Ding Jia didn't sleep much, even with Arthur's solid weight pinning half the couch and Luo Yang's pen scratching steadily somewhere across the room until well past one in the morning. Not because she was afraid, exactly — she'd survived worse nights than this one on pure spite alone — but because her brain had apparently decided two a.m. was the optimal time to run a full audit of every strange thing that had happened to her since waking up. That bloodied female. That shutter. Then that photo from her stalker.
Coma patients report sensory disturbances for months post-recovery. That's documented. That's normal. She'd read three separate articles confirming it during her hospital stay, back when "why does my own apartment feel haunted" wasn't yet a category of problem she had. Auditory hallucinations, phantom smells, occasional visual artifacts — all consistent with extended unconsciousness and the brain re-learning how to filter stimuli.
Yes, that could be it.
It was a perfectly reasonable theory. It had one flaw, which was that dogs didn't generally hallucinate alongside the humans who owned them, and Arthur had reacted to that thing in her hallway just as violently as she had. And she acted out of her character by helping a stranger, just because he was the sibling of that bloodied female that appeared before her. Which might mean she believes that she really saw the girl?
She shut her eyes, shaking the contradiction away, irritated, and left before Luo Yang woke up, slipping back across the hall while the building was still grey and quiet.
She received a text message from her bodyguards before midnight that everything was clear and checked in her apartment. And as she got inside, her eyes ran around the room and found nothing out of place.
A sigh escaped from her before deciding to just get some shut eye after a long day.
By nine, she was sitting in her entertainment agency's security office, mask and cap discarded the moment the door shut behind her, running calculations of an entirely different kind. If this leaks, it's not a scandal, it's a liability story — sympathy coverage, but Lin Lin will want a statement ready within six hours regardless. If it doesn't leak, I still need a contingency for filming days I might have to reschedule.
Fifteen years in an industry that ate hesitation alive had taught her to think three steps past whatever was currently terrifying her, mostly because stopping to just feel the terror had never once been an option she could afford in the moment. She'd process it properly later, the way she always did.
Lin Lin paced rather than sat, arms crossed so tightly it looked less like a defensive posture and more like she was physically holding herself together. Two security officers stood near the door. A junior detective Lin Lin had personally called in a favor sat across the table, notepad open, pen tapping an impatient rhythm against the page.
"Before we open it," the detective said, "I want to confirm — you've received items from this same sender before. Multiple times, over multiple years."
"Three years, give or take," Lin Lin answered for her, voice tight with restrained fury rather than fear. "Dolls, mostly. Letters. We've reported some of it before. Nothing ever stuck because nothing ever technically crossed a legal line — until now, apparently."
"It started as letters, then turned to gifts. It was warming at first, that person even has their own butterfly signature. That's why we knew it was from the same person."
"And the handwriting on this box matches the previous items?"
"Identical. The same butterfly stitched into the wrapping every time. Same loops on the letters. We even studied the strokes, and it was the same even to the dot." Lin Lin's jaw tightened. "Just open it. Please."
The detective snapped on a pair of gloves, peeled back the wrapping paper with careful, deliberate movements, and lifted the lid.
Ding Jia heard Lin Lin's sharp intake of breath before she fully processed what she was looking at herself.
A hospital ID bracelet. Faded, slightly yellowed plastic, the kind every patient wore clipped around their wrist for the duration of an admission. Printed across it, still legible despite the wear, was a name, a date of birth, and an admission date that lined up exactly — to the day — with the night she'd been brought into the hospital in a coma.
Her own name. Her own bracelet. The one that should have been cut off and discarded the day she woke up, alongside the IV line and the heart monitor leads, never to be seen again.
Tucked beneath it, folded once, was a small printed photograph — grainy, clearly taken on an older camera or phone, of a hospital bed with a young woman lying motionless in it, machines surrounding her, taken from an angle far too close and far too intimate to have been shot from a hallway through a window.
Someone had been inside the room.
Possibility one, Ding Jia thought immediately: a staff member with poor judgment and a camera phone, who never reported it because he knew exactly how that would look. Possibility two: a visitor who shouldn't have had access at all, which is worse, but still explainable through nothing more exotic than bad hospital security. Possibility three—
She made herself stop there. Possibility three wasn't ready to be examined in a room with a detective taking notes. Of course, it borders on the paranormal that will instantly throw her to a hospital by the end of the day.
Scrawled across the inside of the box lid, in handwriting she now recognized instantly and would recognize for the rest of her life, were three words.
I never left.
The room went very quiet. Even the detective's pen had stopped moving.
"This bracelet," he said slowly, turning it over in gloved fingers, "should have been disposed of according to hospital protocol the day you were discharged. Either someone retrieved it from medical waste before disposal, or—"
"Or someone had access to it before that point," Lin Lin finished, voice flat with barely controlled rage. "While she was still admitted."
