The new house had been chosen for one purpose: to erase every echo of the life Soroush once had. No jasmine perfume lingering in the hallway, no faint memory of warm laughter behind closed doors, no fragile hints of the woman he had lost. Here, everything was colorless. Blank walls, empty rooms, air that felt untouched.
Yet tonight, the stillness was wrong.
It wasn't just quiet. It felt aware.
Soroush sat in the center of the living room, surrounded by unopened boxes, staring at the message he had received earlier that evening.
You are not alone in this house.
It wasn't formatted like spam. No fake links, no threats asking for money, no emojis to soften the blow. Just a single sentence, stripped bare, written with unsettling certainty.
His breath tightened. For months, he had been trying to escape the weight of absence, the kind that burned deeper than any presence could. But this… this was different.
He tossed the phone aside. The house seemed to exhale around him, its shadows stretching in the low light.
If Ava were still here, she would have rolled her eyes.
"You're overthinking again. It's just someone messing with you."
But Ava wasn't here.
And the emptiness made the message feel disturbingly real.
A faint shift of darkness near the kitchen caught his attention. A flicker. Maybe just the streetlight outside. Maybe his exhausted mind.
He forced himself to look away and opened one of the boxes on the floor. Clothes, scattered papers, old film notes from his job at the archive… and a wooden photo frame he didn't remember packing.
He pulled it out.
It was a picture of him and Ava on the beach in Kish. The sunset behind them. Her smile half playful, half sad, just like the last time he saw her. That smile had always felt like a promise and a warning.
He turned the frame over.
A single line was written with fading blue ink on the back of the photo:
"If one day my voice disappears, follow the silence."
Soroush froze.
He remembered this picture.
He remembered every detail.
And he was certain this sentence had never been there.
Before he could process it, a sound shattered the air.
A heavy thud.
From the bedroom.
Not the kind of sound a random object makes when it slips.
No. This was deliberate.
Something falling, or someone moving.
His throat tightened. He stood up slowly, each breath colder than the last. The hallway leading to the bedroom was too dark. Too narrow. Too still.
Halfway there, he heard it again.
Breathing.
Soft. Controlled.
As if someone had been waiting for him to notice.
His hand hovered above the doorknob.
The air on the other side felt alive.
He pushed the door open.
The room was pitch black except for a thin line of moonlight cutting across the floor. In the center of that light lay an object. Small. Rectangular. Out of place.
A notebook.
Black cover.
No title.
Edges worn, as if handled many times.
And there was something else.
A faint trace of perfume.
Not chemical. Not floral in the typical way.
A very specific scent.
Jasmine.
His pulse hammered.
He hadn't smelled that scent since the final night with Ava.
He crouched down and picked up the notebook. The cover was warm, as if someone had been holding it just moments ago.
He opened to the first page.
A line of handwriting curved across it. Familiar. Impossible.
"Soroush… why did you run from me?"
His vision blurred, not from tears, but from something heavier: recognition.
Because he knew this handwriting.
He had traced these letters a thousand times in the margin of her notes, her lists, her letters.
There was no way it should exist here.
Not in this house.
Not in this world.
But the ink was fresh.
And the silence in the room was no longer empty.
It was waiting