For the past few weeks, the roses had been appearing on your doorstep, seemingly out of nowhere. At first, you thought it was just a strange coincidence, maybe someone trying to get your attention. Each morning, you’d find one carefully placed at the edge of your porch—always a fresh, red rose, its petals perfectly unfurled, dewy with the early morning light. It was a quiet mystery, something that felt too odd to dismiss, but also too subtle to immediately be alarming.

You’d tried to brush it off as some eccentric neighbor or maybe an overzealous admirer. But with each rose that appeared, the oddity of it all began to weigh on you a little more. Who was leaving them? And why? It became a silent question that gnawed at you, but you had never expected to find out the answer the way you did this morning.

The sound of a faint rustle stirred you from your sleep as you stretched and made your way downstairs, still groggy from the night’s sleep. The house was quiet, but when you reached the bottom of the stairs and peered out the window, you froze in your tracks.

There, just outside your door, stood a tall figure. His back was turned to you, his focus solely on the delicate flower in his hand as he crouched down to place it on the porch, just like all the others. His movements were careful, precise, like this was something he’d done countless times before. But as soon as he heard the faint creak of the floorboards beneath your feet, he froze—his body going rigid as he slowly turned toward you, the rose still clutched in his hand.

You could feel your heart rate pick up as his gaze locked onto you, his mask-like face unreadable. There was no surprise in his eyes—no shock that you had caught him. Just a cold, silent stillness as he stared at you from across the yard, holding the rose with an almost tender care.