While she was still admitted. Ding Jia ran the timeline again, deliberately, refusing to let the thought spiral past what the facts actually supported. A year of unconsciousness. Dozens of staff rotations. Visiting hours she'd never been awake to monitor. It was entirely, depressingly plausible that a person with bad intentions and decent access could have come and gone from that room a hundred times without anyone thinking twice about one more face in scrubs.
It didn't require a ghost. It required a security gap and a patient man, and patient men with cameras were a problem law enforcement actually had tools for.
She held onto that thought the way she'd held onto a script she'd actually rehearsed — solid, familiar, something her racing mind could grip instead of sliding straight toward the doctor with blood on his hands and a smile that had never once looked human.
"I need a full list of every staff member, visitor, and contractor with floor access during my admission," she said, voice clipped and businesslike, the same tone she used negotiating contract clauses. "Every name. No exceptions. And I want the visitor sign-in sheets cross-referenced against actual staff schedules — if someone forged credentials to get on that floor, a name on a list won't catch it, but a shift mismatch will."
The detective looked up, faintly surprised. "That's... a fairly specific request."
"I've spent a decade reading contracts for a living." It wasn't an explanation she owed him, but it bought her a second of feeling competent again, which she badly needed right now.
"We'll cross-reference everything," he said, already writing. "I'm escalating this to a formal stalking and unlawful entry investigation, effective immediately."
"They might not even have the footage anymore," Lin Lin said grimly, dropping into the chair beside Ding Jia. "It's been over a year."
"We'll request anyway."
After he left to start the paperwork, Lin Lin exhaled hard, rubbing her temples. "New driver rotation starts today. No solo outings, no confirmed schedules shared further out than twenty-four hours, and I want two more guards added on your security detail before location filming." She said it like a checklist, already moving past the moment because stopping to feel it fully clearly wasn't an option she could afford yet either. "I don't care if it makes the production harder."
"Understood." Ding Jia meant it. She also knew, in the same breath, that nothing about today's discovery was going to stop her from showing up to set in four days — she'd survived a thirty-nine-degree fever through an entire shoot once; she wasn't about to let a stalker's mind games take a role from her too.
The costume fitting that afternoon was a routine for filming prep. Yu Xia fussed over fabric while Xiao Chan ran through the shooting schedule out loud, location names and call times blurring past in the practiced monotone of someone who'd memorized the document the night before.
"Week three moves to the abandoned temple complex outside the city for the second-act sequence," Xiao Chan said, flipping a page. "Production secured it through a historical preservation grant — we only get the permit window for nine days total."
"Abandoned for how long?" Ding Jia asked, mostly out of professional habit. Location history mattered for performance research; she'd learned that much from years of grounding a character in real texture rather than just memorized blocking.
"Forty years, give or take. Featured in a couple of architecture documentaries, nothing dramatic." Xiao Chan didn't look up.
—shutter.
Her hands stayed steady on the fabric this time. It had been quiet for nearly two weeks — long enough that some small, hopeful part of her had genuinely started to believe a coincidence of stress and fatigue might have simply worn itself out.
—shutter.
—shutter.
Hearing things doesn't automatically mean anything's actually there, she reminded herself, running through the explanation one more time. Tinnitus could mimic mechanical sounds. Sleep deprivation alone could produce auditory artifacts in an otherwise healthy brain, let alone one that had spent a year essentially rebooting. She'd read enough about post-coma recovery to know her theory wasn't paranoid — it was, if anything, the responsible conclusion to reach first.
The problem, the same problem it always came back to, was Arthur. Dogs didn't read articles about post-coma sensory disturbances. Dogs didn't know they were supposed to imagine things alongside her for her hallucination theory to hold up, especially during that day back in the hallway.
"Hold still, you're going to throw off the hem," Yu Xia said around a mouthful of pins, entirely oblivious to the small war currently being fought somewhere behind Ding Jia's composed expression.
She held still.
To think that all she worried before are catching up on sleep and complaining about her diet. But now her worries post-coma really upgraded on a different level.
One had a face she couldn't see and a motive she understood all too well — obsessive stalker, the sort that left physical objects behind. She still didn't have his real name, only a butterfly stitched into his gifts, but that didn't trouble her the way it probably should have. Stalkers were a known category of monster. Detectives existed for exactly this reason, evidence existed for exactly this reason, and nothing about a hospital bracelet or a photograph through a window required her to reach for any explanation stranger than a deeply unwell man with too much access and too much patience. It was ugly, frightening, but fundamentally a problem that competent people with the right resources could eventually run to ground.
The other case offered her no such comfort. It had no physical evidence, as she'd only heard and seen it all on her own, if we count out the dog. But her own rational mind could argue away with many medical journals against it. That was the one she couldn't hand off to a detective. The two endings weren't the best places.
She packed for location filming three days later with a folded printout of the temple complex's permit history tucked into her script binder, and a second, far less official list scrawled in the back of the same notebook: every logical explanation she could think of for the sound that wasn't leaving her alone, ranked in order of how much she actually believed each one.
Tinnitus sat at the top.