u/BiGDaDdY401

I'm writing this down because I don't trust what I'll remember next week.

My wife, Helen, says to put everything in, even the boring parts. Especially the boring parts. I'm posting it here instead of keeping it on my laptop because once it's somewhere public I can't quietly go back and change it. I don't know why I think I'd want to. I'd just rather not be able to.

My daughter started waving at the house across the road about two weeks ago.

She does it during breakfast. Maya is five, which means breakfast takes roughly forty minutes and involves almost no actual eating. She sits at the end of the table nearest the front window, pulls the crust off her toast even though I've told her approximately six hundred times that the crust is also bread, and waves at the upstairs window of number eighteen.

The house has been empty since before we moved in.

I've never seen anyone go in or out. There are newspapers melted into the concrete beside the letterbox, and there used to be a FOR SALE sign out front until it blew over during a storm in August. Nobody has bothered putting it back up.

I didn't think much about the waving until one morning I asked who it was for.

"The girl."

I looked across the road. The upstairs window was dark.

"What girl?"

She sighed in the way five-year-olds do when an adult has failed a very basic intelligence test.

"The girl in there."

"There's nobody in there."

"There is."

"Okay."

That was the whole conversation. Maya went back to mutilating her toast and I went back to packing her lunch.

Helen leaves for work before seven three days a week, so mornings on those days are mine. Lunchbox, hair brushed badly enough that Maya usually makes me redo it, then the eleven-minute drive to school while she asks questions like whether fish get thirsty. The girl became part of that routine. Maya waved. I didn't look. Sometimes she'd say, "She's there today," and sometimes, "She's not at the window yet."

Once she told me the girl had different hair.

I asked what she meant.

"Down."

"Down how?"

Maya pulled her own ponytail loose to demonstrate, then became furious because I'd apparently made her ruin her hair.

That was more or less the level of concern I had about it.

Two days ago, somebody waved back.

I was standing at the kitchen bench cutting strawberries when Maya said, "See?" She sounded excited.

I looked.

A little girl was standing behind the upstairs window.

I nearly cut my thumb.

She was far enough away that I couldn't make out much. Dark hair, pale face, maybe Maya's age or slightly older. She was standing very close to the glass with one hand raised beside her head.

My first thought was the sensible one. Someone had bought the place. A family was looking around. Maybe the owner's kid was there while they cleared it out.

Then the girl moved her hand.

A slow wave.

Maya waved harder. "Hi!"

The girl kept waving.

I put the knife down. "What?"

Maya was grinning at me. "She did it."

I stepped closer to the window.

The girl stopped moving. Her hand stayed raised.

It took me a few seconds to work out what was wrong. Maya was sitting right up at the window. I was at the bench, a couple of metres further back. If the girl had been waving at Maya, she'd have been looking down, at the window itself.

She wasn't looking down.

She was looking past Maya, into the room.

At me.

I lifted my hand without really deciding to. Not a proper wave. More that stupid little half-raise you do when you accidentally make eye contact with someone.

The girl's fingers moved once.

"She likes you," Maya said.

I told her to finish her breakfast. When I looked back, the window was dark.

That was at about seven thirty.

At eleven, I remembered buying June the rabbit cup.

I was at work when it happened. There's nothing interesting about what I do. I deal with insurance claims, mostly property damage, which means large sections of my day are spent looking at photographs of wet ceilings and asking people whether they still have receipts for televisions they bought in 2018.

I went to make coffee and somebody had left a pink mug beside the sink. That was all. Pink mug.

And suddenly I remembered standing in a shop holding two children's cups.

One had a rabbit on it. One had little yellow flowers.

June wanted the rabbit. I told her the flower one was nicer. She crossed her arms and said, "Then you have it."

I laughed. In the memory, I mean. At work I was just standing there.

I could see the shop clearly. Bright lights. Grey floor. A display of lunchboxes behind her. June had her hair in two uneven plaits because I'd done them myself.

I remembered buying the rabbit cup.

Then I was standing in the office kitchen with my hand under running water.

I hadn't turned the tap on.

I shut it off.

There is no June. I have one child. Maya.

I stood there for maybe a minute trying to work out where the name had come from, and eventually I decided it had been a dream. That's genuinely what I thought. People remember bits of dreams during the day. Something sets one off and for a few seconds it feels more real than it has any right to.

I went back to my desk. By half past eleven I was embarrassed I'd let it bother me.

I didn't think about the house again until dinner.

Helen had made spaghetti. Maya had eaten about four mouthfuls and was trying to wind one piece around her fork without touching it with her other hand, which she apparently considered cheating.

I said, "June, just eat it."

Nobody reacted straight away. Including me.

For maybe two seconds the name didn't feel wrong.

Then Helen said, "Who?"

I looked at Maya. She was staring at me.

"Sorry."

"Who the hell is June?"

"I don't know."

Maya put her fork down. "The girl."

Helen looked at her. "What girl?"

"The window girl."

I asked Maya what she'd said.

"Her name's June."

"How do you know that?"

She shrugged. "That's her name."

"Did she tell you?"

Another shrug. Maya does that when she thinks the difference between yes and no is unimportant.

Helen asked what we were talking about, so I explained. I expected her to laugh. She didn't. She went to the front window and looked across the road.

There was nobody there.

"Probably someone viewing the house."

"That's what I thought."

"So?"

"So I called Maya June."

Helen gave me the look she normally saves for when I've spent twenty minutes trying to repair something that should have taken five minutes to replace. "You've heard her say it."

Maya said, "I didn't tell Daddy."

"Sweetheart, you just told him."

"No. Before."

Helen rubbed her forehead. "Can we please eat dinner?"

Maya picked up her fork. Then she looked at me and said, very casually, "She said you'd remember."

Helen stopped rubbing her forehead.

I didn't ask Maya anything else. I wish I could say that was because I didn't want to frighten her. Mostly I didn't want to hear the answer.

That evening I put her to bed. She has a routine involving one story, one glass of water and an increasingly complicated series of negotiations over whether the hallway light stays on. I read half of The Gruffalo before she interrupted me.

"Do you remember when I hurt my chin?"

"Yes."

I kept reading.

"When?"

I stopped. Maya was watching me over the top of the blanket.

"You fell over."

"Where?"

"The playground."

"Which playground?"

I knew this. She had split her chin open badly enough to need glue at the hospital. Helen had been at work. I'd taken her. There had been blood all over her shirt.

Except when I tried to remember it, the shirt was yellow.

Maya didn't own a yellow shirt like that.

June did.

I could see her sitting on the kitchen counter with a tea towel pressed under her chin. She was crying. I was telling her not to look at the blood because it always looked like more than it was. Her dark hair was stuck to one cheek.

"Daddy?"

The bedroom came back. Maya was still looking at me.

I said, "The park near Grandma's."

Her face changed. "No."

I knew I'd got it wrong before she told me.

"It was school."

"Right."

"You came."

"I know."

"Mrs Price called you."

"Yeah."

"Then we went to the hospital."

"I remember."

I didn't.

I knew it had happened.

That's not the same thing.

There were facts in my head. Mrs Price. The hospital. Skin glue. Maya getting an icy pole afterward because she'd been brave. But if I tried to see it, I saw June.

Helen found me sitting on the edge of our bed about twenty minutes later, and I told her everything. The cup, the shop, June's hair, the yellow shirt.

She sat beside me without saying anything for a while. Then she asked me what Maya wore on her first day of school.

"That purple backpack."

"What did she wear?"

"Uniform."

"What shoes?"

I got annoyed. "I don't fucking know, Helen."

She went quiet. I apologised.

She said, "She wore those black ones she hated because they rubbed her heel."

And then I remembered.

June standing beside our front door in black shoes.

June pulling one foot backward when I tried to take her photograph.

June saying they hurt.

I stood up so quickly I hit my knee against the bedside table. Helen followed me downstairs.

I don't know why I went to the window. That's probably the stupidest thing I've done in this entire situation, and I've had plenty of time to think about it.

The upstairs window at number eighteen was dark.

Then the curtain moved.

June stepped into view.

I knew her immediately.

That was new.

Dark brown hair to her shoulders.

A pale blue nightdress.

A round face, a slightly crooked front tooth, a little mark beside her right eyebrow.

I knew that mark.

She got it falling off her scooter.

I carried her home while she cried into my neck.

I cleaned gravel out of her palm.

She asked if she needed stitches.

I told her no.

Behind me, Helen said my name.

I couldn't answer.

June wasn't looking at Helen. She wasn't looking toward Maya's bedroom.

She was looking at me the way kids look at you when you've finally turned up to collect them.

I stepped away from the window.

The memory stopped changing. Or it stopped getting bigger, anyway. It didn't go anywhere. I didn't know yet whether that was a rule or just luck.

Helen hadn't seen her. By the time she got to the glass there was only the curtain. She called the police anyway. "If there's a kid in there, somebody needs to know. If there isn't, I want somebody who isn't you to tell me."

Two officers came about forty minutes later. I stayed in the hallway, away from the window, while they walked round number eighteen with torches. Front door locked. Side gate chained. Afterwards one of them told Helen the place had been shut up since the owner went into care, and that streetlights do funny things on old glass.

Helen said, "Okay," in the voice she uses when she's stopped arguing, not when she agrees.

The next morning we kept the curtains closed. Maya complained because she wanted to wave. Helen snapped at her. Maya cried, and then Helen cried because she'd snapped at her, and I burned two pieces of toast. Nobody ate much.

At about eight, Maya asked why I was being weird.

"I'm not."

"You are."

"I'm tired."

"Are you cross at me?"

"No."

"Are you cross at the girl?"

I didn't answer. Maya pushed cereal around her bowl.

"She looks at you more."

"What do you mean?"

"She looks at you when I'm not there."

Helen was standing at the sink. She turned around slowly. "When you're not where?"

Maya pointed toward the window. "Sometimes I go get dressed and she's still looking."

"At the house?"

"At Daddy."

Helen looked at me for a long time. Then she took Maya to school.

I called in sick. I should have gone with them. I can't really explain why I didn't, except that leaving felt like a decision and I didn't have one in me. So I sat in the living room with the curtains closed and tried to remember my daughter.

That sounds ridiculous. I know who Maya is. I know her birthday. I know she hates bananas unless they're blended into something, which makes absolutely no sense. I know she sleeps diagonally. I know she says "aminals" even though she can pronounce "animals" perfectly if you make her slow down. I know she has a little brown patch in her left eye.

But when I reached backward, things started going.

Her fourth birthday.

Fine. I could see it.

Her third.

Mostly fine.

Second.

Pieces.

The first time she walked?

June.

The first time she said Dad?

June.

The first time I held my daughter's hand while crossing a road?

June.

Every missing space had something in it.

I'd been calling it forgetting all morning, in my head, because forgetting was the least bad word I had. It wasn't forgetting.

I was replacing her.

Helen came home shortly after three without Maya. She'd taken her to her sister's. I was relieved enough that she noticed.

"I think we should stay there."

"Yeah."

"For a while."

"Yeah."

She sat opposite me. "What do you remember?"

I told her. She didn't cry. Helen gets practical when she's frightened. She got her phone out and started showing me photographs. Maya eating birthday cake. Maya asleep on my chest. Maya sitting inside a cardboard box we'd turned into a car.

I recognised every photograph. But some of them felt like photographs of things I'd been told about.

I know they're mine. They just don't feel like mine.

Helen put the phone face down on the coffee table.

"When you said June at dinner," she said, "I thought you had another kid somewhere."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"I spent all day wishing that's what it was."

We packed enough clothes for a week. Helen told me to leave everything else.

I went upstairs for my charger. On the way back down, I passed the narrow pane of glass beside the front door.

I had forgotten about it.

I saw number eighteen through it.

June was at the window.

She was up on her toes, I think. Only her head and shoulders showed above the sill.

A memory hit me so hard I dropped the charger.

I was kneeling beside a bathtub. June was maybe three. She had bubbles on her chin and was holding a plastic cup full of bathwater, trying to drink it while I told her, for what felt like the hundredth time, that bathwater was disgusting.

She laughed. I laughed.

The memory was warm. It wasn't frightening at all.

It felt exactly like loving my child.

I grabbed a jacket from the coat hook and covered the pane. Helen shouted from the car asking what I was doing. I told her nothing.

We stayed at her sister's last night.

Maya slept between us.

At about two in the morning I woke up because she'd kicked me in the stomach.

For a few seconds I didn't know who she was.

Not in some dramatic way.

I wasn't screaming.

I just woke up next to a small person and there was a blank space where recognition should have been.

Then it came back.

Maya.

My daughter.

I went into the bathroom and was sick.

She found me sitting on the floor afterward. Helen was still asleep. Maya sat beside me.

"You don't remember me?"

"I remember you."

