The Girl Behind the Song

Morning made a liar of the night.

By eight, the apartment had become only an apartment again. The wall was only a wall. The locked room beside his was only a locked room. Rainwater tapped from the roof ledge in uneven intervals, and sunlight, weak but persistent, slipped through the kitchen window to reveal the ordinary ugliness of old tiles, dust in corners, a kettle with a stubborn mineral stain around its mouth.

Raihan stood in the middle of the bedroom with his phone in one hand and his laptop open on the floor, replaying the recordings for the seventh time.

Static.

Rain.

A faint shift of his own breathing.

At 11:11 p.m., where the song had filled the room with such aching clarity that he could still feel it behind his ribs, the audio file registered only a low hiss. No voice. No humming. No whispered question asking whether he was still awake. The second recorder, the one on his laptop, was worse. It had picked up the whine of its own fan, a notification sound from some forgotten app, and nothing else.

Raihan sat back on his heels and stared at the waveform until the peaks and valleys began to look like a language refusing translation.

"Fine," he muttered.

The wall did not answer.

He had slept badly after the final whisper. Not deeply enough to escape, not lightly enough to feel awake. His dreams had been full of corridors and doors with no handles. At one point, he had dreamed that Nadia was standing in 11B wearing the cream sweater she used to steal from him, humming with someone else's voice. When he called her name, she turned around, and her face had been made of cracked plaster.

Now, in daylight, the dream felt melodramatic and embarrassing. The kind of thing a mind produced when it had too little sleep and too much unresolved damage.

That was one explanation.

It was also the explanation he hated most because it pointed inward.

If the voice was grief, then there was no mystery to solve. No woman behind the wall. No locked room worth fearing. Only himself, making companionship out of emptiness because he could not bear the shape of his life when no one spoke into it.

He set the phone down, stood, and pressed his palm against the wall.

Cold.

Plain painted plaster, slightly rough beneath his fingertips.

He kept his hand there for longer than made sense. The silence thickened around him, patient and mildly mocking. Eventually, he let his arm fall.

In the kitchen, the blue fish mug sat where he had left it, facing the wall like a punished child. Raihan made coffee in it because the only alternative was admitting the mug had power over him. The fish stared at the tiles while he poured hot water over the instant powder. He drank standing by the sink, because sitting at the small table would have made the apartment feel like a place where a person lived on purpose.

His phone buzzed on the counter.

For once, it was work.

A system deployment had failed. Someone had written in the group chat, Raihan, can you check logs? with the polite urgency of people whose crisis was contained entirely in servers and timestamps. He opened his laptop at the kitchen counter and let work pull him into its grid of errors, patches, and cause-and-effect.

This was easier.

A broken script did not leave because it had fallen out of love. A database did not apologize for moving on. Problems in code could be traced if one was patient enough. There was always a line number, a missing semicolon, an access right, an assumption that had failed under pressure. Raihan liked that. Not because systems were simple, but because when they broke, they did not pretend the break had been inevitable and gentle.

By noon, he had fixed the deployment and replied with a concise summary. His manager sent a thumbs-up reaction. The day resumed its meaningless shape.

He ordered lunch and ate half of it. He unpacked two more boxes. He found an old guitar capo inside a pouch and stood holding it with the same careful suspicion he had given Nadia's mug. The capo was black, scratched near the spring. He had bought it years ago when he still played guitar regularly, back when music had not yet become something he was "too busy" for.

Nadia used to ask him to play at night.

Not because he was exceptional. He was competent, perhaps even good when he bothered to practice, but not the sort of musician who made strangers stop walking. She had liked the intimacy of it -- him sitting cross-legged on the floor, her lying on the couch with one arm over her face, both of them pretending the songs were background noise when really they were the way the evening softened around them.

After she left, he had placed the guitar in its case and pushed it beneath his cousin's spare bed.

He had not brought it with him.

The capo should have been useless.

He placed it in the desk drawer anyway.

At five, Mrs. Tan knocked once on his door and handed him a paper envelope containing the receipt for his deposit. She did not step inside.

