My daughter said a man enters our room every night… and that night I decided to pretend I was asleep to catch him.
Sonia is eight.
Eight.
She isn’t one of those children who invents shadows to make a story sound bigger. She doesn’t lie for attention. She doesn’t even raise her voice when she gets excited. She is quiet, sweet, and still believes the moon follows our car because it likes her.
That is why, when she said it so calmly that morning, something inside me cracked.
— Dad… every night a man enters your room after you’ve already fallen asleep.
My hands slipped on the steering wheel.
— What did you just say?
She kept staring out the window on the way to school, watching shops and traffic slide by as if she were talking about the weather.
— He walks very slowly, she said. — Like he doesn’t want the floor to make noise. Mom closes her eyes, but she doesn’t say anything.
There was no fear in her voice.
No confusion.
Only certainty.
That certainty was what turned my blood cold.
— Sonia… where did you get that from?
She shrugged.
— I see him.
The rest of the drive felt wrong. The air inside the car seemed too thick to breathe. I kept looking at her in the mirror, waiting for a smile, a laugh, some sign that this was a child’s strange invention. Nothing came. She just adjusted the straps of her pink backpack and hummed softly to herself, like she hadn’t just opened a hole beneath my feet.
