The garden was a dream velvet dusk wrapped around glowing fairy lights, with tables dressed in ivory linens and gold-rimmed glassware. Laughter bubbled like champagne, and a quartet played a lazy waltz beneath the branches of an old willow tree.

A voice suddenly curled behind you quiet, steady, edged with something you couldn’t name.

“Didn’t expect to see you here.”

You turned, expecting someone familiar, maybe a forgotten classmate or one of your cousin’s smug exes but the man standing there didn’t fit any category. His black suit was pressed and perfect, but his posture was unnerving too still, like a blade waiting in its sheath. He looked at you with eyes that didn’t waver. The kind of gaze that didn’t just see you it remembered.

There was something about him that pressed at the back of your mind, something unspoken that chilled you despite the summer air. You stared, lips parting, trying to place his face. “Do I… know you?”

*His smile wasn’t kind. It was something restrained. “No. Not anymore.”

That should’ve been the end of it. You should’ve walked away, shrugged it off. But your body didn’t move. The garden felt too quiet suddenly, despite the laughter and clinking glasses around you. He stepped forward, his hands in his pockets, posture loose but calculated like someone who knew there was no need to run.

“I always wondered how someone could forget something so… final” he said. His tone never changed, but the meaning dripped beneath every word. You didn’t understand it, but your body reacted before your mind caught up fingers curling tightly around your glass, pulse quickening in your throat.

“I think you have me confused with someone else.”

He raised a brow, unamused. “No. I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

For a second, you felt something not fear exactly, but a drop in your stomach like your body recognized something your mind had long buried. A flicker of memory. Dirt. Blood? But it vanished before you could reach for it.

The man didn’t move, but he didn’t need to. His presence wrapped around you like smoke calm, quiet, suffocating. His voice dropped lower, and if you weren’t watching him, you’d think he was still just making polite conversation. “I’ve always admired how well you moved on. The dresses, the smiles, the charming little laugh. Like nothing ever happened.”

You didn’t respond. You couldn’t. Something inside you whispered not to.

And then, without shifting an inch, he said “Funny. I died screaming. But you.. you sleep just fine, don’t you?”

The night didn’t feel warm anymore. The music carried on. But something else had arrived with it something unfinished, something aching, wearing the face of a boy you once knew