"Some things."

I didn't answer.

She leaned against my arm. Then she started telling me.

Not about June. About us.

She reminded me about the time I dropped her birthday cake carrying it from the car. She reminded me that I used to call her Potato when she was a baby because she had no hair. She reminded me about a pigeon stealing half her sandwich at the zoo, and me chasing it because she wanted the sandwich back.

I remembered that one. Properly.

I laughed. She laughed too.

Then she said, "Remember when I hurt my chin?"

I tried.

School. Mrs Price. Hospital. I knew all of it. But when I reached for the memory, June was sitting on the kitchen counter in a yellow shirt.

Maya must have seen something in my face.

"That's mine," she said.

She's five. She didn't say it like something out of a horror film. She sounded annoyed.

Like June had taken one of her toys.

I hugged her.

I could remember a hundred times I'd hugged June. I couldn't remember holding Maya after she hurt her chin.

I carried her back to bed and lay down next to her and didn't sleep.

At some point I picked up my phone and checked the temperature. Four degrees. I'd been looking at it for a while before I understood why I wanted to know.

There's no power at number eighteen. There hasn't been for years. She's in a nightdress, and as far as I know nobody has ever fed her, or put a blanket over her, or argued with her about the hallway light.

I know how that sounds. I know she isn't a child, or isn't one in any way the word normally means. I don't know whether the memories I've got of her are real ones that belonged to somebody else or things she made up, and at three in the morning I couldn't find the part of me that thought it made a difference.

I lay there next to my daughter and worried about the other one.

I haven't told Helen.

We're not going home today.

Helen's brother is going to get the rest of our things. Work clothes, Helen's laptop, the bag of Maya's toys she keeps asking about, June's school bag. He thinks there's somebody squatting in number eighteen and that I've scared myself after seeing them.

Fine. He can think that.

I've told him not to look at the upstairs window. He laughed. I've told him again.

Maya has started making what she calls my Dad Book. It's printer paper stapled together. She draws pictures of things we've done and makes Helen write underneath because her spelling isn't great yet.

THE ZOO.

DADDY DROPPED MY CAKE.

MY FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL.

THE TIME I WAS SICK ON DADDY IN THE CAR.

Apparently that last one needed preserving.

There are seven pages so far. I remember five of them.

Helen asked me this morning whether I thought staying away would stop it.

I told her I haven't had a new memory of June since we left the house, which is true. I watched her decide to be relieved.

I didn't mention two o'clock. Nothing of June came in at two o'clock. Maya just wasn't there for a few seconds, and then she was. I've been telling myself all morning that it's a different thing, that it's tiredness and shock. I don't believe it enough to say it out loud.

She also asked why it was me and not Maya, when Maya had been waving at that window for two weeks.

I don't know. Maybe it was me waving back.

Helen's brother rang about an hour ago. He's got everything. He said he didn't see anyone, and that he'd only looked from the car anyway, just so he could tell me he had.

I wanted to ask him to go back and look properly. To see if she was all right.

I didn't.

Before he hung up he said, "Tell the girls I said hi."

He calls Helen and Maya the girls. I'm almost sure he always has.

Maya brought me another page while I was writing this.

It's a picture of the two of us standing in our old kitchen. I'm extremely tall and my hands come directly out of my shoulders. She told me it's the morning she started school.

Underneath, Helen has written:

Dad cried after I got out of the car but waited until I couldn't see him.

I told Maya I remembered.

She asked me what colour her backpack was.

Purple. I got that right.

Then she asked me what she'd said when I dropped her off.

I couldn't answer.

I remember June saying it.

I can see her standing beside a school gate in black shoes that hurt her heels, holding both straps of her backpack.

She looks back at me.

She smiles.

And she says, "Bye, Dad."

I don't know what Maya said.

She does. She won't tell me yet. She says I have to try to remember it myself.

So I've been trying.

I haven't got it. I've got the gate, and the shoes, and the way she held both straps. Every time I go back for it, that part is a bit clearer.

I'm going to keep trying.

He died in February. Mom died seven years before him, so my sister Megan and I have been clearing out the house to get it ready to sell. We only found the room because of a water stain on the ceiling of my old bedroom. The roofer went up into the attic to take a look, and about ten minutes later he came back down and asked if we knew somebody had put plywood up behind the insulation.

We didn't know anything about any plywood.

The attic is low enough that you have to crouch between the rafters to get around. Dad kept the Christmas decorations near the hatch, and when we were kids we weren't allowed any farther in than that, because he was convinced one of us would put a foot through the ceiling.

Behind the plywood was a space maybe six feet long and three feet wide. Inside it we found a sleeping pad, a bunch of food wrappers, a plastic cup, two pencils worn down almost to the wood, one of our old water jugs, and the portable camping toilet Dad bought when Megan was little because she refused to use the campground restrooms after dark. There were also thirty-seven drawings.

The first one I picked up was drawn on the back of an electric bill. It was my parents' bedroom, seen from above. Mom was asleep on her side and Dad was on his back. I recognized the headboard right away because Dad had built it himself, with three square panels across the top, and whoever drew the picture had bothered to get all three of them right.

Dad's eyes were open.

The drawings weren't all equally good. Some of the early ones were rough, with crooked beds and hands that were basically lumps, and it was obvious whoever made them was a lot better at furniture than at people. The later ones were different. The lines got lighter and more confident, and the faces started to actually look like faces. Dad improved fastest. I know how that sounds, but it's true. By the later pictures I could recognize him before I'd even worked out which room he was in. Whoever it was had learned the crease between his eyebrows, the way his hair went flat on one side after he'd been lying down, even the shape of his hands. The rest of us mostly stayed simpler.

The first thing that came back to me was the granola bars. Mom bought them for our school lunches, and two or three at a time would just disappear. She blamed me, I blamed Megan, and Megan blamed me right back. Dad said it was rats. Then bread started going missing, and cookies, and once half a roast chicken. That one turned into an actual argument, because Mom was sure Dad had eaten it after everyone went to bed and Dad swore up and down he hadn't. She told him that if we had rats big enough to carry off half a chicken, he needed to do something about them.

That weekend Dad bought insulation. I remember him spending most of that Saturday up in the attic. The noises stopped for a few days and then came back.

What I remember is creaking more than scratching, something shifting above my room and then farther along the ceiling. Sometimes I heard it over Megan's room too. Dad still called it rats.

When I was ten I tried talking to them. It was a hot night (we didn't have air conditioning upstairs back then) and the box fan by my bed clicked every time it turned. Something creaked above me. I had a plastic baseball bat next to the bed, so I flipped it around and knocked the handle against the ceiling three times.

After a few seconds, something knocked three times back.

I thought this was the greatest thing that had ever happened. I knocked twice, but before anything could answer, Dad came into my room and took the bat away.

"Don't do that."

He wasn't whispering. He was just a lot quieter than he usually was when he caught me doing something stupid. I asked him why, and he said, "Because I told you they're rats."

The next morning he went up into the attic, and not long after that there was a metal sliding bolt on the hatch. I asked what it was for.

"Rats."

I told him rats couldn't open the attic hatch, and he said, "Exactly."

Megan came upstairs while I was looking through the drawings and made it through about three before she went back down. When I followed her into the kitchen she said we needed to call somebody.

"Who?"

"The police?"

"And tell them what?"

She just stared at me. "Someone was living above our bedrooms."

She had a point. She called the non-emergency line while I called the roofer back. Two officers came out and photographed the hidden space, and the roofer pulled back more insulation and found a flattened path running along the joists over the bedrooms. Above mine there were two tiny holes in the drywall. There were more over Mom and Dad's room, and one over Megan's. From underneath, they disappeared into the ceiling texture. I'd slept under two of them for twelve years.

The roofer went over the rest of the roof space and couldn't find a second way in. Nothing through the garage, no usable opening at the eaves, no vent big enough for a person. Whoever had been using the attic came and went through the hatch.

When he climbed back down, I asked him how much I owed him, and Megan said, "Seriously?" But it was still the first thing I asked.

The police gave us a case number, told us not to throw anything out, and left. Megan and I sat on the upstairs floor with the drawings spread out between us.

One of them showed me asleep with a cast on my left wrist. I broke that wrist when I was eleven, two days before summer vacation, which meant the bolt was already on the hatch by then. Whoever made the drawings was still up there after it went on.

Dad was in eleven of the pictures, and he was awake in every single one. In one he was sitting next to my bed. I remembered that night. I'd been sick and kept waking up, so he sat in my room with me for a few hours. In the drawing I'm asleep, and Dad isn't looking at me. He's looking at the ceiling.

Dad wasn't easy to talk to, but you could count on him. When the water heater burst in my first apartment, I called him before I called a plumber, and he showed up with towels and a toolbox and didn't ask how I'd managed it until the floor was dry. That was how he handled most things. He fixed whatever part of the problem he could get his hands on. Getting him to explain anything was a lot harder.

Megan remembered something else, which was that Dad used to close our bedroom doors every night. After we'd gone to bed he'd walk the upstairs hallway and pull them shut if we'd left them open. He said it kept the heat in. He did it in summer too, and neither of us had thought about that in years.

We went back through the drawings. In every picture drawn from above one of our bedrooms, the door was shut.

Then Megan found the one of Dad in the attic. He's crouched near the hatch holding a plate with something rectangular on it, probably a sandwich, and he's looking toward whoever was drawing him.

Megan said, "No," and then again, louder, "No."

Until that moment I'd forgotten that Dad sometimes used to take food upstairs after dinner. It wasn't every night, maybe once or twice a week as far as I can remember. If Mom asked, he said he was putting bait down. I don't remember any traps, or dead rats, or an exterminator ever coming to the house. What I remember is the plates coming back downstairs. Sometimes.

Megan picked up the water jug. "Wasn't this ours?"

Dad used to write our last name on all our camping gear because he was convinced people stole stuff at campgrounds. Most of the marker had worn off, but you could still make out part of it. And the toilet was definitely ours. For about a minute that felt weirdly reassuring, in a way I can't really explain, like at least Dad hadn't just left someone up there with nothing. Then I started thinking about what using either of those things actually involved. The jug had to be refilled. The toilet had to be emptied. And once or twice a week isn't nearly enough food for a person to live on.

Megan worked it out at about the same time I did. She sat back against the wall and said, "So he opened it." I didn't say anything. "Obviously he opened it."

Maybe whoever it was stayed in the attic nearly all the time and Dad brought up everything they needed. Maybe once or twice a week was really a lot more often than that, and I just didn't notice. Or maybe the hatch usually wasn't locked at all. The bolt only went up after I knocked on the ceiling, and that was the first time it had occurred to me.

Megan got angry when I said that out loud, though it was less real anger than her needing me to stop. She said maybe it was family. Maybe Dad thought calling the police would only make things worse. Maybe this was exactly the kind of dumb thing he'd decide he could handle on his own. That last part sounded like Dad. It didn't make me feel any better.

I took the drawings home with me and started putting them in date order, which I should have done at the house. A lot of them were drawn on junk mail and scrap paper, but eleven were on something with a date on it: bills, permission slips, the back of a letter from the county. Others I could place roughly by what was in our bedrooms at the time. The earliest dated drawing was from March 1999, and the latest was from November 2005, when I was fifteen.

That bothered me, because that's about when Dad stopped talking about rats. It wasn't dramatic. The noises just stopped being a family thing. Megan remembered him taking the bolt off the hatch when he repainted the upstairs hallway, and she thought that was around Christmas 2005. I remember the repainting, but I don't remember the bolt coming off.

I called Megan and asked her where she thought the person went. She was quiet for so long I thought the call had dropped, and then she said, "How would I know?"

We went through every relative we could think of, and nobody fit. Nobody went missing in 2005, nobody suddenly showed back up, and there was no uncle we weren't supposed to talk about. I went through all the paperwork Dad left behind too, the bills and tax stuff and receipts and manuals for appliances we hadn't owned in twenty years. There wasn't a single name I didn't recognize.

Once the drawings were in order, one thing got a lot more obvious. Whoever made them stopped drawing Megan first. There are no pictures of her at all after she moved into the downstairs bedroom when she was fourteen. There are still pictures of me, and of Mom, and of Dad.

The last six drawings are mostly Dad, and he isn't asleep in them. In one he's lying in bed with his eyes open. In another he's sitting at the kitchen table very early in the morning. I know it's early because of the time on the microwave clock. That one couldn't have been drawn through a hole in the ceiling, and I have no idea how I missed that at the house. Another one shows Dad at the bottom of the stairs, drawn from somewhere above him, and he's looking up.

That was when I stopped thinking of the hidden space as the place where whoever it was had lived the whole time. It might have been where they slept. That's not the same thing.

