Chapter 3

Kevin hated cilantro. He also had a habit of doing things in a very particular way, so he always had to line up the cilantro neatly.

He did it so naturally that I could hardly believe my eyes.

I stared at him, trying to find even the smallest clue that he was pretending.

But there was nothing.

The way he held his utensils and even the way he blew on his food were exactly the same as my dead son, Kevin.

"Dad, why aren't you eating?" he suddenly asked.

I swallowed hard before answering, "I'm not hungry."

"Dad, where's Mom? Why didn't she come to pick me up?" He asked the question in such an innocent voice while eating his taco.

My heart sank when he mentioned Mandy.

After Kevin died, Mandy blamed me for not taking good care of our son. She divorced me, and we had lost contact a long time ago.

"She moved overseas."

After he finished his tacos, I took him back to Harmony Heights.

It was an old apartment complex. The motion-activated lights in the hallway were broken, so they kept flickering on and off.

When I reached Apartment 402, I pulled out my keys.

Before I could even put the key into the lock, the boy suddenly asked, "Dad, is the lock acting up again? You have to lift the handle."

My hand shook. The key slipped from my fingers and hit the floor.

The lock really was broken. I had to lift the handle to open the door. But that problem had only started six months ago.

Three years ago, when Kevin died, the lock had worked perfectly.

So how did this boy know?

I spun around and slammed him against the wall.

My eyes were red as I demanded, "Who are you? Who told you all this? Who sent you here?"

The boy's eyes filled with tears as he trembled in fear. "Dad, what's wrong? I'm Kevin. Look..."

He reached into his pocket and pulled something out. Then he held it out to me.

It was a rusty piece of metal that had been filed into a crooked five-pointed star.

"This is the dart you made for me. I was afraid Mom would throw it away, so I hid it in a crack under the floor beneath my bed..."

I completely broke down when I heard those words.

I had secretly made that dart for Kevin myself, and he really had hidden it under his bed.

After Kevin died, I could never bring myself to touch his room. I had never even cleaned under his bed.

My hands were shaking as I unlocked the door. I rushed into the spare bedroom and dropped to the floor. I used my phone to shine a light under the bed.

There was nothing in the crack.

But the shape of the crack matched the metal dart perfectly.

I sat on the floor and stared at the boy standing in the doorway.

He stared back at me. For a moment, it looked like he was smiling. But then his face quickly changed back to that same hurt expression.

"Dad, I'm tired." As he spoke, he casually took off his shoes and placed them on the bottom shelf of the shoe rack.

Then he walked straight into the spare bedroom and climbed into the small bed that had been empty for three years.

I stood in the living room. As I listened to his steady breathing from the bedroom, the whole apartment felt suffocating.

That night, I sat on the couch with a kitchen knife in my hand. I didn't dare let my guard down for even a second.

At exactly three in the morning, a steady dripping sound came from the spare bedroom.

It sounded like water dripping from completely soaked clothes.

I tightened my grip on the knife and held my breath. Then I quietly walked to the bedroom door.

The door was slightly open.

Through the moonlight, I saw the boy standing beside the bed with his back to me.

He was completely soaked. Water dripped from his clothes and spread across the floor.

A dark puddle slowly formed beneath his feet.

He lowered his head and muttered something.

I moved a little closer.

Finally, I heard what he was saying. "Bad Daddy... He won't pay. He deserves to die..."

I was frozen with fear.

The knife in my hand struck the doorframe with a loud clang.

The boy suddenly turned around.

His face was deathly pale. His eyes had rolled so far back that I could only see the whites. There were no pupils in sight.