“Come back…”
She walked into the bathroom of apartment 1104, Madison Tower, Manhattan, her heart pounding like it was about to jump out of her chest. The singing was playing – the same tune that Michael, her husband, always hummed when he was happy. But… the room was empty.

She shakily called:
“I’m in New York, just finished a meeting,” Michael answered.

But the singing was still playing, deep, sweet… and ended with a sentence that made her freeze:
“Come back.”

The water from the faucet dripped slowly, the mirror blurred with each breath. The bathtub shook slightly, the towels rustled. She stepped forward, her heart pounding, realizing: this was no joke, no imagination. Someone was standing in the dark, knowing every secret she had ever kept hidden, even the five-month pregnancy she had only dared to reveal to her friends.

She wanted to run, but with each step she felt like she was being sucked into the room. And then, another whisper from the mirror, chilling to the bone:

“He never told the whole truth.”

She knew one thing: Michael wasn’t there, but the person in the bathroom – someone… was controlling everything, from her life to her future.

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The key turned in the lock of apartment 1104, Madison Tower, with the soft click that always meant Elena was finally home. It was past eleven on a wet October night in Manhattan, and the city’s orange glow pressed against the tall windows like a bruise. She dropped her bag, kicked off her heels, and walked straight to the bathroom because the flight from Chicago had been turbulent and she needed to wash the day off her face.

She pushed the door open and froze.

Someone was singing.

Not from a phone or speaker. The voice was low, male, warm, and it floated over the marble like steam. The melody was unmistakable: “Moon River,” the same lazy, off-key way Michael always hummed it when he was shaving or making coffee or sliding his arms around her waist from behind. Except Michael was supposed to be in London until Friday. He had texted her four hours ago: Boarded. Miss you already.

The bathroom was empty.

White subway tile, steel fixtures, the long mirror still fogged from the shower someone must have taken earlier. Elena’s pulse thudded in her ears. She stepped inside. The singing continued, closer now, as if the singer stood right behind her.

“Michael?” Her voice cracked.

Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. She fumbled it out.

“I’m in New York, just finished a meeting,” Michael’s text read, timestamped one minute ago.

She stared at the screen, then at the empty room. The singing grew sweeter, more intimate, and then the final line drifted out—not the real lyrics, but something new, whispered against the shell of her ear:

“Come back.”

The faucet dripped. Plink. Plink. Plink. Each drop hit the porcelain like a slow heartbeat.

Elena’s hand flew to her stomach. Five months. She had only told two friends so far; Michael still didn’t know. She had planned to tell him this weekend, over dinner at the little place in Nolita where they’d had their first date. She had rehearsed the words a hundred times on the plane. Surprise. We’re having a baby.

The mirror fogged again, though she hadn’t breathed on it. Words appeared, scratched into the condensation from the inside:

He never told the whole truth.

Her knees buckled. She caught the edge of the vanity. The bathtub shuddered, a low metallic groan, as though something heavy shifted beneath the still water she now noticed had been drawn. The surface trembled. Towels slid from the heated rack and pooled on the floor like shed skin.

Elena backed toward the door, but the air thickened, syrupy, resisting her. The singing started again, softer, almost tender, and this time the voice wasn’t coming from the room.

It was coming from inside her.

She pressed both palms to her belly, terrified the baby could hear it too.

“Stop,” she whispered. “Whoever you are, stop.”

The lights flickered. Once. Twice. Then the bathroom plunged into absolute darkness.

When the lights returned, a man stood between her and the door.

He looked exactly like Michael—same unruly black hair, same faint scar above the left eyebrow from a childhood sledding accident, same crooked half-smile. But his eyes were wrong. They were too dark, pupils blown wide, swallowing the irises until only black remained.

“Hello, Lena,” he said, using the nickname only Michael ever used.

She couldn’t scream. Her throat had sealed shut.

He tilted his head. “You’re late. I’ve been waiting five months.”

The man who was not Michael stepped forward. The floor didn’t creak beneath his bare feet; he made no sound at all. He reached out and laid a hand on her stomach with heartbreaking gentleness.

“She knows my voice already,” he murmured. “I sang to her every night you were asleep.”

Elena found her voice. “You’re not him.”

“No,” he agreed. “I’m what he left behind.”

He took her hand and pressed it against his chest. There was no heartbeat.

“Michael had an accident,” he said conversationally. “Geneva. Black ice on the mountain road. He died instantly, they told you. Do you remember the call?”

She did. Three years ago. She had dropped the phone and screamed until neighbors banged on the door. She had worn black for a year. She had rebuilt herself, piece by careful piece, until she could laugh again, until she met the new Michael—kind, steady, alive—at a gallery opening in Chelsea. They married eighteen months later. He had the same name, the same laugh, the same stories. She had thought it was fate giving her a second chance.

The thing wearing her husband’s face smiled sadly.

“He borrowed the body,” it said. “The one you fell in love with the second time. Borrowed it from a man who looked close enough, who had no family to notice he went missing. Michael—my Michael—never left you. He just… slipped inside. Like a hand into a glove.”