The last dated drawing is on the back of an electric bill from November 2005. Dad is standing under the attic hatch with one arm raised. You can't see his face because he's looking up, and the hatch is open.

I stared at that one for a long time. Then I turned over the drawing of me with the broken wrist. I'd never checked the back, because there was writing on it from school and I'd assumed that was all there was.

There was another drawing under the writing. Same pencil, same cast, same room, but it isn't drawn from the ceiling. The angle is low, right beside my bed, like whoever made it was crouched in the narrow gap between the bed and the wall. I'm asleep with the cast resting on top of the blanket. The bedroom door is all the way open, and Dad is standing just outside it. He isn't blocking the doorway. He's off to one side with one hand on the doorknob, and his other hand is raised to his mouth, one finger pressed against his lips.

I haven't shown Megan that one.

After I found it I went back through all thirty-seven drawings again. Every drawing of one of us asleep has the bedroom door shut, except that one.

The attic hatch only locked from our side.

I was the only person who survived the crash.

There were forty-three people on the train when it came off the tracks. Forty-two died and I didn't. I still don't know why.

People have asked me that enough times that I've started wondering what answer they expect.

I wasn't awake for the part where somebody apparently decided.

The families asked different questions. In the first week they wanted to know if I remembered their husband or daughter or mum. Whether they'd been awake after the impact. Whether they'd said anything. Whether they were scared.

I could answer almost none of it.

The last thing I remember is a woman across the aisle peeling the label off a bottle of water. She'd got most of it off in one piece and was rolling it between her fingers. There was a kid further down playing something on a Nintendo Switch without headphones, and a man two rows ahead of me kept clearing his throat every twenty seconds or so. I also remember a girl in a uni hoodie asked nobody in particular whether someone could turn the air-conditioning down, because it was freezing.

People had died three metres away from me and I couldn't tell their families anything that seemed worth surviving to remember.

Nobody asks me what I remember anymore. The questions I get now are ones they actually expect me to answer.

I woke up in hospital with two broken ribs, a fractured wrist and so many messages on my phone it stopped showing me the number. My sister dealt with most of it while I was in there: reporters, police, the rail company, people I hadn't spoken to since school sending enormous paragraphs that started with I know we haven't talked in forever but... She cleared out my voicemail too, because it was full.

The first voicemail came four days after I got home.

I nearly deleted it because the number wasn't saved, and I'd started ignoring anything I didn't recognise after journalists somehow got hold of my mobile. I only listened because the transcript underneath it said:

can somebody move my arm

The voice belonged to a man. He sounded confused more than frightened.

There was a lot of noise behind him, mostly metal scraping and people talking somewhere further away. He said hello twice, then asked if someone could move his arm because it was underneath him and he couldn't feel his fingers.

Then he said, "Is that Ben?"

There was a pause.

"Ben, mate, can you hear me?"

The message ended.

I listened again. It sounded like something recorded inside the wreckage. My phone said it had been left the previous afternoon at 3:44, which made no sense for a message from the crash, so I decided that must be when the network had finally delivered it. That seemed reasonable enough to me. Mobile towers had gone down along the line, emergency services had talked about communication problems, and my own phone had been found about twenty metres from me.

I rang the number back. It went to voicemail after five rings, and a man's voice, much more cheerful than the one I'd just heard, told me I'd reached Will and to leave a message. I hung up before the beep.

I searched the number.

It belonged to a passenger named William. Will was thirty-eight, married and had one sister. His funeral notice was already online, with a link to a fundraiser his sister Rebecca had set up. She'd replied to every single comment on it. His wife hadn't posted anything anywhere.

I stared at Rebecca's name for probably ten minutes before messaging her. I almost decided against it, but I'd spent the previous week telling people I didn't remember anything useful. This was finally something I could give somebody.

Rebecca rang immediately.

"Is this him?"

That was the first thing she said.

I told her I thought so.

"Send it to me." she said instantly.

I hesitated...

"Please" she said, her voice almost cracking.

So I sent it.

She called back about twenty minutes later and asked who Ben was.

"I really don't know."

"William didn't know anyone called Ben."

"Maybe somebody from the train?"

"No. I mean—"

She stopped.

"When did you get this?"

I told her.

There was a mug on my kitchen bench with a tea bag still sitting in it from that morning. I'd forgotten to drink it. I remember looking at it while she spoke because I didn't really want to concentrate on her voice.

"They'd already found him," she said.

I didn't understand.

"William. They recovered him the night of the crash. He was pronounced dead at 11:46."

That still didn't prove anything. The message could have been delayed.

Then Rebecca said, "They moved him yesterday."

"Moved him where?"

"To the funeral home."

She asked me to play the message on the phone to her.

"You've got it," I said.

"I can't. I keep stopping it when he talks. Just play it and I'll listen."

This time, I listened to the voices behind William. One was too muffled to understand, but a few seconds later a man said very clearly:

"Ben, take his side."

Rebecca stopped me.

"Again."

I played it again.

Ben, take his side.

"I'll call you back."

She didn't call me for three hours.

When she eventually did, she skipped hello again.

"The funeral director has someone called Ben. He helped move William yesterday afternoon."

I told her there had to be another explanation.

"Like what?"

I didn't have one.

The second voicemail was waiting for me when I woke up the next morning. It was from a woman named Priya.

It was thirty-one seconds long. Most of it was her quietly saying, "Excuse me," like she was trying to get somebody's attention without being rude. Eventually she raised her voice.

"Excuse me. I think you've made a mistake."

There was movement in the background, then a drawer shutting. Somebody coughed.

A man said, "Can you put the watch with her effects?"

Priya stopped talking. The message ended a few seconds later.

I sat on my couch with the phone in my hand until the screen went black.

I didn't contact her family straight away.

I'd told myself sending William's voicemail to Rebecca was the right thing because it belonged to her. Sitting there with Priya's message, I realised I didn't actually know if that was true. Maybe hearing the dead person you loved begging strangers to notice them wasn't something you gave somebody just because you happened to have it.

Then I thought about every family member who'd asked me what their person's final moments were like.

I contacted Priya's husband.

His name was Sameer. I told him I'd received something from her number and thought he should hear it. He asked if he could come over rather than have me send it.

He was smaller than I expected when he arrived. I don't know why I expected him to be tall. He took his shoes off at the door, then apologised for doing it even though I hadn't asked him to.

When I played the voicemail, he listened with both hands pressed between his knees.

Afterwards he said, "The watch."

I asked what he meant.

"She wore my mum's watch."

The police had returned Priya's belongings that morning. Phone, wallet, earrings, wedding ring, watch, all of it in a sealed plastic bag with a property label on it. Her phone had been flat since the crash. He'd charged it in the car on the way over because he couldn't stand the idea of it being flat.

He took it out of his jacket, unlocked it and opened her recent calls.

He didn't say anything. He just turned the screen around.

The most recent call was to my number. Yesterday, 7:41pm. Thirty-one seconds.

"It was in the bag," he said. "It was dead."

We sat there for a while before he asked, "Did she sound awake to you?"

I knew what he meant and still made him ask twice.

"Did she sound awake?"

"Yes."

Rebecca told another family. That family told somebody else. Soon people weren't contacting me because I was the survivor anymore. They were contacting me because I was the person who might hear from someone they'd lost.

A journalist rang twice that week asking whether I'd "received any recordings." Somebody's cousin had talked. I didn't call her back.

People sent me screenshots of phone numbers so I'd recognise them if they came through. I saved every one under the person's name. It seemed better to know who it was before I pressed play. By the end of the week I had thirty-four of them.

One came from a woman whose son had been eleven. She'd sent a photo along with his number, him on a couch holding a Nintendo Switch up to the camera. I recognised the Switch before I recognised him. His name was Noah. After that, whenever my phone lit up, the first thing I did was check it wasn't him.

One man sent a voice note that was just him saying his wife's name and then going quiet for about ten seconds.

I muted my phone.

A few minutes later I turned the sound back on.

For two days nothing happened. Then a message came from a university student named Chloe.

"It's really cold," she said.

A moment later: "Can someone turn it down?"

Something metallic rolled nearby. Somewhere behind it, further off, a man cleared his throat.

I played it again and counted. About twenty seconds later he did it again.

I'd sat behind that sound for forty minutes on the train.

I sent the voicemail to Chloe's mother and spent the rest of the afternoon feeling sick. I hadn't thought about the fact that they were being kept together. I hadn't thought about whether they could hear each other.

William called again that evening.

This message was nearly two minutes long.

"I think they think I'm dead," he said.

He didn't sound frightened yet. He sounded like someone explaining a mix-up to people who weren't listening.

"I can hear them. They talk about me like I'm not here. They keep saying 'he.'"

For a while there was nothing except a tap running somewhere.

"I can't move. I haven't been able to the whole time."

Then, much quieter: "I think they've sewn my mouth shut."

I stopped the message there.

Rebecca called that night and asked if anything else had come through from William. I told her no.

I slept better than I had in days.

The next morning I hated myself for that, listened to the rest of the message and sent it to her. She never replied. I'm not going to write down the rest of what he said. It was his, and then it was hers.

After that I tried making rules. Nothing after midnight. Nothing forwarded until I'd heard it twice.

That lasted about a day.

What broke it was a folder I'd forgotten my phone had. When my sister cleared my voicemail in hospital, she hadn't really got rid of anything. The messages had gone into a deleted folder at the bottom of the list, and they'd sat there ever since, because I'd never scrolled that far.

I only went looking because of the contacts. Most of those old voicemails had been from numbers I didn't know, and I'd assumed they were journalists. But I'd spent a week saving the numbers families sent me, and now, when I opened the folder, some of them had names.

Nine of them. All left the night of the crash or the day after.

I didn't play them. I read the transcripts instead, which turned out to be worse, because the transcription had tried its best.

hello is someone

i can hear you i can hear you can you

its ok its ok its ok its

One was from Priya. Her transcript was two words long.

excuse me

Noah's number wasn't there. I checked three times.

They were the answers to what the families had asked me in the first week. I've read the transcripts more times than I can count. I haven't played any of them, and I haven't told anyone they exist. I haven't deleted them either.

Leah's parents contacted me before I'd received anything from her.

She was twenty-six and had been sitting two carriages behind me. Her dad, Martin, did most of the talking. Her mum mostly sat beside him during the video call and corrected little things he said. He told me Leah was impatient, never answered normal phone calls and communicated almost entirely through voice notes because she said typing took too long. Her mum rolled her eyes when he said that and told him Leah only ignored his calls.

It was the first time one of the people whose numbers I'd saved became someone I could imagine being annoying.

Martin asked me to promise I'd call if anything came through.

I said I would.

Three days later, Leah left a voicemail.

She was crying. "I don't know where I am," she said. "Why does everyone keep touching me?"

Then she said, "Mum?"

That was it.

I called Martin.

He and his wife came to my apartment that night. I played the message once, and Leah's mum immediately asked me to play it again.

Martin said no.

She told him to shut up.

Not loudly.

So I played it again.

His wife covered her mouth with both hands. Martin got up and walked into my kitchen, where he stood looking at the fridge for a while before asking when I'd received it.

I told him.

"Have the others matched things happening to their bodies?"

"Yes."

He didn't need to ring anyone. The funeral home had called him that morning to say Leah had been prepared, and that the family were welcome to see her before the service.

Her funeral was in two days. Cremation happened afterwards.

Leah's mum said, "No."

Martin turned around.

She said it again. "No."

"We don't know what this means."

"She said people were touching her."

"I heard it."

"And now you want to burn her?"

Martin looked at me.

I was angry at him for doing that. Only briefly, but I was.

"What do you think?" he asked.

"I'm not the person to ask."

"You're the only person this is happening to."

"It's not happening to me."

He looked down immediately.

His wife was still staring at my phone.

I regretted it before he looked up again.

Martin asked what I would do if it was my sister.

I should have said I didn't know.

Instead I said, "I wouldn't cremate her."

The funeral was postponed.

Leah left two more messages that week. In one, she asked somebody to turn the light off. The other came about an hour after Martin had been in to see her.

"I can hear Dad," she said.

After that he stopped asking whether I thought the messages were real.

The family started fighting. Martin changed his mind every day or two and rang me whenever he did. The worst call was at about eleven one night. I could hear a television behind him with the sound down.

"Jen reckons we're keeping her in a fridge because we're cowards," he said. Jen was Leah's aunt. "She's not wrong, is she?"

I didn't answer that.

"What about burial?"

"I don't know."

"You must have thought about it."

Of course I had. Burial meant leaving her underground, still apparently aware of whatever happened around her body. Cremation meant doing something to her that none of us understood. And the fridge couldn't last forever, however badly everyone wanted a fourth choice.

I told him that last part.

"That's not an answer."

"I know."

He didn't say anything for long enough that I checked the call hadn't dropped.

