It started the same way every night. Not with the lake itself, she'd been spared that particular horror since the first time it dragged her under, but with the seconds just before it. A practice room reflected in too many mirrors. A pair of effortless girls walking past without a glance. A clock somewhere off-screen, ticking down toward a decision that had already, quietly, been made days before anyone else noticed.
Three in the morning, give or take ten minutes, Ding Jia's eyes would fly open to a ceiling she didn't immediately recognize, heart slamming against ribs that ached with a grief that technically wasn't hers to carry. She'd lie there afterward, replaying nothing in particular, because the dream never gave her anything concrete to hold onto. Just feeling, just weight, just the lingering sense that somewhere a debt had gone unpaid and she was the only person alive who knew it existed.
By the fourth night of this, she'd started leaving a lamp on. By the sixth, she'd stopped pretending the under-eye concealer was doing its job. By the eighth, she'd taken to drinking warm milk before bed like her grandmother used to swear by, with exactly zero measurable improvement, though she kept doing it anyway out of sheer stubborn hope.
Lin Lin noticed first, because Lin Lin always noticed first. It was, depressingly, half of what made her good at her job, and most of what made her impossible to lie to for long. It started small. Ding Jia flinched at an empty hallway during a costume fitting, badly enough that the seamstress pricked her with a pin and had to apologize twice.
Ding Jia went quiet mid-sentence at lunch, staring at a corner of the room that held nothing but a coat rack and a poorly hung calendar. Ding Jia asked, with far too much careful, casual interest for someone who claimed to just be browsing the news that morning, whether anyone had ever actually confirmed if that model who'd drowned last week had really been alone when it happened.
It built quietly across the better part of two weeks. A comment here, a strange silence there, until it stopped being something Lin Lin could consider as exhaustion and started looking, unmistakably, like something else.
"Why," Lin Lin asked one evening, arms crossed in the doorway of Ding Jia's dressing room, voice flat in the specific way that meant she'd already decided this conversation wasn't optional, "are you so invested in a dead stranger's accident?"
"Research." The answer came too fast, and they both knew that landed wrong. "For the role. Li Xinyi deals with grief and death constantly throughout the series. I figured understanding a real case might help me ground the performance into something true."
"Mm." Lin Lin didn't look remotely convinced, but she also didn't immediately push back, which was somehow worse. She had a particular, surgical way of letting a lie sit in the open air just long enough for the person who told it to feel it start to rot on its own.
"You've also started talking to empty rooms, Jia. Should I be looking into grief counselors instead of new scripts for you after this filming?"
"I talk to myself constantly when I'm memorizing lines. You've watched me do it for fifteen years."
"I've watched you do it facing a mirror, with a script open in your hand. Not facing a blank wall, hands empty, like you're waiting for something to answer back." Lin Lin's eyes narrowed slightly, the kind of look she usually reserved for contracts with suspicious fine print. "If something's actually wrong, you know you can tell me. I've kept worse secrets than whatever this is. If you feel even a bit something's wrong in your body, it's just a call away to your usual doctor."
For one unsteady second, the offer nearly worked.
Ding Jia thought about the bloodied woman in her hallway. The frozen doorknob in the height of summer. The lily that kept appearing on her desk and dissolving like it didn't fully trust its own existence. She thought about how good it would feel, even briefly, to hand even a fraction of this weight to someone else. To not be the only living person who knew exactly how Su Yao had spent her final months, exactly how cold and suffocating that water must have been, exactly how much of it might have been prevented if even one person had simply looked a little harder, a little sooner.
Then she thought about psychiatric evaluations, leaked medical records, and the particular look her own parents got whenever they suspected something fragile was being hidden from them. That blend of fear and helplessness that made grown adults start speaking to her like she might shatter, and the moment passed, quietly, the way it always did.
"I'm fine. Just tired. Comeback nerves, probably, plus the fitting ran long today." She forced a smile, the practiced kind that had fooled sharper interviewers than her own best friend across a decade of red carpets. "I promise, if anything's genuinely wrong, you'll be the very first person I tell."
Lin Lin studied her for a long, silent beat, clearly listing the lie away in some mental checklist reserved for things I will absolutely bring up again rather than actually believing a word of it. "You'd better mean that."
She let it drop there — for now, at least, which was its own kind of mercy. Ding Jia exhaled the moment the door began to swing shut, already bracing to finally collapse into the dressing room chair and let her face stop performing for five uninterrupted minutes.
She didn't get the chance.
The door paused halfway, and Lin Lin leaned back in, frowning down at a notification that had just lit up her phone, her whole expression shifting from concern into something colder and far more familiar.
"Oh. By the way." She didn't look up right away. "Another package came in for you at the agency this afternoon. Front desk almost didn't flag it. Same handwriting as always, same little embroidered butterfly stitched into the wrapping paper, exactly like the others."
Ding Jia's stomach dropped straight through the floor.
"It's been almost two months since the last one," she said slowly, setting down the hairbrush she'd been holding without quite remembering she still had it. "I genuinely thought he'd finally lost interest."
"So did I." Lin Lin lifted her phone, turning the screen so Ding Jia could see the photo already loaded on it — a plain brown box, slightly larger than the usual deliveries, sitting untouched on the corner of her desk under the agency's fluorescent lights. "He didn't send a doll this time."
She let that hang in the air a moment, watching Ding Jia's face carefully, before she finished.
"Whatever's inside, it's heavier than the dolls ever were. And there's something written on the lid that security wouldn't read out loud to me over the phone."
Ding Jia looked at the photo a long time before she trusted her own voice enough to answer. "Don't open it without me."
"Wasn't planning to," Lin Lin said. "I already called for a sweep. We'll check it together first thing tomorrow." She paused at the door one last time, and for once, the sharp, composed mask slipped just enough to let something genuinely uneasy through. "Jia. Whatever this is, the nightmares, the empty rooms, now this, I don't think it's nothing anymore. It's better to get checked than leave you to suffer alone like this."
Lin Lin left after that, and Ding Jia spent the next hour doing nothing in particular. Staring at scripts she wasn't reading, scrolling through a phone she wasn't really looking at, trying to convince her own nerves to settle before she had to drive home and face an empty apartment alone.
She was halfway out the agency's back exit, bodyguard trailing a respectful few steps behind, when her phone buzzed once in her pocket. A new message, from a number she didn't recognize, no name attached.
She almost didn't open it. Almost.
The message was a single photo, no caption. It took her eyes a second too long to understand what she was looking at. And when she did, her steps stopped dead in the middle of the parking garage.
It was her hospital room. The private one, on the VIP floor, the bed still made, the machines still dark and unplugged. Taken, by the angle of the light and the dust on the windowsill, sometime very recently, long after she'd been discharged, long after that room should have belonged to someone else entirely.
Scrawled across the bottom of the photo, in the same careful, looping handwriting that had decorated every gift box for the last three years, were six words.
I kept it empty. Just for you.
Her phone buzzed again before she could fully process the first message. A second photo loaded beneath it. Her own apartment door, taken from somewhere in the hallway outside, close enough to make out the little brass numbers nailed into the wood.
Timestamped four minutes ago.