The letter arrived without a postmark.
Dani turned it over twice before slitting the envelope. Inside: a single photograph, black and white, of a woman she didn't recognize standing outside a building she did — her building, her lobby, the brass mailbox with the broken hinge she'd been meaning to fix for three years.
On the back, in handwriting she knew as well as her own: You should have stayed gone.
Her brother had been dead for six months.
She sat down before she fell down. The photo landed on the kitchen table, face-up, and the woman in it stared back with an expression that wasn't quite a smile. Dark coat. Hair pulled back. One hand raised — not waving. Pointing.
Dani's phone buzzed. Unknown number.
She answered before she'd decided to.
"Did you get it?" The voice was male, low, careful. Not her brother's. Nothing like her brother's.
"Who is this?"
"Someone who knew Marcus." A pause. "Someone who knows why he's not here to explain it himself."
Outside her window, the city hummed its indifferent morning. A cab horn. A dog barking. The specific nothing-sound of a Tuesday pretending everything was fine.
Don't, she told herself. Don't ask.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"To warn you," he said. "The woman in that photo has been watching your building for eleven days. She was watching Marcus too, near the end." Another pause, longer this time, weighted with something she couldn't name. "She works for the people who paid him to disappear."
The line went dead.
Dani looked at the photograph again. At the woman. At the building.
At the figure half-visible in the lobby glass behind her — small, blurred, already turning away.
It looked exactly like Marcus.
#fiction #mystery #serialfiction #thriller