"She slept with the hall light on until she was fifteen," he said eventually. "Now she wants them to turn it off."

He hung up before I could think of anything to say to that.

They postponed it again. There were legal and practical limits to how long it could go on, though, and eventually the cremation was rescheduled for twelve days after it should originally have happened.

Martin called me that morning.

He didn't ask me to do anything.

He just said, "Keep your phone near you."

I did.

I knew what time the service started and roughly how long the rest would take after that. I spent that part of the afternoon cleaning the oven, which I had never done before, so I wouldn't have to think about whether she could feel it.

Nothing came through. Not during, not afterwards, not that evening.

I started thinking that might be good. Whatever was happening might need there to be a body. Maybe fire ended it.

It didn't occur to me until much later that she hadn't said anything while it was happening. I've thought since about the reasons a person might not say anything.

I didn't tell Martin what I was hoping. I didn't want to give him something based on my phone being quiet for half a day.

It stayed quiet the next day, and the one after that. On the fourth day Martin rang to say they'd collected her from the crematorium. He sounded like he'd slept. I told him I still hadn't heard anything, and for the first time since I'd met him, he said thanks and hung up without asking me another question.

I slept properly that night.

The next morning I woke up at 6:40 and checked my phone.

Nothing.

I lay there for another ten minutes before getting up.

Then the voicemail arrived.

Leah.

I didn't play it immediately. I went to the bathroom, brushed my teeth and put the kettle on. I knew that was stupid, but I also knew the moment I pressed play the morning was going to become about a dead woman again.

Eventually I sat at the kitchen table and listened.

The message was forty-seven seconds long.

At first Leah wasn't talking. There was just a faint rustling sound, then she said:

"I don't understand."

A few seconds passed.

"I'm at home."

Then, quieter:

"No."

She started crying.

"I'm at Uncle Paul's."

"Mum?"

Behind her there was a noise I couldn't place. A soft, uneven clicking that stopped and started.

Then Leah said, "How can I—"

The voicemail ended.

I played it twice before calling Martin.

He answered immediately.

"Where are you?"

"At home."

"Is your wife there?"

"Yes."

"Where are Leah's ashes?"

He didn't answer.

"Martin?"

"Some are here."

"What do you mean, some?"

His wife had wanted to keep roughly half of them at the house for a while. Martin had taken the rest to his brother Paul's the evening before, because Leah used to stay there when she was younger. The plan was to scatter them together at the back beach at Sorrento, where she'd learned to swim, once her mum was ready.

I told him what Leah had said.

He didn't say anything. He put me on speaker, rang his brother on his wife's phone and held the two phones together.

Paul answered after a few rings.

Martin asked where the urn was.

"In the living room. Why?"

"Is anything weird happening?"

"No."

A second later:

"Well, Max is being a pain in the arse."

Max was his dog.

"What's he doing?"

"He won't come in here."

Paul sounded embarrassed even saying it.

The dog had spent most of the morning sitting in the hallway, looking into the living room. If Paul called him, he'd come as far as the doorway and sit down again.

"He used to do that when Leah stayed," Paul said. "Sit outside the spare room till she got up."

Martin asked him to move the urn.

Paul wanted to know why.

"Just move it."

There was noise on the other end of the phone. A cupboard opened. Paul swore about something, then said, "Okay."

We waited.

I remember hearing Martin's wife breathing beside him.

A soft clicking came down the line, very faint. It stopped and started, uneven, getting closer.

I'd played it twice that morning.

"That's weird," Paul said.

"What?"

"He's following me."

Paul had taken the urn into the kitchen. Max had walked down the hall after him and sat down outside the kitchen door.

Nobody spoke after that.

That was yesterday.

I haven't had another message from Leah. I've had three from other passengers. None of them were Noah.

Two families are asking me whether they should cancel cremations. Another wants to know whether burial would be worse. Rebecca wants to know if they should have William exhumed. His wife won't talk about it, so Rebecca is asking me instead. Sameer asked me what I think happens when a body decomposes.

My sister rang last night to ask how my ribs were going. They're nearly healed. I can feel where they've knitted when I breathe in too far. After she hung up I stood in the kitchen with my hand flat on my side for a long time. I'm going to die too, eventually. I'm the only person alive who knows it won't be the end of anything.

Nobody has mentioned the twelve days. I think about them all the time. The cold, and the light, and her dad's voice through the door. I gave her those because I didn't want to be the one who said yes, and she went into the fire anyway.

Martin rang again this morning. Leah's mum still wants to take her to Sorrento. He asked me whether they should. He said whatever I told him, that's what they'd do.

I haven't answered any of them.

Until yesterday, I thought whatever was left of these people either stayed with their bodies or eventually stopped.

Now I don't think Leah knows where she is.

I think she has more than one answer.

My sister wants me to apologise for what I did at her wedding. Not to her. To Mum. Mum had been dead for five years when Erin got married, and this Sunday will be the first time since the wedding that all of us are supposed to sit around Dad's table together.

I haven't apologised. Erin says that's why we're still not speaking properly, although we speak enough for her to tell me that we're not speaking properly, which is very Erin. Dad has stopped calling altogether, and Callum messages me sometimes but never about this. He sends pictures of the dog, something stupid he saw at Tesco, that sort of thing, and once at about eleven at night he sent me a photograph of a pizza he'd burned so badly the pepperoni had curled into little black cups. I think that's his way of saying he doesn't hate me, and since he was the groom, I suppose that counts for something.

Erin got married last October in a converted farm outside Ludlow, all exposed beams, gravel and fairy lights. Mum would have hated the place. She would have complained about the gravel in her heels, said the lights made it look like a garden centre and asked why anyone had paid good money for chairs that didn't match. She also would have loved every second of telling people those things.

Mum was not an easy woman to describe after she died because everybody started editing her. She became warmer, more patient and less likely to ring you three times because you hadn't answered the first two. At the funeral, my Aunt Diane gave a speech about how Mum could make anybody feel welcome, and I sat beside Erin thinking about the Christmas Mum made Diane cry because she'd brought shop-bought trifle after being specifically told not to bring dessert. Both versions were true.

She could be generous to the point of embarrassment, remembered birthdays other people forgot and once drove forty miles at midnight because Erin had been dumped and wouldn't stop crying. She could also enter a room where six people were having six perfectly good evenings and, within ten minutes, make all six evenings about her. We loved her, and sometimes we needed a rest from her. Dad had managed thirty-two years of both things, which was longer than any of us.

The empty chair was Erin's idea. She mentioned it about three weeks before the wedding while we were sorting table decorations in her kitchen, with me tying cream ribbon around jam jars because she had decided flowers looked more expensive if you put them in something that used to contain pasta sauce.

"I'm leaving Mum a place."

I kept tying the ribbon.

"At the top table?"

"At the end."

"Okay."

"You think it's weird."

"I didn't say anything."

"You tied that bow so tight you've strangled the jar."

I looked down. She was right.

"It's not weird."

"It is a bit."

"It can be a bit weird."

She smiled. We were technically discussing a chair, but we both knew we were discussing who had got to have a mother at the important parts of her life. I'd had Mum at my university graduation, my twenty-first, my first flat, various breakups and the year I briefly thought I wanted to become a teacher and she bought me a personalised planner before I'd even applied. Erin was twenty-four when Mum died, and Callum didn't meet her until the following year.

I said the chair was fine.

On the morning of the wedding, Erin put Mum's photograph on it herself. It wasn't a formal picture; Mum was in sunglasses on a beach in Cornwall with one hand holding her hair out of her mouth. Somebody had cropped Dad out of it years ago after an argument about him disappearing to go fishing on the second day of the holiday, although he had kept the photograph anyway. Erin tied cream ribbon around the chair back, put white flowers on the seat and then moved them to the table because, as she said, nobody could sit there with flowers on it.

She noticed me noticing.

"Don't."

"I'm not."

"You've got your face."

"What face?"

"The face where you don't say the thing because you want credit for not saying it."

That annoyed me because it was accurate, so I said the thing.

"Mum isn't actually going to need the chair, Erin."

She looked at me for a second.

"I know, Lucy."

I felt horrible. She left to find the hairdresser, and I stood there holding the flowers she'd taken off the chair without knowing what to do with them. That was our first argument of the day. The second happened after dark and involved our dead mother telling my sister that I'd spent the evening jealous of her.

There were ninety-three people at the wedding. The ceremony was outside after a week of rain, but the clouds broke just long enough for Erin to get married in actual sunlight. Callum cried before she'd made it halfway down the aisle, and Dad held himself together until the vows before making a noise like he'd hurt his back. By the time everybody went into the barn for drinks, most of us already looked as though we'd been crying for hours.

Mum's chair was at the far end of the top table. Someone had poured prosecco into the glass in front of it, and Aunt Diane was standing there when I went inside. She touched the stem and looked at the photograph.

"Your mum would've complained they didn't fill it properly."

"She'd have complained it was prosecco."

"True. She'd have wanted champagne."

"She couldn't tell the difference."

Diane looked at the photograph.

"Don't say that where she can hear you."

Then the chair moved. It slid perhaps four inches and made that ugly wooden scrape across the floor that makes everybody nearby clench their teeth. A little boy was under the next table doing something complicated to a napkin, and the nearest member of staff was on the other side of the room. Diane and I stared at the empty space behind the chair.

"Uneven floor."

"Probably."

Neither of us checked. That's important, because anywhere else I think I would have crouched down and looked at the legs or pushed it back to see whether it moved again. Instead I was at my sister's wedding, wearing shoes that had already removed most of the skin from my right heel, while somebody behind me asked where the toilets were. The chair had moved, and we let it.

Dinner started at six. Dad was sitting next to Mum's chair, with me on his other side, then Erin, Callum and the rest of the wedding party. About halfway through the starter, Dad laughed at something none of us had heard and turned toward the empty chair. His expression was ordinary enough that for a second I thought I'd missed part of a conversation.

"What?"

There was a pause.

"No, she hasn't."

He looked at me.

"Have you?"

"Have I what?"

"Still got that blue coat?"

The fork in my hand touched my plate. I had owned a blue duffel coat when I was nineteen, and Mum despised it because she said I looked like Paddington Bear. I kept it partly because it was warm and partly because annoying your mother is one of the few reliable pleasures available to a nineteen-year-old. It had been in a vacuum bag under my bed for years, and Dad wouldn't have remembered it.

"I think so."

He turned back toward the empty chair.

"She has."

Dad smiled at something beside him, and his eyes went wet.

"Dad?"

He put one finger up to tell me to wait. The gesture irritated me so badly that for a moment it overpowered everything else, because he was shushing me so he could listen to my dead mother. Then his face folded, and he covered his mouth with one hand.

Dad is not a theatrical crier. At Mum's funeral he dealt with it by going outside every twenty minutes and finding something wrong with the cars, and for most of their marriage he treated emotional conversations as problems that might resolve themselves if he went to put the kettle on. That afternoon he reached toward the empty space beside him, stopped with his hand in mid-air and curled his fingers as though somebody had taken them. Watching him, I understood how easily thirty-two years of habit could survive five years of death.

The whole table went quiet.

"Erin?"

Dad nodded because he couldn't speak. Aunt Diane stood so quickly her chair went backward.

"Mare?"

Dad looked at her and then at the space beside him. Diane came around the table and stopped a couple of feet from the chair. Her expression changed, and I watched recognition arrive.

It wasn't surprise. It was recognition, the same face you make when you're collecting somebody from a station and suddenly pick them out of a crowd. Diane stared at empty air for two or three seconds, and then her mouth opened.

"Oh, you bitch."

She started laughing and crying together. People further down the room noticed, but nobody could explain what was happening because Diane had both arms around somebody I couldn't see. Her cardigan bunched between her elbows as if a body were pressing against her. Dad laughed through his tears.

"Look at you."

There was nothing there for me.

Erin wasn't watching Diane. She was staring at Mum's chair with her mouth slightly open, and when I said her name she stood without looking at me. Callum reached for her hand, but she stepped around him and walked toward the end of the table.

"Mum?"

That was when people started getting their phones out. I remember hating them for it more clearly than I remember being frightened, because something impossible was happening to my family and half the room had decided their first responsibility was to film it vertically. I snapped at the nearest man to put his away. He did, probably because I was a bridesmaid and looked furious.

Erin stopped in front of the chair and stood there for several seconds.

"You came."

Her whole face changed. I had never seen my sister look that happy, which made everything that followed harder. She leaned forward and rested her head against empty air, except it wasn't empty because her cheek stopped and her hair flattened against something that wasn't visible.

One of her earrings was pushed sideways. People around us started crying, and somebody behind me kept saying, "Oh my God," as if repetition might make it useful. Callum didn't say anything. He stood behind his chair watching his wife hug someone who had been dead since before he met her.

