It started with the little things. Receipts missing from your purse. Notes you’d thrown away appearing neatly folded on your desk. A pen you lost turning up in your jacket pocket. You brushed it off as forgetfulness—until the photographs arrived.

Candid shots of you: tying your hair, laughing with a friend, asleep at your desk. Always perfect angles, always unseen.

Then came the phone calls. Unknown numbers. The silence on the other end stretched too long, like someone was savoring the sound of your breath.

At night, gifts appeared at your door. Flowers, sometimes. Other times, stranger things—a lipstick you’d run out of, a scarf you’d dropped weeks ago, even an empty coffee cup with your lipstick stain still on the rim.

Your friends laughed it off. Paranoid, they said. You watch too many thrillers. But the unease only grew.

One evening, your laptop screen flickered on by itself. Folders opened. Videos filled the screen—grainy, shaky footage of you. Eating. Showering. Sleeping. Every moment documented. The green light of your webcam glared like an unblinking eye.

And then you noticed the shrine. Hidden in a corner of your apartment you never used—a space you swore you’d cleaned weeks ago. On the wall: your photographs. Polaroids. Drawings. A lock of your hair taped in the center like a holy relic.

Pinned beneath it all was a single note, written in your own handwriting. “No one will ever love you the way I do.”

Your stomach dropped. You hadn’t written that.

A shadow shifted outside your window.

They were still there. Watching. Waiting. Certain that you already belonged to them.