Life took on a quiet rhythm again, but it was the kind that made you hold your breath. Mama walked through our tiny apartment with her shoulders high, her hands always full—laundry, dishes, hospital charts. Her silence was louder than any scream. I watched her try to stretch peace over our days like a thin sheet, but it always tore somewhere.
The mornings were cold. The air tasted like metal. I'd walk to school beside Lisa, clutching my backpack tight, with Lala hidden deep inside. One ear gone. Stitched together with Mama's old thread. Just like us.
Nothing had happened for two weeks.
That made it worse.
Every knock startled us. Every silence rang with what could be coming. I started to imagine I heard him breathing outside our windows. I checked the locks three times before bed. Mama said I was "just being careful." But she checked them again too.
Then one morning, we found the window latch in the kitchen undone.
Mama stared at it too long.
"I must have forgotten," she whispered. But her eyes didn't believe her mouth.
She didn't forget things like that.
That week, a red car parked outside the school for three days straight. I don't know why I noticed. But it didn't feel right. On the third day, Lisa saw it too.
"He's back," she muttered, her voice like broken chalk. "He's watching again."
She stayed with me the entire day.
Then came the second letter.
It was tucked under our doormat. Mama saw it first. Her hands trembled as she opened it, her lips pressed together until they were white.
It read:
"She still looks like me, you know."
No name. No return address. Just that. Eight words. They echoed for days.
Mama stopped humming in the mornings.
The next week, there was another knock at the door. Soft. Controlled. Almost polite.
We froze. Every muscle in my body went stiff. Mama moved toward the door, knife in hand, breathing too quietly. She peeked through the curtain—nothing.
No one.
But something lay on the doormat.
A folded paper. Inside, a crude drawing of a child. A girl. Holding a teddy bear with one ear.
Mama dropped the paper like it burned her fingers.
I didn't sleep that night. Neither did she. I heard her pacing the kitchen in her socks, whispering things to herself. I didn't know if they were prayers or curses.
At school, I began to flinch at footsteps. When a boy in class shouted out an answer, I ducked like something had hit me. The teacher paused. No one said anything.
Lisa started sitting closer.
"Maybe we should tell someone," she whispered once.
I shook my head.
Who would believe us?
Three nights later, I woke to a sound. Not a knock. Just a creak. The kind a door makes when someone's trying to move quietly.
I clutched Lala and held my breath.
It was nothing. Or maybe it was everything. I lay awake until dawn.
That morning, Mama's hands shook so badly she spilled tea on her wrist and didn't even flinch.
Our apartment was no longer a home. It was a waiting room for fear.
I stopped talking in class. I stopped playing. I avoided the swing set during recess. I didn't draw anymore.
Because I knew he was coming.
I didn't know when.
But ghosts don't knock twice.
And monsters don't need permission to enter your life. They just need time.
And we were running out of it.