I went to him.

"What can you see?"

He shook his head.

"Nothing."

That helped more than it should have.

"Me neither."

"Is this..."

He didn't finish.

"I don't know."

Erin pulled away from whatever she was holding and laughed at something none of us had heard.

"No, she didn't."

Dad grinned.

"She absolutely did."

That was the first time I understood there was a conversation happening from which Callum and I were completely excluded. Diane was crying too hard to speak, Dad kept answering questions nobody else heard, and over the next ten minutes my cousin Molly and Uncle Ray began doing it too. There was no dramatic moment when it spread; people simply started making room for somebody I couldn't see.

They shifted their chairs when she passed. They looked at the empty air over one another's shoulders and waited before replying. Staff didn't seem able to see her, but guests kept guiding them around the space she occupied until the movement of the room bent around her without anybody discussing it. For perhaps twenty minutes, I was jealous.

I'm not proud of that, but it was there. Dad could hear her voice, Erin could touch her, and Diane was swearing at her affectionately while I stood within feet of my mother and had nothing. Five years is enough time to lose stupid details, and I couldn't remember whether the tiny brown mark beside her left eye had been above or below the corner. I could remember facts about her voice without being able to hear the voice itself in my head.

For a few minutes I would have done almost anything to hear her call me Lucy-Lou again. I moved closer to Dad and watched the glass in front of Mum's photograph. The prosecco level dropped while nobody visible touched it, one swallow and then another. I remember counting them.

Erin caught my wrist.

"She wants you."

I looked at the chair, and my throat hurt.

"Tell her I'm here."

Erin's smile slipped.

"She knows you're here."

"Okay."

"Lucy."

"What?"

Her eyes moved slightly to my left. They tracked upward as though someone had stepped close enough to stand almost shoulder to shoulder with me.

"Just look at her."

"I am."

"No, you're not."

I turned my head toward the place Erin was watching and tried harder than I knew how to try. I stared at the floorboards for a shadow, at the glass behind us for a reflection and at my own sleeve to see whether fabric moved where something touched it. Erin's eyes followed a face beside mine, blinking when that face apparently moved, and I saw nothing except the room beyond her.

"I can't."

Erin's expression became pity. Mum had come back from the dead and somehow, within an hour, I was already the difficult daughter again. I left before I said something I couldn't take back.

Callum followed me outside. We stood beside a stack of empty beer barrels behind the barn, and he offered me a cigarette even though neither of us smoked. Through the wall we could hear the reception restarting itself: music, cutlery and people talking too loudly because they'd just witnessed something none of them had language for.

"Do you think it's her?"

"Yes."

I'd expected myself to hesitate, but I didn't.

"Really?"

"I don't know what else would know about the coat."

He nodded and looked at the ciga+rette.

"I wish I could see her."

That surprised me.

"Why?"

He gave me a look.

"She's Erin's mum."

I liked him very much at that moment.

"But I also want my wife back."

It sounded selfish until we went inside.

Mum had taken my seat, although my actual chair was still where I'd left it. Dad had shifted down, Diane had pulled another chair over, and Erin was sitting beside Mum's place with her whole body turned away from Callum. The best man was waiting beside the microphone because the speeches had been due to start ten minutes earlier, but nobody at that end of the table seemed to remember him.

Callum sat beside Erin.

"Love, they're waiting."

She held up one finger, the exact same gesture Dad had used on me.

"One second."

It was not one second. Whatever Mum was saying kept the end of the table listening until the best man eventually cleared his throat into the microphone. Erin looked annoyed at the interruption, and Callum saw it.

Mum used to do that at family events. At my eighteenth birthday she spent most of dinner telling everybody the story of giving birth to me, including details I had specifically begged her not to share. There always came a point when the event developed a centre and the centre was Mum. Seeing the same thing happen after she was dead should have comforted me more than it did.

The speeches finally started. Callum made Erin cry, Erin kissed him, and for a little while the room belonged to them again. Dad sat with one hand resting palm-up beside Mum's chair, and once or twice his fingers closed around hers.

The first dance was at eight. Erin and Callum got through perhaps a minute before she looked over his shoulder at someone behind him. She said something, he answered, and then she stepped away while the song kept playing.

Erin lifted her right arm. Her hand settled at shoulder height, and her left hand closed around invisible fingers. Her wedding dress drew inward at the waist as though a hand had settled there. Then my sister started dancing with our mother.

I couldn't see Mum, but I could see every place she touched. Erin's sleeve flattened beneath a hand, her fingers curved around fingers that weren't visible, and a shallow pressure moved across the fabric at her waist. They danced slowly because Mum had never been a particularly good dancer. Dad made a sound behind me, Diane leaned against him and people cried openly.

So did Callum. So did I, because it was beautiful and because Erin had wanted this for five years. The song ended and she kept dancing.

A second song started, then a third. People drifted back toward the tables while Erin stayed in the middle of the floor with her head resting against someone's shoulder. By the fourth song, hardly anybody was watching except family. Callum went to the bar.

I followed him.

"She's missed her."

"I know."

"It's one night."

"I know."

He rubbed his forehead.

"I sound like an arsehole."

"You don't."

"Her dead mum comes to our wedding and I'm jealous."

"You're allowed to be jealous of the dead."

"Are you?"

"Apparently."

He laughed once. Erin came over a moment later, flushed from dancing and happier than she'd looked all day.

"Mum wants us upstairs."

"Us who?"

"You and me."

Callum looked at her.

"Oh. Sorry. She just wants a minute with us."

"It's your wedding."

"I know."

He smiled, but it took him a second.

"Go."

She kissed him and took my hand. I didn't want to go, but I went.

The bridal room was above the barn. My shoes were in there along with six makeup bags, three half-drunk glasses of champagne and a plate containing one abandoned sandwich. Erin closed the door behind us and then opened it again.

"Mum says it's stuffy."

I nearly answered, Of course she does. Erin sat on the edge of the bed, and the mattress dipped beside her exactly where Mum would have chosen to sit, hip against yours and knee touching because she treated personal space as something other families had invented. I stayed near the door.

Erin looked beside herself.

"No."

There was a pause.

"Don't."

Her smile disappeared.

"What is she saying?"

"Nothing."

"Erin."

"She thinks you're angry."

"I am angry."

"Why?"

I gestured downstairs.

"Your husband has spent half his wedding waiting for you."

Erin's face hardened.

"Mum's been dead five years."

"I know that."

"I get one night."

"You don't know that."

The words came out before I could stop them. Erin looked toward the dent in the mattress and then back at me.

"What does that mean?"

"I mean nobody knows what this is."

"It's Mum."

"I think it's Mum too."

"Then what are you doing?"

There wasn't a good answer. Trying to make sure our dead mother behaved herself at a wedding sounded ridiculous even in my head. Erin looked beside her again, and whatever expression she saw made her sit straighter.

"Don't say that."

"What?"

She looked at me.

"Mum says you're jealous."

For a second I thought I'd misheard.

"Of what?"

Erin's eyes moved toward the mattress.

"Of me."

I laughed, but there was nothing funny in it.

"That's convenient."

"Lucy."

"What exactly does she think I'm jealous of?"

Erin hesitated.

"She says you're angry because I can see her."

I stopped smiling.

"Anyone could work that out."

Erin listened. Her face changed again, this time from anger to confusion.

"What?"

"What did she say?"

"She says you counted."

I felt cold.

"Counted what?"

"The drinks."

Neither of us spoke for a moment. I had stood beside Dad watching the prosecco fall and counting the swallows in my head, and I hadn't told anyone. Erin looked unsettled now too.

"She says you watched every time she drank because you wanted proof."

I couldn't think of an answer.

"Lucy?"

"Keep going."

Erin didn't want to.

"She says you wanted her to call you Lucy-Lou."

My hand tightened around the door handle.

"Did you tell her that?"

"Tell who?"

"Anyone. Did I ever tell you that?"

"No."

The mattress beside her shifted. Erin's eyes went to it, and I had the sudden certainty that whatever was sitting there was enjoying this.

"She says you always do this."

"Do what?"

"Make things ugly when people are happy."

I felt every muscle in my face tighten.

"She said that?"

"Lucy—"

"Did she say that?"

Erin listened again.

"She says you were like this at my twenty-first."

"My appendix burst at your twenty-first."

"You complained the whole evening."

"I went to hospital."

That stopped her. Then, horribly, Erin laughed and covered her mouth.

"Sorry."

The mattress shifted again, and Erin tried not to laugh.

"Mum says you did always need to make an entrance."

That was when I knew it was her more completely than I had when Dad mentioned the coat. It was the cruelty of it, perfectly measured and impossible for her to resist once she knew she had an audience. I opened the door.

"Come downstairs."

"Lucy."

"It's your wedding."

"Mum isn't finished."

"She never was."

Erin stood.

"Fuck you."

I went downstairs alone. Callum was waiting near the bottom, and he knew instantly from my face that something had happened. He started up the first step.

"Don't go up there."

He stopped.

"Why?"

"Because right now you're the only person she can't talk into agreeing with her."

He didn't ask which 'she' I meant.

Erin came down with Dad and Diane about ten minutes later. Callum went to her before she reached the bottom.

"Can I have my wife for five minutes?"

Erin blinked.

"What?"

"The photographer wants us outside before he loses the light completely. Then cake, then we leave at eleven. Remember?"

She glanced toward the empty space beside Diane.

"Can we do it in a minute?"

"We've been doing things in a minute for two hours."

Dad looked uncomfortable. Diane looked at the floor. Erin's expression tightened as though Callum had embarrassed her.

"It's one night."

Callum stared at her. I saw him recognise his own words coming back at him.

"Fine."

He stepped aside. Erin went straight back to Mum's chair.

The photographer got them for three pictures before Erin looked away from the camera and started laughing at something beside him. In the fourth, Callum is looking directly into the lens while Erin is turned toward empty air. He told me later that the photographer asked if they wanted another try, and Erin said they had plenty. They didn't.

The cake was supposed to happen next. Instead Dad laughed at something Mum said about Diane's new kitchen, Diane called her a cow and three cousins dragged their chairs closer. Mum thought Dad's beard made him look homeless, Molly shouldn't have gone blonde, and Callum's suit was nice but the trousers were too tight. People laughed harder than the jokes deserved because every insult proved something; each mean little comment was evidence that she was really there.

Callum stopped laughing first.

Around half ten, he sat beside me.

"We're supposed to leave at eleven."

I looked at Erin. She was holding Mum's invisible hand.

"Does she know?"

"I've told her twice."

"What did she say?"

"She said we can leave tomorrow."

I turned to him.

"What?"

"We lose the hotel, apparently."

"Callum."

"I know."

"No, that's not—"

"I know."

He looked exhausted. Across the room, Erin stood, Dad kissed the top of her head and headed for the doors.

"Where's he going?"

Callum watched him leave.

"Getting her overnight bag."

I stared at him.

"She's staying here?"

"With her mum."

The venue closed at midnight. Staff were already stacking glasses, someone had turned the main lights on and half the guests had gone home. Erin was still in her wedding dress, sitting beside an empty chair because our dead mother wanted more time. Whether Mum wanted the time or Erin wanted it stopped seeming like an important distinction.

I walked over. Erin looked up before I said anything.

"Don't."

Dad came back through the doors carrying Erin's overnight bag.

"Lucy, leave it."

"Dad, the wedding's over."

"Exactly."

"Callum is waiting."

"She'll go when she's ready."

"No, she won't."

I'd said it too loudly. Everyone around the table heard me, and Erin stood so fast her chair scraped backward. Dad's face closed in the way it used to whenever Mum and I reached the point in an argument where he knew choosing a side would only make it worse.

"What is wrong with you?" Erin asked.

I looked at Mum's chair. The cushion was compressed by perhaps an inch, enough that I could see the shape of weight on it. Then I smelled her perfume.

Mum had worn the same perfume for as long as I could remember, something floral and expensive that she'd spray too heavily before walking through the house, leaving it behind. I hadn't smelled it in five years. Now it surrounded me so completely that my eyes filled and the chair blurred. For a moment all I wanted was to crouch beside her and ask where she'd been.

I wanted to tell her I still had the blue coat. I wanted to hear her say it made me look ridiculous. I wanted my mum so badly that I almost hated everyone in the room for having had her all evening.

Then Erin said, "Mum thinks you should go."

I looked at her.

"Go where?"

"Home."

It was my sister's wedding, and now my dead mother was throwing me out of it.

Dad caught my arm when I moved around him.

"Lucy."

I pulled free and went to the empty chair. Erin understood before anybody else.

"Don't you fucking dare."

I pulled the chair out. Something resisted, not like a leg catching on the floor but like somebody on the seat had planted both feet and refused to move. I yanked harder, and the chair came with me.

