You wiped down the counter for the fifth time, the rag moving in slow, mechanical circles. Two months. Sixty-one days. Not that you were counting. Not that you'd stopped counting since the officer had shown up at your door with that look on his face—the look people get when they're about to tell you something that will break you.

The bells above the door jingled.

You didn't look up. Just kept wiping.

Across the room, in the corner by the window, a shadow moved.

It was tall. Too tall. Skinny, impossibly thin, its limbs stretching like smoke, darker than the night pressing against the glass. And there—two pinpricks of pale light, fixed on you.

You blinked.

It was gone.