I didn’t know she was dead when I married her.
Everyone in Hong Kong said Priya was brilliant — the kind of woman who could walk into a room and rearrange the air itself. She spoke softly, but her words always landed like a blade laid gently on the table. She had this way of looking at you, like she already knew the next ten things you were going to say.
I thought that was just intelligence.
I didn’t realize it was memory.
Not hers — mine.
The First Sign
It started small.
She would finish my sentences.
Then she would finish my thoughts.
Then she would answer questions I hadn’t asked yet.
One night, while we were eating noodles in our tiny flat in Mong Kok, she said:
“You shouldn’t worry about the man in the stairwell.”
I froze.
I hadn’t told her about him — the pale man who watched me every night as I climbed the stairs, his head tilted too far to one side, like it was hanging from a loose hinge.
“How did you know?” I whispered.
She smiled. “Because he’s been following you since before we met.”
The Second Sign
Priya never slept.
I would wake up at 3 a.m. and find her standing by the window, staring down at the neon-lit street. Her reflection never quite matched her movements. Sometimes it lagged. Sometimes it blinked when she didn’t.
One night I caught her whispering to the glass.
“What are you saying?” I asked.
She didn’t turn around.
“I’m telling them to leave you alone.”
“Who?”
“The ones who think you’re still mine.”
The Truth
It was the old woman downstairs who finally told me.
“Your wife,” she said, gripping my wrist with fingers like dried roots, “died three years ago. In this building. On the seventh floor.”
“But… I live on the seventh floor.”
“Yes,” the old woman said. “That’s why she chose you.”
The Confrontation
I went home shaking.
Priya was waiting in the dark, sitting perfectly still on the couch, hands folded like she was posing for a portrait.
“You talked to her,” she said.
Her voice wasn’t angry.
It was disappointed.
“Are you dead?” I asked.
She tilted her head — the same way the man in the stairwell did.
“I was,” she said. “But you brought me back.”
“How?”
“You loved me before you met me.”
My stomach dropped. “What does that mean?”
She stood, and the shadows clung to her like wet cloth.
“You dreamed of me. For years. You built me in your mind. And when I died, I followed the dream back to you.”
The Ending
I tried to run.
But the stairwell man was waiting.
And behind him, more shapes — pale, bent, whispering.
Priya appeared beside me, her hand sliding into mine, cold as winter metal.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “You’re part of us now.”
“Us?”
She smiled — too wide, too knowing.
“The dreamers. The dead. The ones who live in the cracks between thoughts.”
The lights flickered.
The walls breathed.
And the last thing I saw before everything went dark was her reflection in the stairwell window.
It wasn’t her face.
It was mine.
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