"Two orders of kebab, one without seasoning," Luo Yang ordered smoothly at a street cart they passed during their walk — jog, technically, though at this point it had slowed into something closer to a walk with a dog attached.
Ding Jia knelt to offer Arthur water from a small collapsible bottle she'd started carrying specifically for these morning outings, scratching under his chin while he lapped at it with theatrical gratitude. The vendor handed over two paper-wrapped skewers a moment later, and Luo Yang passed her the seasoned one without being asked, keeping the plain one for himself.
"You don't even know if I like seasoning," she said, falling into step beside the pair once he'd taken the leash back, adjusting his lowered cap before picking the pace back up.
"You complained about bland hospital food for five straight minutes when we were having dinner. I assumed the opposite of that was your preferred flavor."
"...That's annoyingly accurate."
"I write characters for a living. Paying attention is the job."
She didn't have a good response to that, so she ate her kebab instead, content to let the comfortable silence stretch between them as they wove through the morning crowd. They passed enough people that she silently thanked whatever luck kept her unrecognized — mask, cap, sunglasses, the full disguise kit, though it was starting to feel less like hiding from fans and more like hiding specifically from Lin Lin, who would absolutely murder her if a single photo surfaced of her casually jogging with an unidentified man this soon after her "miraculous recovery" press cycle had finally started dying down.
Why did I agree to this again? she wondered, glancing sideways at Arthur's smug, satisfied expression as he trotted along like he personally owned the sidewalk. Right. The puppy eyes. It was always the puppy eyes — hers, apparently, just as easily talked into things as anyone else's.
After half an hour, they slowed to a stop a few meters from a children's playground, where kids swung and shrieked happily while their parents traded gossip on nearby benches, sunscreen and complaints about school fees drifting faintly on the breeze. Ding Jia wiped sweat from her forehead and resettled her cap, letting her breathing even out as she took in the scene. An entirely ordinary Tuesday morning, the kind she hadn't gotten to simply exist inside in longer than she could properly remember.
Luo Yang knelt to give Arthur water and a few treats from his jacket pocket, drawing a handful of curious, lingering glances from passing women despite his deliberately unapproachable energy — the cap, the silence, the way he answered nothing beyond what was strictly necessary. He didn't seem to notice the attention, or didn't care, which only seemed to make people look harder.
She kept a polite distance from him on the bench, just far enough that no one passing by would assume they were together. Which, technically, they weren't. Not really. Neighbors who'd developed a habit of walking the same dog at the same hour wasn't a relationship by any definition Lin Lin would accept, even if Ding Jia was finding it increasingly difficult to explain, even to herself, why she kept saying yes to these mornings.
She was midway through enjoying the rare normalcy of the moment: sun, sugar from the kebab glaze, a dog she didn't have to be careful around — when the sound returned.
—shutter.
—shutter.
Her hand pressed instinctively over one ear, a useless gesture against a sound that lived somewhere inside her skull rather than the air around her. She glanced toward Luo Yang, half-hoping, half-dreading that he might react too, that something in his face might flicker the way it had, briefly, the night Arthur growled at an empty hallway.
He didn't. He kept feeding Arthur treats with the same flat, unbothered focus as before. Whatever this was, it was hers alone to hear, the same way it had been hers alone at the photoshoot, hers alone at the park, hers alone at three in the morning more nights than she wanted to count lately.
Frustration simmered under her calm exterior. Ever since waking from that coma, the strange things had only piled up, one after another, with no end in sight and no explanation that didn't sound like the opening line of a referral to a neurologist. And she had a fairly solid, deeply unwelcome theory about what they all had in common. A theory she'd been actively avoiding saying out loud, to anyone, for weeks.
—shutter.
—shutter.
She pressed her lips together, weighing the absolute social disaster of asking the question sitting heavy on her tongue against the much larger disaster of never asking it at all and slowly losing her mind in silence.
"Luo Yang."
He glanced over, unhurried. "Hm?"
"Do you believe in ghosts?"
His hand stilled briefly against Arthur's fur. Barely a beat, gone almost before she registered it, but she'd spent fifteen years reading micro-expressions for a living, and she didn't imagine that pause.
"No," he said, without a trace of hesitation, voice as flat and certain as if she'd asked whether the sky was blue.
She turned fully toward him now, genuinely thrown. "Really?"
"Mm."
A horror author who didn't believe in ghosts. Something about that felt deeply, almost comically contradictory. Like a chef who didn't eat food, or a doctor afraid of blood, and she turned the thought over twice before her curiosity finally won out over her better judgment.
"Then how do you even write your stories? Multiple books deep into a series about restless spirits and centuries-old grudges, and you don't believe a single word of the supernatural premise?"
He returned his attention to Arthur, answering as though the question barely warranted the breath it took to form. "Research. Imagination. Neither requires belief. I don't believe in dragons either, and I still wrote one in my second book."
"That's different. Nobody actually thinks dragons are real."
"Plenty of people think ghosts are real for exactly the same reason people think dragons are real. They want an explanation for something they can't otherwise account for. Grief. Guilt. A noise in an old house. It's a comforting story more often than it's an actual sighting."
—shutter.
—shutter.
She narrowed her eyes at him, equal parts amused and suspicious, searching his profile for some crack in that infuriating calm.
"...You're joking with me. Aren't you?"
He didn't answer. He didn't need to. The absence of a denial was answer enough, and somehow that was worse than if he'd simply said yes.
She sat there a moment longer with the sound still ringing faintly in her ears, watching a man who'd built an entire career out of things that didn't scare him, sitting two feet away from a woman currently losing a quiet war against exactly those things.
Maybe, she thought, deflating slightly, I should get my ears checked. And my brain, while I'm at it. If this isn't ghosts, it's definitely something wrong inside my own head — and at this point, I'm honestly not sure which answer would scare me less.