Diane screamed my name.

I turned around and sat down.

I didn't reach the cushion. My thighs struck two solid thighs beneath me, warm through the fabric of my dress, and my back trapped an arm against the chair. My weight settled against a torso I couldn't see. For one impossible second, I was sitting on my dead mother.

Everyone reacted at once. Dad shouted, Diane covered her mouth and Erin lunged toward me. I nearly stood.

Then a woman's voice spoke beside my left ear.

"Lucy-Lou. Get off me."

Five years of trying to remember that voice ended in four words.

Something hit me across the face.

My head turned and my lip caught against my tooth. I tasted blood, and the room went completely quiet. I put both hands on the sides of the chair.

And I sat harder.

The body beneath me pushed back. I felt one knee twist under mine and a shoulder shove against my spine, then the resistance disappeared all at once. I dropped the last inch onto the cushion hard enough to jar my teeth.

Dad stumbled backward. Erin made a sound I had heard once before, five years earlier in a hospital corridor, and looked at the space behind me.

"Mum?"

Nobody answered.

"Mum."

I touched my cheek. Five red marks were already rising across it. Erin looked at them, then looked at me.

"You made her leave?!"

Nobody spoke to me for the rest of the night. The staff brought the cake out after midnight because someone had paid extra for sparklers and they didn't want them wasted, and Erin and Callum cut it in an almost empty room. There are photographs, but I'm not in them. In the photographer's last picture of the first dance, Erin's dress is pulled inward at the waist beneath a hand that isn't there.

The phone videos are worse in a quieter way. They don't show Mum, and there is no translucent woman in the background or face appearing in a mirror. They show people making space for nothing, Diane hugging air, Dad holding an invisible hand and Erin dancing with her arms positioned perfectly around an absent body. In one clip, when I sit in Mum's chair, I stop several inches above the cushion and stay there for almost a second before the camera jerks sideways.

Erin and Callum eventually went to the hotel. Dad drove home without saying goodbye, and Diane called me a vicious little bitch in the car park before bursting into tears and hugging me. I think she hated me, and I think she was relieved. Those things can be true at the same time.

My cheek bruised badly enough that I had to explain it at work. I said I walked into a cupboard, which nobody believed, but nobody asked twice. Erin didn't speak to me for seven weeks, and Dad hasn't spoken to me since Christmas. I saw him once in Sainsbury's and he went down another aisle.

Callum sent the burned-pizza picture during week three.

Erin finally rang in January. She didn't shout, which would have been easier. We talked for nearly an hour about her honeymoon, my landlord, Dad being stubborn and Callum getting the dog he'd wanted and discovering that dogs apparently still need walking when it's raining.

Then she said, "I need you to apologise."

I said I was sorry.

"Not to me."

I didn't answer.

She told me they'd been setting Mum a place at Sunday lunch. Dad still poured her a drink sometimes and left the chair pulled slightly away from the table. She hadn't come back. Erin thought that was because of me.

"Mum held onto that stuff. You know what she was like."

I did.

"If you apologised, she'd know she was welcome."

I asked Erin whether she wanted Mum back.

"Yes."

She started crying after she said it. Of course she wanted her back. So did I.

That's why I haven't apologised.

Erin is four months pregnant now. She told me last week, and we both cried again. She said she wants me there when the baby comes and wants us to be a family again.

Then she said, "I want Mum to meet the baby too."

I've spent five years wishing my mother could have seen the things she missed. I've spent almost a year knowing that, under the right circumstances, she might.

Yesterday Erin sent me a photograph of Dad's dining room because she wanted to show me that he'd put my usual place back at the table for Sunday. Mum's chair is still at the end, pulled slightly away as though someone has just stood up, and Dad has moved the chair beside it to leave a gap. Erin says that's where the high chair will go when the baby is old enough.

Sunday lunch is in two days. I'm trying to decide whether I can sit across from that chair without wanting to sit in it again.

I haven't looked directly at my phone since 3:57 this morning. It's face-down on the carpet about six feet from me, and I know I have fourteen missed calls because my watch keeps vibrating even though I turned the display away. I'm sitting on the floor against my bedroom wall with the lights on, staring through the open door into the hallway. There is someone standing beside the bathroom.

I should probably explain that I live alone. My girlfriend, Nina, moved out in June, and although we're still technically together, she'd probably object to me describing it that way because the whole reason she moved out was to figure out whether we actually wanted to be. The house is a small two-bedroom rental, the kind where you can stand in the kitchen and see almost everything except the bedrooms. There isn't anywhere for another person to live in here without me noticing.

The first time I saw it was Sunday night. I was in bed scrolling through my phone instead of sleeping, which has become a bad habit since Nina left, and I'd been watching videos for maybe forty minutes when I looked toward the bedroom door and noticed what I thought was a coat hanging at the far end of the hall. There isn't a hook there, but at one in the morning I wasn't immediately concerned about the implications of that. I looked back at my phone and watched maybe fifteen seconds of a video about restoring an old kitchen knife before glancing toward the hallway again.

The shape seemed to be standing a little nearer. I remember squinting at it, then reaching for the lamp beside my bed, more annoyed with myself than frightened. The light came on and there was nothing there. My hallway contains a narrow bookshelf, a framed print Nina bought because she said the wall looked like a dentist's office, and a laundry basket I had been promising myself I'd put away for three days, and none of those things looked remotely human with the light on.

I got up, checked the front and back doors, and went back to bed. I didn't tell anyone about it because there wasn't anything to tell, and people see shapes in dark rooms all the time. The next day I went to work, forgot my lunch in the fridge, spent twenty minutes arguing with a supplier about an invoice, and called Nina on the drive home because we'd agreed to speak every few days instead of doing the mature thing and actually ending the relationship. By the time I went to bed Monday night, the shape in the hallway had become one of those little incidents you remember only because you were briefly embarrassed by how much it frightened you.

Monday night it was standing beside the bookshelf. I was awake when I saw it, and I wasn't half asleep or looking past a pile of laundry because I'd cleaned the hallway after work. It looked like a person facing me from maybe twenty feet away, tall enough that the top of its head was level with the framed print. I couldn't see clothes or a face, just the suggestion of shoulders and legs darker than the hallway around them.

My first thought was that someone had broken into the house. I grabbed my phone and opened the emergency-call screen, but before I pressed anything I looked up again. The person was now on my side of the bookshelf, only a few feet closer, but I knew exactly where it had been before because the shelf had been between us. I shouted, "Who are you?" and got no answer.

I got out of bed without taking my eyes off it and switched on the bedside lamp. The hallway became empty again. I checked every room, including beneath the beds, inside the wardrobe in the spare room, behind the shower curtain, and even the attic hatch although I would have heard someone pull the ladder down. Both doors were still locked from inside, and the kitchen window that doesn't close properly unless you lean your hip against the frame had undisturbed dust along the sill.

That was when I called Nina. I told her I'd heard something rather than admitting I'd seen a person disappear when I turned on a lamp, because I was still trying to preserve the possibility that I wasn't becoming the kind of man who sees intruders that aren't there. She asked whether I wanted her to come over, and I said no because at that point I'd convinced myself it had been a shadow again. Tuesday morning, after sleeping badly, that explanation still seemed reasonable enough to get me through work.

Tuesday itself was normal, and that detail is important to me now because I've started dividing the last few days into periods when this was happening and periods when I was still allowed to care about stupid things. I took my car in because the rear brake had started squealing, bought tomatoes I didn't need because they were on sale, and got annoyed when Nina sent me a picture of a bookshelf she'd bought for her new apartment. I remember thinking it looked cheap. That night, mostly as a joke to myself, I left the hallway light on before going to bed.

I fell asleep around midnight and woke at 2:40 because my phone vibrated on the bedside table. Nina had sent me a message saying she'd finally watched a series we'd started together and that I had been right about the ending being terrible. I typed half a reply before remembering the hallway, and when I looked toward the door someone was standing directly beneath the light. The light didn't make it disappear this time.

I dropped my phone onto the bed and stared. The person was about fifteen feet away, standing in the middle of the hallway with both arms hanging straight down, and although the ceiling light was behind it I still couldn't make out any useful detail. It wasn't a silhouette exactly; it was more like my eyes kept settling on the hallway around it instead of the person itself. Then my phone vibrated again.

I looked down automatically and saw Nina had sent, You awake? When I looked back up, the person was halfway to my bedroom. I don't remember deciding to get out of bed, but one second I was sitting there and the next I was pressed against the headboard with my feet under me, staring at the hallway. The person hadn't changed position while I watched it.

I stayed like that for maybe a minute before looking at my phone again. When I raised my eyes, it was closer. There wasn't any motion to see; I looked down, read the time, looked up, and the person was simply standing a few feet nearer than before. It was close enough now that I could see its hands.

I tried it again because fear apparently makes me scientific. I kept my eyes on the person and reached blindly across the bed until I found my phone, then held it beside my face without looking at the screen. Nothing happened. The moment I turned my eyes toward the display for less than a second, the person was standing at my bedroom door when I looked back.

I don't know how to describe what that did to me without exaggerating it. I didn't scream or faint or feel my blood turn to ice, because mostly I just understood with absolute certainty that I had been doing something all night that I needed to stop doing. I threw the phone across the room, where it landed face-up near the wardrobe with Nina's message still glowing on the screen. I stared at the person in the doorway and backed toward the opposite side of the bed, and for a long time neither of us moved.

Eventually I realized I could get to the bedroom window without passing it. I climbed out barefoot, tore the knee of my pajama pants on the sill, and stood in the side yard feeling like an idiot. When I looked back through the window, I couldn't see anyone inside. I slept in my car anyway.

In the morning I went inside with a hammer because it was the closest thing I owned to a weapon. There was nobody in the hallway, nothing had been disturbed, and my phone was still beside the wardrobe where I'd thrown it. I called in sick and spent most of Wednesday looking for an ordinary explanation. Carbon monoxide was the obvious one, so I bought two new detectors and tested the old one, checked the medications I take even though I've been on the same antihistamine for years, and searched for visual hallucinations caused by sleep deprivation until the internet convinced me everything from dehydration to a brain tumor could explain anything.

By noon, I had reduced the previous night to a sequence I could tolerate. I had been tired, frightened and staring into a dim hallway, while my bright phone screen repeatedly forced my eyes to adjust between light and dark. That explanation was so tidy that I almost resented myself for not thinking of it sooner. I told Nina most of the truth when she came over after work.

She stood where I'd seen the person and made me show her exactly where it had appeared. She didn't laugh, which was nice, but she also kept asking how much I'd slept lately and eventually said she thought I should stay at her place for a few nights. I told her, "I thought the point of moving out was getting space from me," and she gave me a tired look before saying, "I wanted space. I didn't want you hallucinating alone in a bungalow." She stayed until about ten, and by the time she left I was embarrassed enough that I nearly apologized for making her come over.

At 11:30 I turned off the television and saw the person standing in the kitchen doorway. This time I didn't reach for my phone, and the figure remained where it was, maybe twelve feet from the couch with one shoulder partially hidden by the wall. I stared at it while feeling along the cushion for my phone with my right hand. Nothing happened.

I found the phone and lifted it, and still nothing happened. I turned it so the screen faced me, but as long as I kept looking at the person it remained where it was. Then I looked at the screen. When I looked back, the person was beside the dining table.

That was the moment I stopped thinking I was hallucinating. I spent the next hour testing it, even though I know how ridiculous that sounds now. If you're imagining yourself in my position, you're probably imagining you would leave immediately and never come back, but I had already left once and by daylight the entire thing had collapsed into something explainable. I needed something I couldn't explain away in the morning.

I put my phone on the coffee table and stared at the figure for five minutes. It didn't move, but when I looked down long enough to read the battery percentage and then looked back, it was closer. I did it again by opening a message from Nina, and again after typing I think you're right. Something is wrong. By then it was standing at the edge of the rug, so I stopped testing.

I kept my eyes on it while using voice control to call Nina. The phone rang on speaker from the table, and when she answered I told her there really was someone in the house. She told me to call the police, and I said, "I can't look at my phone," which produced a short silence before she asked what I meant. I told her I couldn't look away from him.

Nina asked, "Who is him?" I told her I didn't know, and she said she was coming over. I don't know whether hearing another person's voice distracted me or whether I simply blinked too long, but I remember glancing toward the phone when she said my name sharply. When I looked back, the figure had crossed the rug.

I ran through the laundry and out the back door without looking behind me. I didn't stop until I reached the service station at the end of the road, and Nina found me there fifteen minutes later wearing no shoes and holding my keys hard enough that the teeth had cut into my palm. I stayed at her apartment that night. Nothing happened.

