I never thought I’d be posting a second time on this.

im josh btw I really did try to move on. I went back to my job. I kept my head low. I told myself that the police had it handled, and whatever happened to that woman was no longer my burden to carry.

It was about three weeks ago.

Then one Tuesday night at 11pm, Marcus called me, which he’d never done in the two years we’d been working together. Marcus was a one-word text and grunt-of-approval kind of guy. When he called me at 11pm, it was a sign something was wrong.

I replied.

One sentence he said.

“Today someone came into the office asking about the drive,” he said.

I stood erect.

He said a guy had come in about 7 o’clock, just before closing. Middle-aged. Quiet. The kind of calm that comes not from not having anything to worry about but from deciding not to worry anymore. He told the woman at the front desk he was there to pick up a hard drive he had left a few weeks earlier. "Forgot to fill out the intake form right," he said. His name, he said, was Daniel Marsh.

The woman at the desk looked up the system. The drive was recorded under an incomplete intake. She told him it had been marked and passed on to the police. She said it like you would say anything routine, because to her it was routine.

"The man gave a slow nod," Marcus said. Did not respond. Didn't ask why. Just said thanks and walked out.

From the back office, Marcus had been watching.

The man, he said, did not appear surprised.

The man smiled, he said.

That night I did not sleep.

The next morning I phoned the officer who had come to the office that night. The one who phoned me to say they found her. I told him of Daniel Marsh. About the guy who walks into the office. On the smile.

[Long pause]

He told me they had a name. That the investigation was ongoing. That I should not interfere and that I should call immediately if I am contacted directly.

“Is she dead?” I asked.

He said he could not confirm details of a case that was still active.

I asked again.

He hung up the phone.

I want to tell you, it ends there. That I locked my door and kept out of it and let the system do what systems are supposed to do.

Four days later I got a message through Reddit.

A DM From an account without any posts. No history account was made the same day he messaged me.

It said this.

You were not to have posted about the drive. Delete it. You do not know what you found, and you do not want to.

I looked at the message a long while.

Then I looked at the name.

It was DMarsh1981.

I snapped a picture. Send it to the officer at once. The account said.

The account was deleted in under an hour.

That was six days before.

I haven't heard from the police since then. My calls are going to voice mail. The officer working our case has not returned a single message.

Last night I was walking to my car after work. There’s one working light in the far corner of the parking lot outside our building. The rest died months ago, and the building manager has not replaced them.

I was halfway to my car when I saw a car parked two spaces away that hadn't been there when I arrived.

Engine stop. Dark.

I stood very still, the way you do when something inside you knows before your brain does.

I couldn't look in the car.

But somewhere across the lot I could see the little red glow of a camera lens catching the light.

I got in my car and drove, and I didn't stop until I was inside my apartment with the deadbolt locked.

I’ve been thinking about the woman in the photographs. Her last image was of her standing at the kitchen counter with the glass in her hand, looking out the window.

She felt something but still extinguished the light and got into bed.

I always thought the scary part of that was what happened to her.

Now I’m beginning to think that the scary part is how easy it is to talk ourselves into believing we saw it.

I did not imagine the car in the lot.

Didn’t notice the camera.

I’m posting this because I want there to be a record somewhere that I saw it if something happens to me.

His name was Daniel Marsh.

And I think he knows where I sleep.

I will update if I can.

I want to tell you about the night I found the folder on my dead brother’s laptop.

Marcus passed away in February. Auto accident. Black ice on a road he'd driven a hundred times. The kind of death that makes no sense no matter how many times someone tries to explain it to you.

He was twenty-four. I was 22 years old. He was the kind of person who remembered everyone’s coffee order, arrived early to everything, and never made you feel like a burden. The world was certainly a worse place without him in it.

About two months after the funeral, my mother asked me to go through his things. She could not make herself do it. "I will," I said.

His laptop was on his desk where he always left it. Charging up. SCREEN FADES TO BLACK. Just stepped out like.

I opened it up.

His wallpaper was still the photo of the two of us at a lake three summers back. I had to sit with that for a minute before I could go on.

I was just going to back up his photos and music. Nothing intrusive. Just the stuff worth keeping.

But when I opened his documents folder I found something that stopped me dead.

A folder named MY BROTHER.

I looked at it a long time.

I opened it up.

