My Father's Name

She drove to her mother's without remembering the route.

Samira Qassem was making tea in her small kitchen when she saw her daughter's face and an old alarm went off behind her eyes.

"Yasmin?"

"Mama. How did my father actually die?"

No answer at first. She washed a hand that wasn't dirty, sat, then said, "I've told you a hundred times. Work accident."

"At a station called what?"

Silence, long enough that Yasmin thought it would go on forever.

"No one ever told me a name. Your father just called it 'the station.' The definite article. Like there wasn't another one in the world."

"Did he act strange before he died?"

"He got messages from his own number. Exactly like you." She paused. "First time I've said that out loud in twenty years."

"What did they do?"

"Some of them warned him. Once, it saved us from a car accident — I was in the car with him. And some of them..." She trailed off, eyes somewhere far away. "Some of them knew things nobody was supposed to know. He told me once one of them knew something I'd said to him in our bedroom, door closed, no one else in the house."

"Did you believe him?"

"I believed the voice he had when he told me. It was a man afraid of something real. Not something imagined."

Samira smiled, suddenly, unexpectedly, somewhere far off. "He always called you 'flower.' Never 'sweetheart,' never your name straight. From the day you were born. Something just between the two of you. You don't remember that?"

Yasmin didn't answer. She didn't know why that detail, of all of them, tightened her throat.

Her phone buzzed.

She opened it, both of them watching.

*Tell her you know about the bedroom. She'll understand.*

Yasmin's heart stopped. She hadn't said "the bedroom" out loud. Her mother had, seconds ago, no phone open, no one else in the house.

Something was listening to them. Right now. Not before. Now.

Both women looked around with the same blind instinct — the doors, the windows. Nothing.

Yasmin went home after midnight, unable to stay. She sat on her bed, phone beside her.

One last message before exhaustion took her: *Congratulations again. You understand more than he did at this exact stage.*

Then, a moment later, a photo.

She opened it with cold fingers. Herself, from behind, on this exact bed, in this exact shirt. Timestamp: three minutes from now.

Out of a habit that had become instinct, she pulled the raw header without thinking.

No zero date. No fault. A real timestamp. Live. Exact to the second it was sent.

This one hadn't come from the past. This one was happening now.

She looked back toward the closet, the exact angle the photo had been shot from.

No one there.

But the door — the one she'd have sworn she closed on her way out — stood open a few centimeters.

Next Episode: The Photograph Not Yet Taken — Someone stood in her room. The photo proves it.