The first drawing came home on a Tuesday. Orange construction paper. Emma's bedroom, rendered in crayon: purple walls, star nightlight, a small figure with yellow hair sleeping peacefully.

And in the doorway, a shape.

Tall. Dark. No face—just a black scribble where features should be. Proportions wrong in ways that feel intentional, like she's trying to capture something she doesn't have the skill to render.

"That's the man who reads to me."

Emma is five years old. Her mother died eight months ago. The grief counselor says children process loss in strange ways, create imaginary figures to fill the absence.

But the drawings keep coming. Every day, the man is closer. First the doorway. Then the foot of the bed. Then beside the pillow, those wrong-long hands almost touching her sleeping form.

The camera he sets up gets turned to face the wall. The nights he sleeps outside her door, he hears her talking to someone—question, pause, answer—and when he bursts in, the room is empty but charged with presence.

"He's not in the house anymore, Daddy. He's in me now."

When Emma picks up a crayon and fills an entire page with darkness—a face that somehow looks back even without eyes—her father understands too late. The man has finished reading to his daughter.

Now she's going to read to him.