Elena’s legs gave out. She sank to the cold tile.

“No,” she said. “No, that’s not possible.”

“Feel.” He guided her trembling fingers to the base of his throat. Beneath the warm skin she felt something hard and wrong, like a ridge of scar tissue that ran too straight, too perfect. Surgical.

“He kept me quiet with pills at first,” the thing said. “Then with lies. Then with love. But the body is failing now. It was never meant to hold two souls this long.”

He knelt so they were eye to eye.

“The baby quickened it,” he whispered. “New life calls to old death. I’m stronger now. Strong enough to take the wheel.”

Elena shook her head violently. “I’ll call the police. I’ll—”

“You’ll what? Tell them your dead husband possessed your new one?” He laughed, and it was Michael’s laugh, the one that used to make her knees weak. “They’ll lock you up, Lena. For your own safety. And then there will be no one to sing to our daughter.”

She stared at him, tears sliding hot down her cheeks.

“What do you want?” she asked.

His black eyes softened.

“Come back,” he said simply. “Like the song. Come back to me. All the way. Let me in again—into you, into her. We can be a family. The three of us. The four of us, really.” He touched her stomach again. “I never blamed you for moving on. I just… missed you.”

The room spun. Elena remembered the nights she had woken from nightmares reaching for a man who wasn’t there anymore. The way the new Michael always knew exactly how she liked her coffee, exactly where to kiss the back of her neck to make her shiver, exactly which stories from their past made her cry happy tears. Too perfect. She had told herself it was love.

“I can’t,” she sobbed. “I won’t.”

The smile faded.

“Then I’ll have to take her instead.”

The bathtub water erupted. A hand—pale, bloated, unmistakably dead—burst through the surface and seized her ankle with impossible strength. Elena screamed as she was dragged backward. The dead Michael, the original, crawled out of the tub, water streaming from his decayed suit, skin sliding from bone, mouth open in a soundless howl.

The living Michael—not Michael—watched almost pityingly.

“I tried to do this gently,” he said. “But you always were stubborn.”

Elena kicked, clawed, but the corpse’s grip was iron. Her fingernails raked across the marble, searching for anything. They closed around the small silver frame she kept on the vanity: their wedding photo, her and the new Michael laughing under cherry blossoms.

She smashed it against the corpse’s skull. Glass shattered. The thing recoiled with a wet hiss.

In the broken frame, the photograph had warped. The man beside her in the picture no longer smiled. His face was blank, featureless, a void.

Elena rolled free and scrambled to her feet.

“Get out of my house,” she spat.

The possessed Michael sighed.

“Very well.”

He stepped aside, making a courtly gesture toward the open door.

She ran.

Down the hallway, past the kitchen where a single coffee cup sat rinsed in the sink—Michael’s morning cup, though he was supposedly in London. Past the nursery she had secretly started painting pale yellow last weekend. Into the living room, slamming the door behind her and dragging the console table across it.

Silence.

Then singing again, muffled through the wood.

Moon River…

Her phone buzzed on the floor where she’d dropped it.

A video call from “Michael Home.”

She answered with shaking hands.

His face filled the screen—her husband, the one she had married the second time, looking exhausted but normal. Behind him was the familiar chaos of Heathrow baggage claim.

“Lena?” he said worriedly. “Baby, why are you crying? What’s wrong?”

She stared at him. At the eyes that were suddenly, unquestionably brown again, not black.

“I heard you singing,” she whispered.

He frowned. “I’ve been on a plane for eight hours. I literally just landed.”

The bathroom door creaked open down the hall.

Michael’s face on the screen went pale.

“Elena,” he said very quietly, “listen to me. Whatever you do, do not go back in there.”

Something heavy began to drag across the floor toward the living room.

“Whatever you hear me say,” he continued, voice trembling, “it’s not me anymore. I’ve been trying to warn you for months. The humming. The texts from my own number when I was sitting right next to you. I thought if I stayed away—”

The dragging stopped outside the door.

“Elena,” the thing in the bathroom called, using Michael’s voice perfectly, “come back.”

On the screen, the real Michael—wherever he truly was—closed his eyes.

“I love you,” he said. “Both of you. I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. Run.”

The door exploded inward.

Elena dropped the phone and ran to the window. Twenty-three floors up. No fire escape.

Behind her, footsteps.

She turned.

The thing that looked like Michael stood in the shattered doorway holding the silver frame with the ruined photograph. He turned it toward her gently.

In the broken glass, the picture had changed again. Now it showed the three of them—her, Michael, and a little girl with her father’s dark hair—standing together under those same cherry blossoms.

The little girl was smiling.

The thing extended its hand.

“She’s waiting,” it said. “We both are.”

Elena looked at the hand, then at her belly.

Very slowly, she placed her own hand in his.

The apartment went quiet.

Somewhere far below, yellow cabs honked. The city kept moving, indifferent.

In 1104, the singing started again, soft and sweet.

Moon River, wider than a mile…

And this time, two voices harmonized.