Inside were hundreds of voice messages. Outdated. Four years ago. The last was three days before his death.

I popped my headphones in and hit play on the oldest one.

His voice came through and I wasn’t prepared for that. The way the dead sound just like they do. The lie is the absence of them and the voice is the truth.

Just talking. Stream of conscienceness. What happened that day. Something funny a co-worker said. Had something good for lunch. normal stuff. But then at the end of every single recording no matter what he was talking about he said the same thing.

He shouted my name.

And then he said I hope you are ok. Hope you are eating. I hope you know that whatever you are going through right now, it will be ok. You always figured it out. You'll know. You're going to figure this out.

I sat there crying listening to recording after recording of my brother talking to himself about his day and then at the end of every single one he would check in on me.

I didn't know he did this.

He didn't say it.

Four years of voice notes. Four years of him talking to me in a folder I wasn't supposed to find while he was alive.

I got all the way to the final recording. One taken three days before the accident. I hit play.

He spoke of work. He was talking about a book he was reading. He said he wanted to come visit me next weekend.

Then he paused for a second.

Then he said something he’d never said at the end of any of the other recordings.

I’m not sure why but I’ve been thinking about you all day,” he said. Like really thinking about you. Just so you know, if anything happened to me, I wouldn't want you to be sad for too long. I want you to be alright. I'd like you to continue. And I’m going to be talking to you like this. I want you to know wherever I end up. You might just not be able to hear.

After three days he was gone.

I’ve listened to that last recording more times than I can count.

And sometimes late at night, when the apartment is too quiet and the grief too heavy, I swear I can feel him in the room.

Not in a scary way."

In the only way that counts.

Like he had kept his word.

Me (19M) and Maya (19F) have been together for eight months. Four of those months we were in the same city. The other four she moved away for university and everything changed.

I want to be honest because I need real answers not just people telling me it gets easier.

We met at a mutual friend's birthday. She was sitting in the corner of the room reading something on her phone while everyone else was loud and i just thought that was the most interesting thing i had ever seen someone do at a party. I sat next to her. We talked until 3am. I walked her home. She texted me before she even got inside.

The first four months were the kind of thing you do not think actually exists outside of movies. We were inseparable. She used to leave little notes in my jacket pockets. I used to drive to her place at midnight just because she said she could not sleep. Everything felt easy in a way I had never felt before.

Then September came.

She got into a university three hours away and I watched her pack her whole life into boxes and I kept telling myself three hours is nothing. People do this all the time. We are going to be fine.

The first month was okay. We called every night. Fell asleep on the phone. Sent each other voice messages throughout the day just to feel close.

Then the calls got shorter. Not because we stopped caring. Just because she had a life happening there and I had a life happening here and by the time we both had a free moment we were already exhausted.

Last night I was lying in bed at 2am staring at my phone waiting for her to come online. She had been out with her uni friends. I was not angry. I just felt this hollow thing in my chest that I could not name. When she finally texted me she sounded happy and I was glad she was happy and also I have never felt more alone in my life at the same time.

She cried on our last call. Not about anything specific. Just one of those moments where the distance hits you all at once and there is nothing either of you can do about it except sit there and feel it together from opposite ends of a screen.

I love her. I genuinely love her. And I do not know if love is supposed to feel this much like grief.

Is this normal. Does it get better. Or are we just two people holding onto something that the distance is slowly taking apart.

I do not want to lose her. I just do not know how much of this I can carry.

this one is from where i work guys.
I work night shifts at a data recovery company.

Most people do not think about what that means. They hand over a broken hard drive or a waterlogged laptop and they want their wedding photos back or a college thesis they forgot to back up. The job is quiet. Technical. Mostly just me and two other guys in a basement office that smells like solder and cold coffee and the particular kind of silence that only exists underground at 2am.

Three weeks ago a drive came in with no client name attached to it.

That happens sometimes. People drop things off in the after hours slot and forget to fill out the form properly. We log it anyway and wait for someone to call.

Nobody called.

Marcus the senior tech took a look at it first. He plugged it in and ran the diagnostics and told me the drive was fine. Not corrupted. Not damaged. Just locked behind a password that had been entered wrong so many times the system had frozen it. He handed it to me and said to see what I could pull before we shelved it.

It took me about forty minutes to get in.

What I found inside was a single folder.

