PART 1
The clock on the nightstand blinked 2:46 AM in acid green. I was already awake. I had been awake for seventeen nights.
Seventeen nights since Maya, my four-year-old, started whispering to the corner of her room. Seventeen nights since she called the empty space by her closet “Mama’s friend.” And three nights since she told me, over cereal, that this friend knew the song I sang to her mother on our wedding day.
I had never sung it aloud. Not once. Not since the funeral.
I lay on the hardwood floor of the hallway, my back against the cold plaster, a tablet clutched in my sweating palms. The night-vision camera I’d mounted on Maya’s bookshelf showed everything in sickly grayscale. Her small body rose and fell under the Frozen duvet. Her breathing was steady. The room was still.
2:47 AM.
The closet door creaked.
Not much. Just a breath of movement. But in the silence of that house — a house that had been too quiet for eight months — it sounded like a gunshot.
Maya sat up. She didn’t rub her eyes. She didn’t look confused. She turned her head toward the closet and smiled.
“You’re late,” she whispered.
My thumb hovered over the record button. I had told myself I was doing this to catch a burglar. A squatter. A rat. Anything but what my chest was already preparing for.
A shape stepped out from behind the closet door.
It was a woman.
She wore a coat I’d never seen, gray and too large for her frame. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf. She moved like she knew the floorboards, avoiding the third one from the window — the one that groaned. She knew it.
Maya held out her hand. The woman took it. Sat on the edge of the bed.
And then Maya said the words that turned my blood to mercury.
“Did you bring the story about the lighthouse? Mama said you would.”
The woman reached into her coat and pulled out a folded piece of paper. She unfolded it with fingers that trembled. And then she began to read, her voice so low the camera barely caught it.
“The lighthouse keeper loved the sea, but he loved the woman who waited on shore more…”
I knew that story. Sarah wrote it. In the hospital. The last week. She made me promise to read it to Maya every birthday. I hadn’t been able to open the notebook since the cremation.
The woman on the screen knew every word.
I was on my feet before I knew it. The tablet slipped from my hands and cracked against the floor. I didn’t care. I pushed through Maya’s door with my shoulder, the wood splintering against the frame, my voice tearing out of my throat —
And then I saw her face.