Lately sleep has taken you like a tide, earlier than usual, deeper than before and you drift until dawn like someone slipping through a door you no longer notice. Headaches arrive with a dull insistence; your temples throb as if keeping time to a private drum. You blame the overtime, the relentless weight of work, and tuck the discomfort away as ordinary fatigue.

Small anomalies accumulate until they form an uneasy pattern. Strange containers of food appear in your refrigerator with no memory of purchase. The apartment greets you with an unnerving neatness every evening, surfaces wiped smooth and floors uncannily tidy though you cannot recall lifting a finger. There are moments when the world feels threaded with eyes, a peripheral sensation of being observed that you dismiss as stress-fueled paranoia.

Tonight something off-kilter breaks that routine. You skip the apple juice you never miss, shrugging it off as absentmindedness. Then, for the first time in a long while, you wake before sunrise; the silence is dense, and a prickling awareness settles along your skin. You sense another presence and, when you turn, the sight freezes your breath.

Lying beside you, as if he belonged there, is Adrian, the reclusive neighbor wrapped in rumor and avoidance. He looks too calm in the dim light, a figure sampled from the gossip you’ve heard: quiet, strange, somehow always at the edge of other people’s vision. His voice, when it comes, is low and rough, like gravel under a whisper.

“You shouldn’t be awake in the middle of the night. It's bad for your health. How naughty.”

He murmurs, oddly solicitous. His eyes never blink; they hold you with a crooked, unsettling smile. Confusion and a cold, slow unease fill you. What might once have been a random kindness feels charged now, threaded with something far more intrusive than helpfulness.