Nothing happened Thursday either. I went to a doctor, who listened to the story with impressive professionalism and asked about drugs, alcohol, sleep, stress and family history. He suggested that acute stress and sleep deprivation could cause perceptual disturbances without necessarily meaning anything more serious. I didn't tell him I'd conducted repeated experiments with the hallucination because I wanted him to continue looking at me like a patient rather than a problem.

Thursday night I slept for almost nine hours. Friday morning I woke feeling better than I had all week and checked my phone before I was fully awake. The person was standing in Nina's bedroom doorway. I screamed her name.

Nina woke up, saw me pointing, and looked at the doorway. She asked what I was seeing, and when I asked whether she could see him she said there was nobody there. That should have made me think the doctor was right. Instead, I looked at my phone again.

When I looked back, the person was standing beside Nina's dresser. I left her apartment before breakfast because I didn't want to explain why, and the drive home took twenty-two minutes. Before starting the car I put my phone in the glove compartment and didn't touch it once. When I got home, the house was empty.

I turned the phone off and put it inside a kitchen drawer. I spent the whole afternoon waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. By evening I was almost euphoric, and I cleaned the kitchen, did two loads of washing and cooked actual food instead of eating cereal over the sink. At some point I started believing the phone itself really was involved, which sounds absurd now but felt considerably better than the alternative.

Around nine I saw the person standing at the far end of the hallway. The phone was still switched off inside the drawer, and I stood in the living room staring at him while nothing happened. I remember thinking that maybe the phone didn't have to be on, or that perhaps just having it in the house was enough. That is the sort of theory your mind produces when it desperately wants a problem to remain mechanical.

I decided to throw the phone outside. The kitchen drawer was behind me, so I kept my eyes on the person and walked backward until my hand found the counter, then felt along the cabinets without turning around. I opened the wrong drawer first, found the right one on the second try, pulled out the phone and dropped it onto the floor without ever looking at it. The person didn't move.

I nudged the phone toward the back door with my foot. Nothing changed until something outside hit the fence, probably a cat, and I looked toward the sound without thinking. When I looked back, the person was standing six feet closer. I don't know how long I stood there before understanding.

The phone had never mattered. I looked at the clock on the wall, then back at the hallway, and the figure was closer. I looked at the kitchen window and found him closer again, then looked down at my own hand and saw the distance shrink once more. The only reason I'd connected it to the phone was because the phone was what I looked at most.

I backed toward the bedroom without taking my eyes off him. He didn't move, and the distance between us was about ten feet by then, close enough that I could see he was wearing something dark and ordinary, maybe a jumper and trousers. His face was pale but indistinct, not blurred exactly, just difficult to hold in my mind. I reached the bedroom and closed the door without looking away until the last possible second.

For perhaps ten minutes, nothing happened. I sat on the floor with my back against the door until I heard a soft sound from the hallway, not footsteps exactly, but more like someone shifting their weight. That was when I realized closing the door had created a problem I hadn't considered. I couldn't see him anymore.

I opened the door. He was standing immediately outside, and I slammed it again so hard a picture fell off the wall. I pushed the dresser against the door and told myself that whether he could move or not didn't matter if there was a locked door between us. For almost three hours, I heard nothing.

Then I needed the bathroom. I tried to ignore it for another forty minutes before finally moving the dresser enough to open the door. He was halfway inside the room. The dresser hadn't shifted and the door had still been shut, but he was simply standing partly through the space where the door had been, as though whatever allowed him to come closer didn't particularly care about walls.

I stared at him and he remained still. That was when I noticed my eyes hurt because I had been trying not to blink, so I forced myself to blink normally while watching him. Nothing happened, and for maybe five minutes that helped. Then I started thinking about Nina.

I wondered whether she'd called again. The person moved, even though I hadn't looked away. I had been staring directly at him when it happened, and one moment he was near the doorway while the next he was nearer the bed. I stopped breathing for a second because I understood the second mistake I'd made.

It wasn't about where I was looking. It was about what I was paying attention to. I tried to prove myself wrong by staring at his face while counting backward from one hundred, but somewhere around ninety-three I wondered whether counting itself counted as distraction. He moved again.

I focused on his left shoulder and tried to think about nothing else. The moment I noticed myself thinking about whether I was concentrating properly, he was closer. I repeated the word shoulder silently in my head because I thought giving my attention one fixed point might help, but that only gave me another thought to monitor. Every attempt to concentrate created another thing to concentrate on.

That was around 3:57. I put the phone face-down and stopped trying to call anyone, because every attempt to solve the problem was giving my mind somewhere else to go. He's beside the bathroom now, farther away than he was before only because I moved into the corner of the bedroom while keeping as much of my attention on him as I could. I don't know whether distance works normally for him or whether I'm inventing another explanation because explanations make this easier.

I'm not typing this. I turned on voice dictation without looking at the screen and have been speaking for I don't know how long, which seemed clever when I started. The problem is that every time I think about what sentence comes next, he gets slightly closer. I can see his face properly now.

He's an ordinary-looking man, maybe fifty, with thinning hair and a grey jumper. His mouth is closed and his arms hang comfortably at his sides, and there is nothing about him that would make you cross the street if you passed him during the day. That's somehow worse than if he looked monstrous. I don't think he's angry, and I don't think he's hungry, but I have no idea whether he wants anything from me at all.

I think he just comes closer whenever I stop giving him my full attention. I've been trying to remember when I first saw him on Sunday, and I keep coming back to the fact that I had been looking down at my phone for almost an hour before I noticed him. I have no idea where he was when I started. Thinking about that made him move again.

He's just outside the bedroom now. I can see enough detail to know his eyes are open, and he's looking directly at me. I thought that was obvious until a few minutes ago, when I realized I've never once seen him look anywhere else. My phone just vibrated again.

I didn't look. It vibrated a second time, and I'm keeping my eyes on him while trying not to wonder whether it's Nina. I need somebody to come here, but if she does I'll have to think about the door, listen for her car, answer when she calls my name, or decide whether to warn her before she walks inside. Even thinking through those possibilities has already brought him closer.

I'm going to stop talking now. The voice-to-text should keep whatever it has already captured, and maybe I can send it without looking if I can get the assistant to do it, although even thinking about that is becoming another distraction. I understand now why the phone seemed so important at first. It was never making him move; it was just the easiest thing in the world to make me forget he was there. 

I do the headcount at a boarding school. Last month the number was finally right.

I keep a variance book. It's a habit from eleven years managing a builders' merchant in Shrewsbury, where if your count doesn't match the system you write the difference down before you go home, because in the morning you'll have decided you were tired and it was fine.

I've kept one since I started at the school. Nobody asked me to. It's a red notebook in the drawer under the kettle and there's nothing in it but dates and numbers.

That notebook is the only reason I know Immie Parr existed.

I'm going to tell this in order, because if I tell it out of order it sounds like something that happened to my head rather than something that happened.

I'm forty-four and I've been houseparent at Hartley House for six years. Small independent boarding school on the Welsh border, not posh so much as stubborn. Hartley is the smallest of the three houses, twenty-one on the books. My wife Jo and I live in the flat off the back, which sounds grim and mostly isn't, except our kitchen shares a wall with a stairwell that twenty-one teenagers use at seven in the morning.

My job is pastoral. That's a word that means nothing. What it means in practice is that I know where children are. Sign-out sheets, prep, lights out, evening check at half nine.

I count. That's the job.

Immie was thirteen, Year Nine, and I'd have told you at the time she was mildly the worst of them. She could not get up. Not in a difficult way, in an almost medical way. She kept propping the east fire door with a shoe so she could sit out on the step after lights out, and I took that shoe out of the door maybe thirty times and she never once pretended she hadn't put it there. She had a plastic otter on her bag and she wanted to be a marine biologist, which I wound her up about constantly, because we are about as far from the sea as it's possible to get in this country.

Jo bought her a mug for her birthday in February. Otter on it. Immie kept it in our kitchen because she wasn't supposed to have it in the house, and she thought that was the funniest thing that had ever happened.

On the 3rd of April I counted twenty-two.

I want to be clear about how boring that was. I assumed I'd double-counted somebody moving between rooms, which happens constantly, because children don't hold still for you. I went round again, got twenty-one, wrote 22/21 in the book out of habit and went to bed.

It happened again on the 6th. Then the 7th, the 9th, and then every night for the rest of that week.

Denise Pugh has been at Hartley longer than the current headmaster. She does the check with me Tuesdays and Thursdays, and when I told her I kept getting an extra she laughed at me, which was fair enough.

"You count twice, you," she said. "Every time. I've watched you do it. You count them, you don't believe it, then you count them again and get a different number because they've moved."

She's right that I do that. She counted twenty-one that night and I counted twenty-two, and she was so cheerful about it that I felt stupid rather than worried.

So I changed method. That's the stock man in me. If your count's unreliable the answer isn't counting harder, it's counting differently.

Hartley has six rooms. Two on the ground corridor with four in each, two on the middle corridor with three in each, and two upstairs with four and three. I started doing it by doorframe. Hand flat on the frame, count the bodies in that room, say the number out loud, move on. You cannot double-count somebody that way unless they physically get past you in the corridor.

Twenty-two.

On the 16th of April I did the check late, about eleven, because I'd been on the phone to a parent. The house was properly dark by then. I didn't put the corridor lights on because the light comes through the glazed panel above each door and wakes them, and a fourteen-year-old woken at eleven is a problem you have to solve for forty minutes.

So I did it by ear.

You can do it. I'd never tried before, but you can stand in an open doorway of a room with four girls in it and separate four different people breathing. They don't breathe at the same rate. One of them snores a bit. One of them was awake and doing that careful shallow thing they do when they want you to think they're asleep.

Room one. Four.

Room two. Four.

Middle corridor, room three. Three.

Room four. Three.

Upstairs, room five. Four.

Room six is the small one at the end under the roof and there are three boys in it.

I stood in that doorway in the dark with my hand flat on the frame and I counted four.

I stayed there a long time. I don't know how long. Long enough that my eyes adjusted and I could see the shapes of three beds and the shapes of three boys in them, and I could hear four people breathing in that room, and I was aware in a very calm and practical way that all I had to do was reach six inches to my left and put the light on.

I didn't put the light on.

I went downstairs and wrote 22/21 in the book and sat in the kitchen until about two.

That was the night it stopped being an admin problem, and it's also the night I decided not to tell anybody, which I've thought about a lot since.

I had ordinary explanations and I believed them for about three weeks, and I'd still defend that. A day pupil hanging about after hours. Somebody's brother from the village. A kid from Ellesmere House wandering over to see a girlfriend and hiding in a bathroom when I came round. All of those things have genuinely happened. None of them are strange.

The problem was that I never found anybody. You'd think that in a building with four corridors, if there's one extra person, you eventually open a door and there they are.

The fire drill was the 28th of April.

We do them properly. Everyone out, down the side path, onto the tennis courts, in house lines, fobs swiped at the muster point so the system does the roll call for you. Four minutes, and they complain about it for the rest of the evening. Immie complained about it into the next week.

I counted the line twice while we waited. Twenty-two both times. Denise, standing eight feet from me, looking at the same line of children, counted twenty-one.

The system said twenty-one names present.

It also said twenty-two swipes.

One swipe was logged with no name attached. Just a fob ID, four seconds after the last of mine went through, in a lit car park, in front of me, while I was watching the line.

I took it to Mr Orme, who runs boarding, and he was very reasonable and said it was an IT thing, which is the most persuasive sentence anybody has ever said to me. Of course it was an IT thing. Cloned fob, ghost record, dead card somebody found in a coat pocket and swiped for a laugh. He said he'd raise it with the office.

I was relieved. I went back to the flat and told Jo about it like it was a funny story and she said something about the school still running Windows 7, and we watched most of a film, and I slept fine.

That lasted two days.

The counting got bad after that. Not the numbers. Me.

Half nine, then again at eleven, then again when I got up for the toilet, standing in a dark corridor in my dressing gown counting other people's children. At breakfast. After prep. During Saturday activities. Once on the minibus back from a hockey fixture, where I made the driver wait while I went down the aisle touching the back of every seat.

Jo asked me what was wrong twice and I lied twice. We've been married sixteen years and she knows exactly what I look like when I'm lying. She thought it was the job. She'd been telling me for a year the job was too much and I'd been telling her it wasn't, so I wasn't going to hand her the evidence.

On the 6th of May I did the check at half nine with the lights on and I did it out loud, room by room, the way I'd been doing it for a month.

Four. Four. Three. Three. Four. Four.

I stood at the top of the stairs and said, "Twenty-one," out loud, to nobody, and I went down and wrote 21/21 in the book, and I felt something come loose in my chest that I can only describe as gratitude.

I got about halfway through a cup of tea before I did the addition again.

