from the framed photo. The folders on the desktop were organized in a way I would organize them. The browser history was full of websites I read regularly. Searches I would actually make. Emails open in tabs from a personal address that is not my personal address but is structured exactly the way I name my emails.

I asked him if I could take the laptop home for the weekend before he wiped it. He said sure.

I spent the weekend going through it. There are nine years of my life on that laptop. Photos with the children. Photos with a man whose face I have never seen. Tax documents. Travel itineraries to places I have never been. Medical appointments I never had. School emails about parent teacher conferences for the kids whose names I do not know. A whole life. Detailed. Specific. Mine in every way that matters except that I have never lived any of it.

The man in the photos has a wedding ring. So do I in the photos. I do not have a wedding ring. I have never been married. I checked my hand. There is a faint pale band on my ring finger where a ring would have been. I have never worn a ring. I do not know how that mark got there.

This morning I came in and the receptionist smiled at me and said “is your daughter feeling better.”

I do not have a daughter.

I said “what did you say.”

She looked at me and her smile faded. She said “your daughter. The little one. You said yesterday she had a fever.”

I do not remember talking to her yesterday. I do not have a daughter. I went to my desk. The framed photo of the two children was still there. The younger one is maybe six years old. She has my eyes. I have been looking at that photo for an hour and I cannot stop because something in my chest hurts when I look at her and I do not understand why it hurts because I have never met this child.

I checked my phone. There are no contacts I do not recognize. No photos of children. No messages from anyone calling me mom. My personal email is the same email I have had for years. Nothing in it about a family.

But on my work laptop, the one I just got at this job four weeks ago, the calendar has an entry for tonight at 6pm that says “pick up Maddie from dance.”

Maddie is the name of the older child in the photo.

I did not put that entry in my calendar.

I am sitting in the parking lot writing this because I do not know what happens if I go back in. I do not know what happens if I leave. The receptionist has my supposed daughter’s name. The HR system has nine years of paperwork. Other people remember a version of me that has been here since 2017. They are not lying. I can tell. They believe everything they are telling me.

The only person in this building who thinks I am new here is me.

I keep going back to the framed photo on my desk. The older girl. Maddie. She has my eyes. And there is a small chip on her front tooth. The exact same chip I have on my front tooth from when I fell off a swing when I was seven.

I do not know what to do. I do not know who to call. My family will think I am having a breakdown. I cannot tell my actual friends because they only know the version of my life I am living. There is another version of my life sitting on a laptop in my passenger seat and a child somewhere who has my chipped tooth and someone is going to expect me to pick her up from dance class in three hours.

I am going to drive home now. I am not going back into that building today. If anyone has experienced anything like this, please tell me what you did. I do not know if I am being inserted into someone else’s life or if someone else has been removed from mine. I do not know which would be worse.

I just want to know who took the photos. Someone took them. Someone framed them and put them on my desk. That person knows what is happening here. I need to find them before tonight at 6pm because I cannot stop thinking about a child I have never met waiting outside a dance studio for someone who isn’t coming.