"You settled?" she asked.

"Mostly."

Her gaze moved past him, toward the shared wall visible through the bedroom doorway. "Good."

Raihan leaned against the doorframe. "Do you have the floor plan for this unit?"

Mrs. Tan looked back at him. "Why?"

"Work habit," he said. "I like knowing where the pipes run. Electrical too, if you have it."

"You think pipes sang to you, then now you want to interrogate them?"

Despite the dryness of her voice, something in her expression had tightened again.

"I'm just curious."

"Curiosity is how people lose sleep."

"I'm already doing that."

For a second, he thought she might smile. She did not. The almost-smile collapsed into weariness before it reached her mouth.

"I'll see," she said.

It was not agreement. It was not refusal. With Mrs. Tan, Raihan was beginning to learn, most answers arrived wearing disguise.

Before she turned away, he asked, "Was there ever a tenant in 11B who sang?"

The corridor behind her seemed to grow longer.

Mrs. Tan's hand went to the strap of her handbag. Her fingers worked once at the leather, kneading it as if checking for weakness.

"Many people sing," she said.

"Not through walls at 11:11 p.m."

Her eyes sharpened. "You heard it again last night?"

He studied her. "You knew when."

Mrs. Tan said nothing.

The quiet between them was not empty. It was crowded with everything she would not say.

Raihan lowered his voice. "Who is she?"

Mrs. Tan glanced toward 11B, then down the corridor, as if the old walls themselves might disapprove. When she spoke again, her tone had become almost brisk, which somehow made it sadder.

"If you hear something tonight, don't answer."

"I already did."

Her eyes returned to him.

The look on her face made the apartment behind him feel suddenly too small.

"What did you say?"

"She asked if I was still awake." He swallowed. "I said yes."

Mrs. Tan closed her eyes.

It lasted only a breath. When she opened them again, the guardedness had returned, but not quickly enough. Raihan had seen what lay beneath it: not surprise, exactly. Recognition.

"She spoke?" Mrs. Tan asked.

"You knew she could."

"No."

"You're lying."

Mrs. Tan's mouth tightened. "Careful, boy."

He almost apologized out of habit. The word rose in him automatically, trained by years of wanting to keep peace, wanting to be reasonable, wanting to make himself easier to love. He bit it back.

"I'm sorry," he said anyway, and hated himself a little for it. Then he corrected, "No. I mean -- I'm not trying to accuse you. But something is happening. You know something about that room."

"I know enough to tell you not to invite trouble."

"Is she trouble?"

Mrs. Tan did not answer.

The lift chimed at the end of the corridor. A young couple stepped out carrying grocery bags, laughing softly about something on a phone screen. They passed between Raihan and Mrs. Tan, bringing with them the smell of fried chicken and wet umbrellas. For that brief interruption, the world became normal again.

When they were gone, Mrs. Tan leaned slightly closer.

"Some voices are not asking to be followed," she said quietly. "Sometimes they are only repeating what they lost."

The sentence opened something cold under Raihan's skin.

Before he could ask what she meant, Mrs. Tan turned and walked away.

This time, she did not tell him to lock the door.

He did it anyway.

---

By ten-thirty, Raihan had converted his bedroom into a small, ridiculous laboratory.

His phone rested against the wall with the microphone facing the plaster. His laptop was open on a chair, recording through an external headset microphone he had found tangled in a box of cables. A third device -- an old tablet with a cracked corner -- sat on the floor running a voice memo app. He had even opened a notes document titled 11B Observations, because naming something made it feel less like madness and more like process.

The first entries were embarrassingly sparse.

Night 1: female singing from shared wall at 11:11 p.m. Wall warm. Recording captured nothing. Whisper: "Are you still awake?" Reply: "Yes." She said: "Me too."

Mrs. Tan: knows more than she admits. Warned not to answer.

Question: sound source physical or non-physical? Time-specific? Triggered by contact/response?

He stared at the phrase non-physical and nearly deleted it.

Instead, he left it there.

