At first, it was just a glove. Then the keys vanished. After that, an old scarf went missing. She could’ve chalked it up to age, forgetfulness, fatigue—until the fifth thing disappeared in a month. Her sewing box, always perched on the living room shelf, had slipped into thin air. Margaret Whitmore sank onto her chair, heart pounding not with fear but with slow, simmering irritation. Her tidy little world was unravelling at the seams, and some invisible hand was plucking at the threads with unsettling precision.
“Alright then,” she said to the empty room, voice sharp as the winter draught creeping under the door. “Fancy a game, do we?”
The flat offered no reply. Only the grandfather clock in the hall ticked away, ruthless as a metronome. Margaret had lived alone for eight years. Her husband had left quietly—mid-nap on the sofa, newspaper splayed across his lap. She’d kept everything just so since then: the same worn dining table, the same curtains, even his chipped “World’s Best Dad” mug, its lettering faded to a ghost.
Her son visited sporadically, every few months, hauling bags of tinned soup and paracetamol. He’d grumble about her not answering the phone, then vanish again, words clipped by a schedule crammed with work and school runs. She never minded. He had his own life, his own debts. She’d smile, nod, wave him off, then linger in the dim hallway, tracing the peeling paint with her eyes until the silence grew thick enough to taste.
But a month ago, something peculiar had moved in. Not suddenly—more like a stealthy tailor snipping at the edges of her reality. First came the smell: dry leaves smouldering, like her grandparents’ old cottage in the Cotswolds. Then the draughts. Curtains twitching with no windows open. Shadows slinking across walls, out of step with the light. The house was breathing in a rhythm she didn’t recognise.
Margaret said nothing. Just sat by the window more often, feet tucked under her, cradling a gone-cold cuppa, watching snow settle over her little Yorkshire town. She’d remember her father teaching her to darn socks, his fingers guiding hers when she tangled the wool. How she and her husband had huddled by the radiator during that dreadful winter in the ‘90s, laughing as they burned damp firewood. The first time they’d seen a mobile phone and bickered half the night about how it worked before dozing off, still squabbling in their sleep.
Then things started vanishing. Trinkets first—a button, a hanky, a hairpin. Then the proper losses: her favourite shawl, her reading glasses, the photo album. No clues, no logic. Just gaps where bits of her life had been neatly snipped away.
“Where’ve you gone?” she asked the air one evening. The words rang louder than she’d meant, as if the walls had flinched. She froze.
From the bedroom came a whisper: “Here.”
Not eerie, not menacing. Just small. Unfamiliar. And horribly, undeniably real.
She didn’t rush in. Made tea instead, sat, watched the steam curl like a riddle. Finally, she squared her shoulders and pushed the creaking door open. The room was ordinary—bed made, curtains drawn, son’s school photo smirking from the nightstand. But the air hummed. A presence, feather-light but warm, like sunlight through linen.
“Who are you?” she asked, calm as you please.
No answer. Just a floorboard’s sigh, as if someone had shifted their weight.
The next day, her poetry notebook went missing—the one full of addresses of friends long gone. That evening, she found a postcard on the table. No stamp, no name. Just two shaky words: *I’m here.*
After that, they coexisted. The other one in shadows, in curtain-shivers, in the way the light bent oddly by the wardrobe. Margaret in the clatter of kettles and the scrape of butter on toast. No conversations. But one day, opening the linen cupboard, she found every lost item—folded, clean, as if someone had been keeping them safe.
And then it clicked. This wasn’t an intruder. It was *her*. The one she’d buried under years of *not nows* and *maybe laters*. The one who’d sung off-key at bonfires, danced to crackly cassette tapes, written letters she never sent. The one who’d faded, stitch by stitch, into the background.
Margaret wrapped the shawl around her shoulders—it still smelled of lavender and decades—and stepped onto the balcony. Lit a cigarette for the first time in nine years. The smoke curled upwards, taking the weight with it.
Snow drifted down, soft as dust. Below, the town glittered, its lights winking through the flakes like the whole world whispering back: *About time you showed up.*
*Where’d you go?* she thought. Then, smiling: *Oh. There you are.*