No name. Just a folder sitting in the middle of an otherwise empty drive like someone had cleaned everything else off and left only this.

I opened it.

Photos. Hundreds of them. Maybe more. All organised into subfolders by what looked like dates going back about four years.

I opened the first subfolder.

A street. Daytime. Shot from a distance like someone sitting in a parked car with a long lens. In the middle of the frame a woman walking a dog. She had no idea the photo was being taken. You could tell by the way she was looking at her phone and laughing at something on the screen. Completely unaware.

I opened the next subfolder.

Same woman. Different day. Outside what looked like a gym. Shot from across the parking lot.

I kept clicking.

Same woman. A grocery store. A park bench. Getting into her car. Standing at her front door with her keys out. Sitting at a restaurant across from someone. Walking alone at night under a streetlight.

Hundreds of photos. All of her. All taken without her knowing.

I sat back in my chair and felt something cold move through my chest.

I kept going because I did not know what else to do.

The most recent subfolder was dated eight days ago.

I opened it and my hands went still on the keyboard.

The photos were different.

She was inside a house now. Shot through a window. She was at a kitchen counter making something. The angle was low like whoever was taking these was crouching in the dark outside the window looking in.

There were twelve photos from that night alone.

In the last one she was looking directly at the window.

Not at the camera. Not at anything specific. Just that thing people do when they feel something without being able to name it. That instinct. She was standing very still holding a glass and looking at the exact spot where someone had been watching her and her face had gone quiet in a way that made my stomach turn.

I closed the folder.

I went to Marcus and told him what I found. He looked at the drive for a long time without saying anything then picked up the phone and called the police.

Two officers came in around 4am. They took the drive. Asked us questions. Wrote things down. Told us we did the right thing and that they would look into it. The whole thing took less than an hour and then they were gone and it was just me and Marcus and the basement again.

I tried to go back to work but I kept thinking about her face in that last photo.

The way she was looking at the window.

The way something in her already knew.

I went home at 6am when my shift ended and I showered and I tried to sleep but I kept seeing the subfolders. The dates. Four years of someone's life documented by someone who was never supposed to be there.

I woke up at noon to a missed call from one of the officers who had come in that night.

I called back.

He told me they had tracked down the woman in the photos.

I asked if she was okay.

A pause. The kind that takes up too much space.

He said they found her that morning. That it appeared she had been missing for approximately six days. That they were still working on the details and could not share more at this time.

I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the wall.

Six days.

The most recent photos on that drive were taken eight days ago.

Someone had watched her through that kitchen window eight days ago.

She had been missing for six.

There is a two day gap I cannot account for and I have not stopped thinking about it since.

I keep coming back to that last photo. Her standing at the counter. The glass in her hand. That stillness in her face.

She felt it.

She knew someone was outside that window.

And she still turned the kitchen light off when she went to bed.

Just like the rest of us would have done.

Just like you will do tonight.

I've been staring at my phone for three hours now.

It began as a normal Tuesday night. I was alone in my apartment, scrolling through old photos, when my screen lit up with a notification from an unfamiliar number.

Unknown: I see that your light is still on.

I froze. I replied, "Who is this?"

The response arrived in less than two seconds.

Unknown: Someone who has been following you for a long time.

My stomach dropped. I walked to my window and pulled the curtain back slightly. Nothing but a dark, empty street and a single flickering lamppost three buildings down.

I texted, "This is not funny." Stop.

Unknown: You are wearing a grey shirt. The one with a small tear at the collar.

I looked down at my shirt.

There was a tear at the collar.

My hands began shaking so violently that I nearly dropped my phone. I rushed to every window in my apartment and locked every door. I called the cops. They stated that they would send someone to check the area.

While I waited, I sat in the corner of my bedroom, lights turned off, trying to control my breathing.

Then my phone vibrated again.

Unknown: It was smart to turn off the lights. But you forgot about the one down the hall.

I hadn't told anyone I'd turned off the lights.

The police arrived 20 minutes later. They searched both the building and the street. They found no one. The officer told me it was probably a prank and advised me to block the number.

I nodded and thanked them.

After they left, I finally mustered the courage to check my phone one last time.

There was one last message.

Unknown: The officer who had just left failed to check inside the walls.

Then from somewhere deep inside the wall, directly behind me

something

knocked

back.