At ten-fifty-five, he turned off every light except the desk lamp. The apartment settled into blue shadow. Rain did not fall tonight, but the city still seemed damp, wrapped in the after-scent of storms: concrete, leaves, distant drain water, the metallic breath of old pipes. From somewhere upstairs came the scrape of furniture. Then silence. Then a cough.

He sat cross-legged near the wall, notebook open on his lap, pen in hand.

This, he thought, was absurd.

It was also the most alive he had felt in weeks.

The admission unsettled him. He did not want to be the kind of person whose pulse returned only for a mystery. Yet waiting here, watching the clock move toward 11:11, he felt a sharpness in himself that grief had dulled. Fear, curiosity, anticipation -- all of them were forms of attention. All of them required him to be present.

His phone changed from 11:10 to 11:11.

Nothing happened.

Raihan held still.

The silence extended, then stretched thin.

At eleven minutes and seventeen seconds past eleven, the first note appeared.

It did not begin so much as emerge, as if it had already been sounding somewhere beyond the reach of his hearing and only now drifted close enough to touch. The melody was the same, but tonight there were words beneath it, too quiet to catch. The syllables blurred together, almost English, almost not. A line rose, broke, and returned to humming.

Raihan's pen hovered over the notebook.

He wrote: 11:11:17 -- song begins. Words? unclear.

The singing faltered.

He stopped writing.

"Hello," he said softly.

The song ended on a half-note.

He waited, resisting the urge to fill the silence. He had learned in difficult conversations that people often revealed more after the point where politeness expected a reply. Nadia had used silence that way near the end. She would stop speaking and look at her cup, and he would rush to comfort, explain, negotiate, patch over the widening gap with words. He knew now that he had been speaking not to understand her, but to stop hearing what her silence meant.

So he waited.

After a long while, the woman whispered, "You came back."

The words struck him strangely.

Not you're still awake.

Not who are you.

You came back.

Raihan leaned closer to the wall, careful to keep his voice low. "So did you."

There was a pause. Then, almost with suspicion: "Do I know you?"

"No." He hesitated. "I don't think so."

"That is not a very useful answer."

Despite everything, the corner of his mouth lifted.

Her voice had changed. Still soft, still threaded with that impossible distance, but clearer than last night. There was intelligence in it now, and wariness. She did not sound like a ghost from a story. She sounded like a woman who had woken up to something inexplicable and was trying not to panic until she had gathered enough facts.

"I'm Raihan," he said. "I live in 11A."

A faint movement came through the wall. Not a sound exactly. A shift in air, or the suggestion of someone adjusting her weight on the other side.

"Eleven A," she repeated.

"Yes."

"That is Mr. Low's unit."

Raihan looked toward his notes. "Not anymore."

"He moved?"

"I don't know who Mr. Low is."

Silence.

Then the woman asked, more carefully, "What year is it?"

The pen slipped slightly in Raihan's fingers.

He stared at the wall.

Of all the questions she could have asked, this one moved through the room with the quiet weight of a door closing somewhere far away.

He answered with the current year.

The wall went cold.

Not fully. Not like the connection had vanished. But the warmth that had been gathering near his shoulder seemed to retreat.

"No," she whispered.

Raihan said nothing.

"No," she repeated, and this time the word carried breathlessness, not denial alone but fear trying to find a shape. "That can't be right."

"What year do you think it is?" he asked.

She did not reply at once.

When she finally spoke, her answer was wrong by more than a decade.

Raihan wrote it down with a steadier hand than he felt.

The difference sat between them.

He could hear her breathing now, quick and shallow. It was absurd, how human that sound was. He had expected, if he had expected anything at all, some eerie distance, some theatrical chill. Instead, he heard a young woman on the other side of the wall beginning to understand that the world had moved without her permission.

"What is your name?" he asked gently.

Another pause.

"Elise."

"Elise what?"

Her laugh was faint and defensive. "You ask like police."

"Sorry."

"Are you police?"

"No."

"A thief?"

"No."

"That is what a thief would say."

This time, the smile reached him before he could stop it. It startled him, that small muscle memory of amusement. "Fair point."

