Her knees gave out before her brain caught up, and she sank straight onto the floor, one hand locked white-knuckled around the doorknob. She couldn't look away from the woman's hollow, blood-rimmed stare even as every nerve in her body screamed to run.
Then, as suddenly as she'd appeared, the woman vanished. Gone in a blink, as though she'd never been there at all.
If that was a hallucination, Ding Jia thought distantly, then her brain had developed a deeply unwelcome new hobby. Maybe I should move up my psychologist's next appointment to tomorrow?
The dog stopped barking the instant the woman disappeared, and that single fact landed harder than anything else. The dog had reacted too. Which meant…
Oh no. Oh no, that meant it had been real. Otherwise, the dog was hallucinating with her too. Do they even hallucinate?
Her stomach dropped. She pressed a trembling hand over her mouth, too rattled to remember she was currently falling apart in front of a complete stranger. And his dog.
Luo Yang, for his part, was simply relieved Arthur had finally stopped barking — Arthur, who'd been losing his mind at a blank stretch of hallway wall for reasons that made no sense to him whatsoever. It wasn't until he saw his neighbor's reaction that he started to wonder if there'd been something there after all.
He glanced at the wall in question. Just a painting — a perfectly mediocre one, the kind sold in bulk to furnish luxury buildings. Certainly nothing that should have a grown woman nearly fainting at her own front door.
He studied her more carefully. Something about her face tugged at his memory and then it clicked. The woman from the rooftop yesterday. And now that he looked properly, a face he vaguely recognized from a film clip his sister had shown him months ago, gushing about some actress's performance. He hadn't paid much attention at the time. He rarely watched dramas.
Which was, in fact, the exact reason her name had landed near the top of a casting shortlist his producer assembled for the film adaptation of his book: a list he'd ultimately ignored in favor of setting his own conditions for every role. He hadn't expected to end up living across the hall from her regardless.
"Miss, are you alright? I apologize for my dog — he seems to have startled you." His voice carried none of the warmth his words implied, but the apology, at least, sounded genuine.
She didn't respond, still lost somewhere behind her own eyes. Arthur, apparently more in tune with her distress than his owner, trotted over and began licking her face with enthusiastic concern, which finally jolted her back into the present.
Luo Yang pulled the dog back gently and crouched in front of her. "Miss?" He snapped his fingers once, lightly, in front of her face.
She blinked hard, surfacing properly this time, and found herself staring at two unfamiliar — well, one familiar, one decidedly furry — faces.
"I'm sorry. My dog's barking must have frightened you," he said, standing and offering his hand.
His dog. Right. Of course it was the dog's fault, and not the literal corpse standing in her hallway moments ago.
She accepted his hand and let him pull her upright, already rebuilding her composure piece by piece. Years of acting training kicking in exactly when she needed it most.
"It's fine. It's been a while since I've been around a dog, so it just startled me," she said smoothly, the lie sliding out without a flicker of hesitation.
Internally, she was still reeling. Externally, she looked like a woman mildly inconvenienced by an overenthusiastic Labrador.
Once she'd convinced him she was fine, he gave a short nod and turned to walk back toward the door directly across from hers.
Her breath caught.
Of course. Of course the unfairly attractive man from the rooftop wasn't just some random neighbor in the building.
He was her next-door neighbor.