What happened to my photos?

Hi I have an IPhone SE (the old one) and I am very confused. I had 6000 photos in my photo gallery and 2000 photos in my ‘recently deleted’. Then I deleted my ‘recently deleted’ permanently. Just now when looking through my phone I notice that all my deleted (or so I thought) photos are back in my photo gallery. But I still only have 6000 photos. Can someone make this make sense? I couldn’t have accidentally clicked ‘recover’ cause then I would have 8000 photos + my storage went down almost 20 GB after “deleting”. I haven’t been able to find any missing pictures. What did I delete?