The room softened by one degree.

"Elise," she said again, and then added, with reluctant dignity, "Elise Lim."

Raihan wrote the name carefully.

The instant the pen formed the final letter, the desk lamp flickered.

He froze.

Elise heard it somehow. "What was that?"

"My lamp."

"Your side also?"

"What do you mean, also?"

"The light here." Her voice thinned. "It does that when you ask questions."

Raihan looked around his bedroom. The light steadied, casting the wall in warm yellow. His recording devices glowed silently. He wondered, not for the first time, whether any of this would remain in the files when morning came.

"Elise," he said, "where are you right now?"

"In my room."

"Room 11B?"

"Yes." A hint of impatience entered her voice, as if some facts were too obvious to be treated like discoveries. "Where else would I be?"

He swallowed. "The room next to mine is locked."

"Locked?"

"From the outside."

"That is not funny."

"I'm not joking."

Her breathing changed again.

Then came a soft scrape, followed by another -- perhaps her moving across her room, perhaps memory giving sound to something that was not happening in the present. Raihan imagined her going to her door, touching the handle, finding it ordinary on her side. The image was so clear that for a moment he almost expected to hear the door open in the corridor.

Instead, Elise said, "My door opens."

"Can you open it now?"

A longer silence.

"No."

"Why?"

"I…" Her voice faded. When it returned, it was smaller. "I don't know."

Raihan wrote: She perceives door as accessible but cannot open? Memory boundary?

The phrase looked ridiculous.

"Elise," he asked, "what do you see in your room?"

"What kind of question is that?"

"Humor me."

"Are you always like this?"

"Unfortunately."

She was quiet long enough that he wondered if she had withdrawn. Then, as if indulging him against her better judgment, she began to describe the room.

"A bed near the window. Blue bedsheet. The cheap one with little white flowers -- I bought it because the auntie gave me discount after I lied and said my birthday was coming." A faint warmth entered her voice at the memory. "Desk by the wall. Too many papers. My keyboard. Not musical keyboard, computer keyboard. The letters N and M are fading because I type too hard. A mirror near the wardrobe. It has a crack at the corner. I should replace it, but I keep telling myself later."

Raihan listened, pen forgotten.

"Curtains?" he asked.

"Yellow. Ugly yellow. But in the morning, when sun comes through, the whole room looks like someone spilled honey on the floor."

Something about the image went through him gently.

"What about outside?"

"Rain."

"It's not raining now."

"It is here."

The words hung between them.

On his side, the night beyond the window was dry. Moisture clung to the glass, yes, but no rain fell. The city lights shimmered only because the window needed cleaning.

"Can you hear anything else?" Raihan asked.

"Sometimes."

"What?"

"Footsteps in the corridor. Auntie Tan shouting at someone downstairs. A baby crying. The lift." She paused. "Sometimes music from your room. But not tonight."

"My room?"

"Or Mr. Low's. I don't know. It changes."

"What kind of music?"

"Guitar."

Raihan went still.

His gaze drifted to the desk drawer where he had placed the old capo.

"I don't have a guitar here," he said.

"You did before."

The sentence was quiet, almost unsure, but it moved through him like cold water.

"I just moved in yesterday."

"Then maybe not you."

But she did not sound convinced.

Raihan rubbed the bridge of his nose. The room felt suddenly too full of time. Time in layers. Time misfiled. Time pressing against the wall with warm hands.

"What do you remember before hearing me?" he asked.

Elise did not answer.

He waited.

When she spoke again, the wariness had returned. "Why do you want to know?"

"Because something is wrong."

"That I know."

"Maybe I can help."

"You don't know me."

"No."

"And I don't know you."

"No."

"So why would you help?"

The question was reasonable.

Too reasonable.

Raihan opened his mouth, then closed it. He could have said he was a decent person. He could have said anyone would help under the circumstances. He could have said curiosity, but the word felt ugly now, insufficient and self-serving. The truth was more difficult. He wanted to help because her voice had reached into the room where he had been trying not to exist too loudly and had asked whether he was awake. He wanted to help because, for one minute last night, someone had needed an answer from him that was not about leaving or being left.

