After coming home from work, I see my favorite dishes laid out all over the table. The liquor is warmed up, and its aroma is the type that I like.

But I don't feel the slightest bit grateful toward my thoughtful and gentle wife.

My gaze passes through her and lands on the wall behind her. There hangs a memorial portrait of her…

"Caden, eat up. What are you gawking at?" The woman before me flashed me a smile, my name rolling off her tongue as she prompted me to eat.

But I knew, without a doubt, that my wife, Mabel Kingsley, had passed away three months ago.

We'd been married for five years and always lived in Ashdale. My wife died three months ago because of an accident.

Her death had been too sudden for me to accept it. In my daze, I made a huge mistake at work and was laid off.

I spent my days in a drunken haze after that.

Just last month, I met my savior while I was out drinking. He'd heard about my circumstances and suggested a change of environment. With his recommendation, I became a truck driver for a truck fleet in Belford.

After all, as a man who'd lost his wife, I could call anywhere home, and it wouldn't matter.

I'd been on the road for a month. When I finally returned home, it was already late at night.

With a push of my hand, the front door swung open, but what greeted me was a table full of hot food and my supposedly dead wife.

I stared at her familiar face, then glanced at her memorial portrait behind her. A lump formed in my throat. I wanted to run, but my legs felt as if they'd been pumped full of lead, refusing to budge.

"W-Why'd you light these candles?" I managed to squeeze the words out of my mouth after pausing and racking my mind for something to say, only to realize that my voice was cracking with fear.

"Oh, the breaker box must have tripped. Let's just make do with the candles for now," my wife replied expressionlessly.

Those were the candles I used when I said prayers for her departed soul, yet now, she'd put them out on the dining table. The flames of the white candles were pale and weak, making for an inexplicably eerie sight.

My heart pounded in my chest. The person in front of me looked exactly like my wife, but my instincts screamed otherwise. She didn't even sound alive.

"Why aren't you eating, Caden?" she prompted again.

"I'm not hungry, Mabel," I answered in a quaking voice.

"That makes no sense."

When I still didn't touch my food, she picked up her utensils and began to eat. But her movements were off and exaggerated, like her limbs had a mind of their own as she stiffly shoveled food into her mouth.

She was not Mabel! I'd lived with Mabel for years and knew her to be graceful, not the unrefined copycat before me.

Did ghosts truly exist?

"You're still not going to eat?"

The woman looked up and flashed me a smile. It was the 15th night of the month. The moon was full and bright, but its silvery light cast a whitish glow over the woman's face.

She was smiling, but her lips were curving all wrong as she asked me the question.

I couldn't speak, so I shook my head mechanically.

"Mabel" sighed, then reached for me. I instinctively wanted to push her away, but my body had gone numb and stiff.

Left without a choice, I let her guide me to the edge of the bed.

"Go ahead and sleep. You've had a long day, honey."

There was not a trace of emotion in her voice. She patted my head mechanically, like a mother comforting a child, but her hand was cold every time it landed on me.

I dared not move, so I played along, closed my eyes, and pretended to fall asleep.

However, I was too tired, and my nerves were extremely riled up. It wasn't long before I dozed off into a heavy slumber.

I slept dreamlessly through the night and woke up to brilliant sunlight.

Perhaps being on the road for a month had taken its toll on me, for my exhaustion had outweighed my fear. Frankly, I was surprised I'd fallen asleep at all under such eerie circumstances.

Emboldened by sunlight, I cleared my throat and called out to Mabel as I had in the past, "Mabel?"

No one else was in the bedroom.

I got out of bed and checked the other rooms. The kitchen was a filthy mess, the utensils covered in dust. The trash in the corner had grown moldy, its odor disgustingly pungent.

The food that had been on the dining table last night was tossed in a corner of the wall, and cobwebs dangled from it.

The apartment looked exactly as I'd left it when I went on the road a month ago.

Had last night been a hallucination?

No! It couldn't be. I could clearly recall her cold hands; I'd never forget her icy touch! How could I have imagined all that?

I collapsed on the ground like a sack of potatoes that had just been dropped, then lifted my gaze to Mabel's memorial portrait.

She was smiling gently at me through the frame. But without realizing it, I thought I saw her smile grow more sinister and blood spill from her eyes, just as they had on the day she died.

A ghost! She'd come back to haunt me as a ghost!

A scream escaped me. I rubbed my eyes, gathering the last of my strength as I burst out of the room.

"Damn it! Are you trying to kill yourself?"

I'd taken off so fast that I ended up colliding with my downstairs neighbor, Hilda, who'd just returned from a grocery run. She rubbed her arm as she snapped at me, "Why the hell are you running so fast? Did you see a ghost in broad daylight?"

Yes, that was exactly what happened!

I grabbed Hilda as if she were my saving grace.

"Hilda!" I stared at her, my voice full of panic as I asked with my last shred of hope, "You live right under my apartment, so you'd know! D-Did any living person come by my place yesterday? My wife… Did my wife show up?"

Hilda retorted scornfully, "Living person? What, were you expecting a ghost? Besides, where'd a bachelor like you get a wife? Mrs. Lloyd and I were downstairs playing poker the whole day yesterday and didn't see any woman show up."