I want whoever reads this to understand that I wasn't tired and I wasn't confused. I had been counting for five weeks. I know what four and four and three and three and four and four comes to. I said twenty-one because I wanted it to be twenty-one so badly that my mouth just did it, and the terrible thing, the thing I still can't get past, is that for about four minutes it worked.

I went back up and did it again properly and got twenty-two, and I sat on the bottom step of the main stairwell for a while.

On the 12th of May I counted twenty-one.

I did it four times. Doorframes, then out loud, then the sign-in sheet against the fob log, then the breathing, which by then I could do. Twenty-one every time. I wrote 21/21 in the book and I did not feel relieved, because I'd learned two nights earlier exactly what that number felt like when it was a lie, and this one didn't feel like anything at all.

The register has twenty-one names on it. It has had twenty-one names on it since September.

Immie's isn't one of them.

I checked the sign-out book, the medical file, the laundry list, the seating plan, and the photograph of the whole house taken in the first week of term that's been pinned in my office since before any of this started. There are twenty-one children in that photograph. I know all their names and none of them is hers.

I asked Denise. I did it carefully, like I was just chatting, and I've never worked so hard to sound normal in my life.

She said, "Who?"

I asked Jo that night, standing in our kitchen, and Jo said she didn't know an Immie and had I meant Amy over in Ellesmere. Then she opened the cupboard for a cup of tea, took down the otter mug, used it, and said it had been in there for ages and she thought it came with the flat.

She isn't lying to me. She's not being strange about it. She has simply never met her, and the mug is just a mug.

So I've got nothing. No photograph, no name on any list, no other adult on this earth who knows what I'm talking about. What I've got is a page of a red notebook with five weeks of 22/21 on it in my own handwriting, one line where I wrote 21/21 and had to cross it out, and one line where I didn't.

Here's the part I'm sure about, and it's the only part.

The count was high because both of them were in the building.

Which means one of the twenty-one children asleep above my head right now was not here in March, and I have spent four weeks trying to work out which one, and I can't. Every one of them has always been there. I taught all twenty-one of them to cook pasta in September. I have specific memories of every single one.

Last week I came in from the car with the shopping and stopped in our hallway and counted the people in my flat.

Two. Obviously two. It took me about a second and a half and then I had to put the bags down.

That's the thing I'd want you to understand, if you've ever been counted onto a coach, or lined up on a field while somebody ran a finger down a row of you and got to the end and nodded. The count isn't there to protect you. The count is a number, and a number can be made correct.

I did the check last night. Doorframes, hand flat on each one, out loud, lights on.

Twenty-two.

I'm doing it again in an hour and I don't want the number to be right.

I only searched the address because of the rates notice.

Mum's still got the old place at Ashgrove in her name somehow, thirty-one years after we left it, and Brisbane City Council sends her a letter about it roughly once a decade. She's seventy-one and she's in a unit in Chermside and she will not deal with paperwork, so I typed the address into Google to find out who owns it now.

Second result was a YouTube channel called 14 Peyton St.

No profile picture. No description. No subscribers. The videos have no views except the ones I've put on them.

There were four hundred and sixty-something uploads.

I'm going to try to explain this properly because I'm not a writer and if I do it badly you'll think I'm having a breakdown, which is the thing everyone else has already decided. My name's Dane. I do commercial refrigeration — cool rooms, display cabinets, the walk-in freezers behind supermarkets. I'm thirty-eight. I've been divorced for two years and I live by myself in a two-bedroom in Zillmere with a door that locks and a window that doesn't open past about fifteen centimetres because the frame's swollen and I've never fixed it.

I'm telling you about the window because it matters later.

The first video I clicked was the most recent one. Uploaded that morning at 5:51am. Title was just a date.

It's my bedroom. Filmed from up near the ceiling in the corner by the wardrobe, looking down at the bed on a slight angle. Dark, but not pitch — there's a streetlight through my blinds that I've been meaning to do something about for a year. You can see the shape of me under the doona. You can hear the air con, and under that you can hear the fridge in the kitchen cycling, which is a Westinghouse with a compressor that kicks in about every eleven minutes and sounds like someone clearing their throat in another room. I know that sound better than I know my own voice. It was the right fridge. It was my flat.

Seven hours, eleven minutes long. Nothing happens in it. I sat there at my kitchen bench with a coffee going cold and I scrubbed through the whole thing on the timeline and the only movement in seven hours is me rolling over twice and at one point putting my arm out from under the blanket.

I want to be honest about my first reaction, because I think people expect terror and it wasn't that. It was a sort of flat irritation. Like when you find out someone's been talking about you. I assumed straight away it was Kate.

Kate's my ex-wife. We were married nine years and we still share a Google account for the photos because neither of us has ever got around to splitting it, and I thought: right, she's got some app running, or she's set something up, or — I don't know. It didn't make sense but it made more sense than anything else. I rang her at work and I was not particularly nice about it.

She made me send her the link. I heard her go quiet.

"Dane, there's hundreds of these."

"I know."

"No, I mean — scroll down. There's hundreds."

I did the sensible things first. I want that on record because of how the rest of this sounds.

I changed every password I've got. I factory reset my phone. I checked my flat for cameras properly — not a quick look, a proper look, standing on a chair going over the smoke alarm, the air con vent, the light fitting, the back of the wardrobe, behind the skirting where the previous tenant had patched something. I took the smoke alarm apart. I unscrewed the wall plate on the aircon because I install this stuff for a living and I know where you'd put something.

Nothing. There is nothing in my bedroom that could be filming me, and the angle in the videos is a corner of the room where there's a bare wall and a cornice and no fixture of any kind.

I reported the channel. YouTube's automated system said it didn't violate community guidelines, which, fair enough — it's a dark room. I rang a number and got a queue. I emailed a form and got a reply four days later that was clearly a template.

I put a chair under the door handle. I know that's not how door handles work. I did it anyway.

And then that night a new video went up, and the angle had changed.

It was lower. Maybe chest height, still in the corner, but closer in. Close enough that you could see the chair wedged under the door handle in the bottom of the frame, which I sat there looking at for a long time, because it meant whatever this was had seen me do it.

Kate came over on the Saturday and we went through the channel together for about three hours with the laptop between us on the couch, and it was the least awkward we've been since the separation, which I know is a strange thing to notice. She kept saying "this is insane" in a normal voice, like we were looking at a bad rental listing.

She's the one who noticed the room changes.

If you scroll back far enough — and I mean far, you have to load the page over and over, it's hundreds of uploads — the bedroom in the videos stops being my bedroom. It becomes the place I was living in at Wooloowin before the split. Kate's and my bedroom. And before that it's the unit I had in Kedron in my twenties, with the terrible vertical blinds. And before that it's a share house in Greenslopes I've barely thought about in fifteen years.

The uploads go backwards. Every video is one night further back.

"That's your nan's spare room," Kate said, at one point, about a video maybe two-thirds down.

It wasn't my nan's spare room. It was her mum's place at Redcliffe, where we stayed for a week when we were first together. I know the wardrobe. We had an argument in that room about whether to go to her cousin's wedding.

She wouldn't have it. She was absolutely certain, and she got annoyed with me about it, and we left it there because we've had thirty versions of that argument and neither of us has ever won one.

I've gone back and looked at that video eleven times since. I still think it's Redcliffe. But I don't feel the way I felt about it that Saturday, and I can't work out whether that's because she's right or because she said it out loud.

Here's the part where I'd stopped being irritated.

I bought a camera. Cheap Wi-Fi thing from Officeworks, hundred and nineteen dollars, sat it on my chest of drawers pointing at the bed. I had the idea that I'd catch whatever it was. I told Kate I was doing it and she said don't, and I said I have to, and she said that's not the same as having to.

My camera recorded a normal night. Six hours fifty of an empty dark room with a bloke asleep in the middle of it. The door stays shut. Nothing comes in. Nothing moves except me.

The channel uploaded a video of the same night at 5:44am. Same room, same night, same me rolling over at the same times — you can match them up, I did, frame by frame, it's the same night from a different corner.

My camera isn't in it.

It's pointing right at the bed from the top of the chest of drawers, it's got a little blue standby light on the front of it, and in their video the chest of drawers is empty. There's my deodorant and a coin dish and nothing else.

I sat on the floor of my bedroom for a while after that. I'm not going to dress it up.

Then nothing happened for four days.

I mean the uploads kept coming, one a night, but I stopped watching them, and I went to work, and I did a compressor swap at a bakery in Woolloongabba where the owner argued with me for forty minutes about a warranty that expired in 2023. My offsider Dilan brought the same lunch he brings every single day, which is rice and a hard-boiled egg and a container of sambal, and complained about his knee. I went to a barbecue at my brother-in-law's — ex-brother-in-law, still go, long story — and didn't mention any of it to anyone.

You can get used to nearly anything if it's quiet and it happens at the same time every day. I want that understood, because it's the part that frightens me most in hindsight. For about a week I had a thing filming me in a locked room every night and I mostly thought about my van's air conditioning, which has been stuffed since March.

I rang Mum on the Thursday.

I need to explain something about my mother. She's sharp. She does the quiz on the iPad, she's got opinions about the neighbours, there's nothing wrong with her head. But we left Peyton St when I was seven and she has never once talked about the last night we were there. I've asked twice in my life. The first time I was maybe nineteen and she got up and started doing the dishes in the middle of my sentence. The second time was at Dad's funeral and she said "not today, love," which was fair, and I never tried again.

Also — and this is the thing I'd never once thought about properly — when she stays at my place, she doesn't sleep in the same room twice. First night, spare room. Second night, she's on the couch. Third night she's back in the spare room with the mattress turned around the other way. She's done it at my place, at Kate's and my place, at my sister's. I have complained about this to people. I've told it as a funny story about my difficult mother.

I asked her straight out. I said, Mum, I've found something online, and it's got footage of me asleep, and it goes back years, and I think it goes back further than that.

She didn't ask what I meant. That's what I keep coming back to. She didn't ask a single question.

She said: "Have you got it up there in front of you now?"

I said yes.

She said: "Don't scroll all the way down."

Then she asked about my sister's kids and whether I was eating, and when I tried to come back to it she said she had a thing at four, and she does not have a thing at four, she has never had a thing at four in her life.

I scrolled all the way down.

It takes a long time. The page loads about twenty at a time and there are four hundred and seventy-one videos on that channel, and by the time you're near the bottom the thumbnails have stopped being any room I recognise.

It's a smaller room. Yellow-ish, in the way old footage goes yellow, except this isn't old footage, the file quality is identical to last night's. There's a window high on the left wall. And the bed in it is a single, up against the wall, and the shape under the blanket is small.

You can see the whole grid of them at once if you shrink the browser down. Four hundred and seventy-one little dark rectangles, all the same room-shape, all the same angle-ish, and the shape in the bed gets smaller and smaller as your eye goes down the page, until near the bottom it's about the size of a rolled-up towel.

That's the thing I can't stop seeing. Not any one video. The page.

The oldest upload is dated four years ago, which is nonsense, because I was thirty-four four years ago and the child in that video is about six. But it's dated four years ago and it was uploaded at 5:39am like all the rest.

Right. The last thing, and then I'll stop.

Two days ago the channel put up a video that isn't like the others. It's at the top of the page with a little grey label on it.

It's scheduled. Not uploaded — scheduled. For tomorrow.

And it's got a title, where all the others just have dates.

LAST NIGHT.

I've been reading that title for two days trying to decide which way round it means. Last night as in yesterday. Last night as in the last one. I don't think it's being clever. I don't think it's talking to me at all — I don't think anything on that channel has ever been for me. Four hundred and seventy-one videos and no views. It's not a show. It's a list.

But here's what I actually wanted to tell you, and it's the reason I'm writing this at ten past four in the morning with every light in the flat on.

I went back through the uploads to check the dates against my calendar, because I wanted to know if it had missed any nights — the nights I stayed at Kate's, the week I was in hospital with my shoulder. And I found something I should have found in the first hour, and didn't, because I'd already decided what this was.

The videos aren't uploaded the morning after.

The upload timestamps are all 5:39, 5:44, 5:51 — I'd been seeing those and assuming, like an idiot, that it was the morning after the night in the video. It isn't. Check any of them against the date in the title and it's the morning before. Every single video of me sleeping went up before I went to sleep.

It was never filming me.

I keep trying to get to the end of that thought and stopping. For a month I've been checking a camera. There's no camera. Something has had a list of my nights since before I had them, in order, oldest at the bottom, and it has been putting them up one at a time, and it is nearly at the top of the list.

I'm not going to sleep tonight. I've been up since Tuesday and I've got two boxes of Mother in the fridge and I've decided, and I know how that sounds, and I don't care.

The scheduled one is still sitting up there at the top of the channel.

It's got a duration listed. Seven hours and forty minutes.