He did not know how to say that to a stranger through a wall.

"I don't know," he admitted.

Elise was quiet.

Then she said, softer, "That answer is better."

Something loosened in him.

He looked at the time. 11:34 p.m.

"We may not have long," he said. "Last night, after midnight, everything stopped."

"Midnight?"

"Yes."

"That happens to you too?"

"What happens to you?"

Her voice dropped until he had to lean closer. "The room goes far away."

A chill moved along his arms.

"How can a room go far away?"

"I don't know how else to say it." There was frustration now, and fear underneath it. "One moment I am here. Then everything becomes… not dark exactly. Quiet. Like I am underwater, but there is no water. I can think, but only in pieces. Then I hear something -- rain, or the lift, or someone humming -- and I am back."

"How long has this been happening?"

"I don't know."

"Days? Weeks?"

"I don't know."

"Years?"

"Stop."

The word cracked across the wall.

Raihan fell silent.

His instinct, sharpened by work and anxiety, was to keep asking, to map the edges of the impossible before it shifted. But Elise's breathing had changed again. He could hear the effort she was making to hold herself together, and suddenly he understood what she had meant without meaning to say it: questions could be violence when a person was already trying not to fall apart.

"I'm sorry," he said.

No reply.

"I mean it."

Still nothing.

The quiet lengthened. Raihan stared at his notebook, at the neat rows of observations that now looked clinical and cruel.

He closed it.

The sound of the cover shutting was small but decisive.

"I'll stop asking for tonight."

Elise's voice returned carefully. "You sound like you don't want to."

"I don't."

"At least you are honest."

"Sometimes by accident."

A faint breath came through the wall. Almost a laugh, though too fragile to claim the name.

He leaned his shoulder against the plaster. The wall was warmer now. "Can I ask one easy question?"

"That depends on your definition of easy."

"What song were you singing?"

Silence again, but this one felt different. Less defensive. More inward.

"I don't know the title," she said at last.

"You don't know?"

"I wrote it."

Raihan's fingers stilled against the floor.

"You're a songwriter?"

"No."

"You wrote a song."

"That doesn't make me a songwriter."

"What does it make you?"

"Someone with one unfinished song."

There was a dry humor in her voice, but beneath it lay something exposed. Raihan recognized the shape of that kind of dismissal. The way people lowered their own dreams before anyone else could be careless with them.

"It's beautiful," he said.

The words came out too simply to hide behind politeness.

Elise did not answer for a while.

When she did, her voice had changed. "You heard enough to know that?"

"Yes."

"Maybe you have bad taste."

"I've been told worse."

"By who?"

He almost said Nadia's name.

It rose in him, ready and bitter, and he caught it just before it crossed his tongue. The room seemed to notice. Or perhaps Elise did, through whatever impossible thread connected them.

"You don't have to answer," she said.

The kindness was small. It struck hard.

Raihan looked down at his hands. "My ex."

The word sat there, plain and heavy.

"Ah," Elise said.

Not pity. Not curiosity. Just understanding shaped into one syllable.

He wished she had asked a question. A question he could deflect. Instead, she left him space, and the space made him aware of the ache he had spent all day arranging furniture around.

"She left recently?" Elise asked after a while.

"Recently enough."

"That means yes."

"It means I'm not sure how to measure it."

"In days?"

"That makes it sound manageable."

"In meals?"

He gave a short laugh despite himself. "What?"

"How many meals have you eaten without her?" Elise asked, and there was something almost practical in her tone. "That is how you know. Days lie. Meals don't. You either sit across from someone or you don't."

Raihan looked toward the kitchen, where the half-eaten lunch container sat near the sink.

He thought of Nadia's empty chair. The way he had avoided sitting at tables since she left. The way he stood to eat now, as if meals were chores to be completed before loneliness could find a chair opposite him.

"Too many," he said.

Elise did not rush to comfort him.

He appreciated that. Comfort, badly given, could feel like someone trying to close a wound with tape.

