I first noticed the woman on a Tuesday morning while walking to work. She was sitting beside the window of a small café across from the bus stop, watching people pass without touching her coffee. I had seen her there before, but that morning she looked directly at me and smiled. I assumed she was someone I had met and simply forgotten.

The strange part was that she knew my name.

She didn’t call out or wave me over. She just mouthed it through the glass, slowly enough that I could understand. I looked behind me because I thought she might be talking to someone else. There was nobody there, so I continued toward the bus stop and tried not to think about it.

That evening, I mentioned it to my coworker Daniel. He laughed and said I was probably imagining things because I had barely slept the night before. We spent a few minutes searching for some scary stories online, mostly because Daniel liked reading strange things during slow shifts. He showed me several stories about strangers appearing in windows, but none of them seemed remotely believable.

The next morning, the woman was there again.

This time, she wasn’t drinking coffee.

She had a folded newspaper on the table and one hand resting on it. When I walked past the café, she turned the newspaper around so I could see the front page. I couldn’t read the headline from outside, but I could clearly see a photograph printed beneath it.

It was a picture of me.

I stopped walking.

The woman smiled again.

Then she folded the newspaper and put it into her bag.

I crossed the street and entered the café.

She was gone.

The waitress told me the woman had left a few minutes earlier. I asked if she came there often, and the waitress said she had never seen her before. I described the woman, but the waitress shook her head and told me nobody matching that description had been sitting there.

I checked the table anyway.

There was a newspaper underneath the chair.

The front page was from 1994.

The photograph showed the same street I was standing on, but the buildings looked different. I recognized the café because the sign above the entrance had the same shape it had today. Beneath the photograph was a short article about a woman who had disappeared after leaving work one evening.

Her name was Claire Morris.

The photograph beside the article showed the woman from the café.

I took the newspaper home.

That night, I searched for information about Claire. There wasn’t much available, but I found a local newspaper archive with several articles about her disappearance. She had worked at a nearby hotel and had been walking home when she vanished. Her body was never found.

One article mentioned that she had often complained about seeing someone watching her from across the street.

The article didn’t say who.

I stopped looking after that.

For several days, nothing happened. I didn’t see the woman again, and eventually I started convincing myself that the newspaper had been some elaborate joke. Maybe someone at work had arranged it. Maybe Daniel knew more than he admitted.

Then my apartment phone rang.

I almost never received calls on it.

When I answered, there was silence.

I said hello twice.

A woman’s voice finally said, “You shouldn’t have taken the newspaper.”

I recognized her immediately.

I asked who she was.

She didn’t answer.

Instead, she said, “Look outside.”

I was standing in the kitchen, and the window was directly in front of me. I didn’t want to turn toward it, but I did.

The woman was standing across the street.

She wasn’t at the café.

She was looking up at my apartment.

I dropped the phone.

When I looked again, she was gone.

I called Daniel and told him what happened. He didn’t laugh this time. He came over after work and spent nearly an hour checking the street from my window. Nobody was there. He suggested I stay somewhere else for a few nights, which I did.

I stayed at his apartment for four days.

On the fifth morning, he woke me before sunrise.

There was a newspaper on the kitchen table.

Neither of us had bought one.

The front page showed Daniel’s apartment building.

The photograph had clearly been taken from across the street.

Daniel stared at it for a long time before saying, “That’s my bedroom window.”

Neither of us touched the paper.

Under the photograph was a short article about Claire Morris.

This time, there was something different.

A new sentence had appeared beneath the original story.

She was not alone that night.

Daniel searched the newspaper archive again.

The sentence wasn’t in the original article.

We went to the library and asked for old records about Claire. A librarian eventually found a box of local newspaper clippings. One article mentioned that Claire had reported seeing a man watching her from a parked car several nights before she disappeared.

There was never an arrest.

There was, however, a photograph.

The man in it was standing beside a dark sedan.

Daniel recognized him.

It was his grandfather.

He had died before Daniel was born.

Daniel didn’t speak for several minutes.

Then he asked me why the woman had brought the newspaper to us.

I didn’t have an answer.

That evening, I went back to my apartment alone.

I found another folded newspaper underneath my door.

I almost left it there.

Instead, I opened it.

The photograph showed Claire standing outside the café.

She was looking toward the camera.

Behind her was the same dark sedan.

But this time, someone was sitting inside it.

The driver’s face was hidden by the shadows.

The passenger window was open.

A hand rested on the edge.

On the back of the photograph, someone had written a message.

She has been waiting for someone to remember.

I never saw Claire again.

The café closed a few months later, and the building was eventually renovated. Daniel refused to talk about his grandfather after that. He also stopped using the old newspaper archive entirely.

I still have the first photograph.

Every few months, I look at it.

The picture hasn’t changed.

Claire is still standing outside the café.

But recently, I noticed something I had missed before.

There is someone standing behind her.

It looks like me.