I went still. It was as if a bucket of icy water had been tipped over my head.

They didn't know I was married at one point. If anyone showed up, they would have noticed right away.

And yet, Hilda made it clear that she hadn't seen or heard anything or anyone.

The midday sun was blazing, yet the cold sweat that had broken out over my forehead ran down my face like rivulets.

I didn't believe in ghosts or the occult, but it was hard not to after everything I'd gone through. Could the apartment be haunted?

I stood in place for a long while before snapping out of my daze. After some thought, I decided to hit the supermarket for two packs of cigarettes.

I then headed over to the management office.

"Haunted?"

The man in the management office grinned as he took the cigarette I offered, only to go from happy to confused after hearing my story.

"Yes. Have you heard about any hauntings at Block A6-1, Apartment 302?" I asked in a measured voice, trying my best to get to the truth without sounding overly invested.

"Nope."

He took a drag of his cigarette, then fixed me with a long look.

"To think a 6-foot-tall man like you would believe in such nonsense!" He spat on the ground and eyed me with contempt. "Why would you be afraid of ghosts if you hadn't done something wrong? What are you getting up to?"

His admonishment rendered me speechless. I had no choice but to give him a sheepish, apologetic smile.

I had no idea if I'd live past tonight.

I dared not return home even as the day darkened, but hotels were too expensive, and I couldn't bring myself to pay the tab.

Just as I was debating my choices, my phone rang.

It was Tony. I never really knew his last name because he never told me.

"Hey, Caden. You busy? Care to come out for a drink?"

It was already 8:00 pm when I met up with Tony.

He was my saving grace, the one who'd hooked me up with the trucker job. We'd met over a month ago at a dinner party. A few party-goers had conspired to get him drunk.

I couldn't stand their antics and downed a few drinks on his behalf, sparing him. When he sobered up, he thanked me for looking out for him.

He hooked me up with a new job after hearing my story. Given that I'd moved to Belford without money or connections, he offered me a place to stay in his vacant apartment, which was the one I lived in now.

He was always in a jovial mood when I saw him, but when he registered my arrival, he greeted me with a plain, "Hey."

But the pleasantries didn't last. "I let you have the apartment for free, Caden. You could stay or leave for all I care, but why'd you go to the management complaining about ghosts? How the hell am I supposed to put that apartment up for lease after this?"

I knew Tony was unhappy. It was all I could do to appease him and wait out his tirade. When he'd calmed down, I smiled bitterly and gave him a run-down of what I went through last time.

When I finished speaking, I scratched my head. "Pretty wild, huh? I didn't think I'd see a ghost in this day and age. I had a damn hard time believing it myself."

But Tony didn't mock me in the slightest, and instead leveled a long, hard look at me. "I heard a few stories about Mabel's death. Could someone have set this haunting up as a prank on you?"

Tony's words struck me where it hurt. Mabel had fallen from the stairs after missing a step and died from her injuries. The cops had come and ruled out the possibility of a homicide, yet rumors of my having anything to do with her death still went around.

"I believe you're innocent, but I suggest you find out whether Mabel had a twin sister or something. Maybe one of her family members fell for a rumor and decided to avenge her by staging a haunting."

I nodded quietly. Last night's incident had been sudden, and I'd been too scared and anxious to notice details beyond the obvious. There was no telling if the creature from last night had been a human or a ghost.

As I considered this, Tony's words began to make sense.

After all, there were no such things as ghosts in this world.

Mabel had been abandoned by her parents at a young age and grew up in an orphanage. I didn't know much about her past, let alone whether she had a younger sister.

I stayed at Tony's house for a night, then returned to Ashdale the next morning.

Mabel would drop by the orphanage in Ashdale once a month before she passed. She said she'd grown up and gotten so much charity during her time there. It was only right, she claimed, that she gave it back to society now that she was capable.

She invited me to tag along on every trip, but unfortunately, I'd only been here once before we were married.

The elderly orphanage director, Agatha Harmon, scowled at the sight of me. Upon hearing the reason for my visit, she grew even more reticent.

"Look, Agatha, Mabel slipped and fell by accident. Don't hold that out against me!" I tried to explain, knowing Mabel's death was like an open wound to Agatha.

"Slipped and fell to her death? That's rich, coming from you!"

Venerable as she was, Agatha almost never let her anger get the better of her. And yet, a simple sentence from me was all it took for her to break character.

She pointed at my nose, looking like she'd want nothing more than to bite my face off.

The seconds ticked by, and my patience wore thin. I settled for my last resort. "Agatha, according to the rules and regulations, I, as Mabel's next of kin, have the right to look at my spouse's records, right?"

Agatha's face went white, then darkened like a storm cloud. She had always been proper, and Mabel said she was a stickler for rules. So, as much as she hated my guts, she still tossed the orphanage records at me.

I lunged for it, my knees hitting the ground. I stayed like that and flipped through the pages until I found Mabel's name. The information on the page spelled out the answer to my question in clear, unambiguous letters: "Only child. No siblings."