Instead, she said, "I'm sorry."

The words were ordinary. Her voice was not. Something in it acknowledged the humiliation of surviving small things: a mug, a chair, the wrong amount of rice cooked out of habit.

Raihan swallowed and looked at the clock.

11:48 p.m.

"Tell me about your song," he said, partly because he did not want to talk about Nadia anymore, partly because he wanted Elise to remain on the safer side of grief for both of them.

"What about it?"

"What is it supposed to be?"

She hummed one line, barely audible. The melody moved through the wall and settled under his skin.

"I started it after I heard someone crying," she said.

Raihan's throat tightened.

"Who?"

"I don't know. A man. Through the wall."

His pulse slowed, then seemed to strike harder.

"When?"

"I told you, I don't know."

"Was it Mr. Low?"

"Maybe." She sounded uncertain. "Maybe not. Sometimes the crying was very far. Sometimes very near. I wanted to sing something back, but I didn't know if he could hear me."

Raihan did not move.

The memory came with unwelcome clarity: himself two nights ago on his cousin's sofa, one hand over his mouth because the house was small and his cousin's children were asleep. The sound he had made had not been sobbing, not exactly. It had been uglier. A failed attempt to keep pain quiet.

But Elise could not have heard that.

Could she?

"How long ago?" he asked.

"I don't know." Then, after a pause, "For me, maybe yesterday. Maybe a long time."

The room seemed to tilt gently.

Raihan put one hand flat on the floor to steady himself. "Elise."

"Yes?"

"Do you know what happened to you?"

The wall cooled.

He regretted the question immediately.

On the other side, Elise took one sharp breath. For several seconds, she said nothing at all. When she finally spoke, her voice had gone thin.

"I'm in my room."

"I know."

"I was singing."

"Yes."

"I was waiting for…" She stopped.

"For who?"

"I don't remember."

"It's okay."

"No, it's not." Panic trembled under the words now. "I should remember. There was something I had to do."

"Don't force it."

"There was a paper."

"What paper?"

"My song. I wrote it down. I put it…" Her breathing quickened. "I put it somewhere safe."

"Where?"

"I don't know."

"Elise, breathe."

"I am breathing."

"Slower."

"Don't tell me how to breathe."

"Fair."

The brief spark of irritation seemed to anchor her. He heard her inhale, then exhale, uneven but present.

Raihan kept his voice low. "You said there was something you had to do. Not tonight. Just -- eventually, if you remember, you can tell me."

"Why?"

"So I can help you do it."

A silence.

Then Elise said, with heartbreaking caution, "You would?"

"Yes."

"You don't even know if I'm real."

The sentence landed with a quiet force.

Raihan looked at his recording devices, their small red lights blinking into the dim room. In the morning, perhaps, they would offer him nothing again. Static and rain. Empty proof. He might wake and decide this had been a stress response, an elaborate private collapse. He might spend months telling no one because even loneliness had pride.

But his palm was warm where it touched the wall.

Her voice had made him smile.

Her question about meals had hurt in a place no hallucination should have known how to find.

"No," he said. "I don't."

Elise was quiet.

Then he added, "But you don't know if I'm real either."

For the first time, she laughed.

It was small and brief, gone almost before he could be sure of it, but it changed the room. The wall seemed less like a barrier in that instant and more like a shared surface, two people leaning against opposite sides of the same impossible thing.

"That is true," she said. "Maybe you are my stress response."

"I hope your imagination could do better."

"Don't be humble. It makes ghosts suspicious."

The word passed between them and left a chill behind.

Neither of them spoke for a moment after that.

Then Elise said, much softer, "Do you think I am?"

Raihan closed his eyes.

A ghost.

He could not say the word aloud. It felt both too dramatic and too cruel. Elise did not sound like something dead. She sounded like someone trapped halfway through a sentence.

"I think," he said slowly, "something happened. And this room remembers you."

The answer was not scientific. It was barely an answer at all. But Elise received it with a silence that felt almost grateful.

"I don't want to disappear," she whispered.

Raihan's chest tightened.

He thought of Nadia's message, the polite arrangement of an ending. He thought of how much of love was the fear of being erased from someone's daily life. From their habits. From their future tense. From the small unconscious places where a person once lived.

"You're talking to me," he said. "That's not disappearing."

"For now."

"For now is still something."

"You sound like you're convincing yourself too."

He looked down.

"Maybe."

The clock read 11:56 p.m.

He had four minutes, if last night meant anything.

"Elise," he said, urgency slipping into his voice despite his effort to hide it. "Can we talk again tomorrow?"

"I don't control it."

"But if you can--"

"I'll try."

The answer was immediate enough to expose her own hope. He heard it and pretended not to, because dignity mattered even through walls.

"I'll be here at 11:11," he said.

"You shouldn't wait for strange women in locked rooms."

"I've made worse decisions."

"Recently?"

"Very."

Another almost-laugh.

Then the sound from her side shifted.

A low hum began beneath her voice, but not from her throat. The connection itself seemed to vibrate, as if the wall were filling with distance. The desk lamp flickered once. The phone screen dimmed, brightened, dimmed again.

"Elise?" Raihan said.

"I hear it." Her voice sounded farther away now. "The water."

"There's no water."

"There is always water when it happens."

The warmth under his palm began to fade.

"Elise, stay with me."

"I don't know how."

Her fear pierced him more sharply than he expected. He pressed his hand harder against the plaster, as if pressure could hold a person in place across years.

"Tell me something," he said quickly. "Anything. Something real."

"What?"

"Your favorite food."

"What?"

"Just answer."

A breathless, disbelieving sound. "You are insane."

"Favorite food."

"Char kway teow," she said, voice trembling. "With too much cockles. The stall downstairs, before the uncle changed his wok and ruined everything."

"Good. Favorite color?"

"Yellow, but not ugly curtain yellow."

"Favorite song?"

"Mine, when I finish it."

The answer broke something open in him.

The warmth was nearly gone.

"Raihan?" she whispered.

"I'm here."

"You'll come back?"

"Yes."

"Even if I forget?"

The clock changed.

12:00 a.m.

"Elise?"

Silence.

Not a natural silence. Not the quiet of someone choosing not to speak. A sudden absence, clean and terrible, as if the line between them had been cut by something patient and exact.

Raihan kept his palm against the wall.

Cold plaster met him.

He stayed that way for a long time, listening to nothing.

Only when his arm began to ache did he lower it.

The recording devices were still running. Their red lights blinked obediently. He stopped them one by one, saving the files with names that felt too ordinary for what they contained.

If they contained anything.

He did not play them back.

Not yet.

Instead, he opened his notebook and, beneath all the observations, wrote three lines.

Elise Lim.

Char kway teow with too much cockles.

Favorite song: mine, when I finish it.

The apartment felt different after that.

Not less empty.

But less alone.

---

He waited until morning before checking the recordings.

It was an act of cowardice dressed as discipline. He told himself he needed sleep, though he slept poorly. He told himself files should be reviewed with a clear mind, though his mind had not been clear in months. The truth was simpler: he did not want the recordings to fail him yet.

Hope was easier before evidence.

When dawn finally came, thin and pale, he sat at the kitchen table with coffee in the blue fish mug and opened the first file.

Static.

His own voice, faintly audible this time.

Hello.

A pause.

I'm Raihan. I live in 11A.

More static.

The empty spaces where Elise's answers should have been were worse than silence. They made him sound like a man speaking gently to a wall.

He closed the file before it reached midnight.

The laptop recording was the same. His side only. Questions without replies. Laughter with no visible cause. At one point, he heard himself say, For now is still something, and the shame of it burned across his face because without Elise's voice the line sounded unbearably desperate.

The tablet had recorded nothing after 11:11 at all. The file had corrupted.

Raihan sat very still.

Outside, someone was sweeping the corridor. The bristles moved rhythmically past his door, scratch, pause, scratch. A kettle whistled somewhere. A child complained about school. The living world continued, indifferent to the fact that proof had again refused to exist.

He opened a browser and searched her name.

Elise Lim singer apartment 11B

Nothing relevant.

Elise Lim cafe singer

Too many results. A business consultant. A student athlete. A woman selling handmade candles. No one who matched a voice behind a wall.

He searched the old stall names near the block, the address, the year Elise had given, the phrase yellow curtains because desperation made fools of search terms. For an hour, he found fragments of local history, property listings, an archived food blog mentioning a char kway teow stall downstairs that had changed owners years ago. The detail made his hands go cold.

There had been a stall.

The blogger complained, almost lovingly, that the new uncle used a different wok and the taste had never recovered.

Raihan leaned back in his chair.

His coffee had gone cold.

A sensible person would stop here. A sensible person would accept that there were coincidences, that old blogs and grief and poor sleep did not equal proof of a woman displaced in time. A sensible person would call a friend, go outside, eat something with vegetables, and stop building a bridge toward a locked room.

But Raihan had spent too long being sensible while his life quietly collapsed anyway.

At eleven that morning, he went downstairs and bought char kway teow from the stall that now sold economic bee hoon but still had an old signboard faded beneath the newer one. The auntie looked confused when he asked whether there had once been a char kway teow uncle there.

"Long time ago," she said. "Before my time. You ask for what?"

"My friend mentioned it."

"Your friend how old?"

"Older than she sounds," Raihan said, then realized too late how strange that was.

The auntie stared at him.

He paid for coffee and left.

By evening, he had added a new section to his notes.

Possible validations:

1. Char kway teow stall existed. Changed after old uncle/wok? Confirmed by old blog + auntie partial memory.

2. Elise gave year inconsistent with current year. Need verify tenant records / old directories.

3. Mrs. Tan reaction suggests prior knowledge.

4. Recordings capture only me. Why?

He stared at point four the longest.

Then, below it, he wrote:

Maybe she is not sound. Maybe she is only heard.

The sentence unsettled him enough that he closed the notebook.

Night came slowly.

At 10:45 p.m., he found himself brushing his teeth earlier than usual, as if preparing for an appointment. He changed into a clean shirt. Then he felt foolish and changed back into the old one. Then, after a minute, changed again, because foolishness was less powerful than the thought of Elise hearing him and somehow knowing he had not bothered.

At 11:05, he sat by the wall.

No recordings this time.

No notebook.

Only him, the desk lamp, and the waiting silence.

At 11:11, the wall warmed.

The song did not come immediately. Instead, he heard a faint rustle, like paper being moved by careful hands. Then Elise's voice, closer than before, whispered his name with uncertain pronunciation.

"Raihan?"

He closed his eyes.

Relief moved through him so quickly it almost hurt.

"I'm here."

A pause.

Then she exhaled, and in that small sound he heard the echo of his own relief reflected back to him.

"I remembered," she said.

"What?"

"You said you would come back."

His throat tightened.

"I did."

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The silence was not empty this time. It was filled with the fragile astonishment of being remembered.

Then Elise said, with a careful brightness that did not quite hide her fear, "Ask your questions, police-not-police. But slower tonight."

Raihan leaned his shoulder against the wall and smiled despite himself.

"Deal."

"And you have to answer mine."

"Depends on the question."

"That is my line."

"Fine. Fair."

Outside, the city moved in its ordinary darkness. Above them, pipes ticked softly. Somewhere in the building, a lift opened and closed, carrying someone home. On one side of the wall sat a man trying to remember how to live without being left behind. On the other, a woman who might have been a memory, or a ghost, or something time had failed to finish.

At 11:14 p.m., Elise asked, "What does the world look like now?"

Raihan looked toward the window, where the city lights trembled against the glass.

He thought of giving her facts. Buildings. Screens. New train lines. Shops replaced, roads renamed, the char kway teow stall gone. But the question was too large for facts, and too tender for history.

So he told her the first true thing he could.

"Lonely," he said. "But still lit."

On the other side of the wall, Elise was quiet for a long while.

Then, softly, she began to hum.

This time, Raihan did not take notes.

He listened.