“Forgive me… I couldn’t save her either.”

The sentence hung in the darkness like a knife.

I kept staring at my phone screen, my hands shaking so violently I could barely hold it.

Save her?

Save who?

Daniel bowed his head next to Emily and began to cry harder, though he was still trying to muffle the sound. My daughter slept, clutching the edge of her pillow. And underneath it lay that pink hospital wristband.

Then I understood. Or at least, part of it.

The little sister.

The baby.

The loss.

The emptiness.

I felt a sharp, heavy blow to my chest. Two years ago, I had been pregnant. For a very short time. Barely nine weeks. A pregnancy that never made it. Bleeding. The hospital. A doctor saying, “Sometimes these things just happen.” And after that, silence.

Daniel never spoke of it again. Neither did I. Not because it didn’t hurt, but because it hurt too much.

But Emily knew. We had made the mistake of telling her the moment we saw the positive test. She had been so excited. She would talk to my belly. She had even picked out a name.

Lucy.

Later, when we lost the baby, we told her that “her little sister wasn’t going to be able to come.” Emily cried for two days. Daniel cried for months. And now, he was lying down next to her every night like a man who was drowning.

I couldn’t sleep. I waited until dawn.

Daniel came back to our room around four. He thought I was still asleep. I heard him slide into bed slowly. He smelled like Emily’s baby lotion. And tears.

At seven, the alarm went off. He got up first. He went into the bathroom. I sat up in bed.

“We need to talk.”

Daniel walked out, his face pale. He looked at me. I suppose he understood instantly, because his breath hitched for a second.

“You saw the camera.” It wasn’t a question.

I nodded. I braced myself for a lie. An excuse. Something. But he simply sat down across from me like a man utterly exhausted from hiding.

“How long have you been doing this?”

Daniel rubbed his eyes. “For five months.”

I felt rage. Pure rage. “Five months of sneaking into our daughter’s room?”

“I didn’t want to scare you guys.”

“You already scared her!”

He looked down. “I know.”

“Then explain to me what the hell is going on.”

It took Daniel a long time to answer. And when he spoke, his voice sounded broken.

“Emily started talking in her sleep.”

The air caught in my throat. “What?”

“After the miscarriage. Sometimes I’d walk past her room and hear her talking to herself. She was saying… strange things.”

“What kind of things?”

He swallowed hard. “She was asking when her little sister was coming back.”

Chills ran down my spine. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“I know. I thought so too. But one night, I went in because I heard her crying.” He fell silent for a few seconds. “And she was asleep… but her hand was stretched out to the side of the bed. Like she was touching someone.”

I didn’t want to hear this. I really didn’t. But I pressed on. “And?”

“And she said, ‘Don’t worry, there’s room for both of us.’“

The kitchen suddenly felt too small. Too cold. Daniel lifted his eyes to meet mine, filled with guilt.

“After that, I couldn’t stop going in.”

“Why?”

“Because she started waking up crying. She said Lucy was cold.”

My heart was beating so hard it hurt. “Daniel…”

“I know how it sounds.”

“Did you take her to see someone? A therapist?”

“Yes. The child psychologist said it was just a child’s way of processing grief. But then, Emily started saying things that no one could possibly know.”

A thick silence fell between us.

“Like what?”

Daniel got up slowly. He walked over to his briefcase and pulled out a folded medical envelope. The same one I had seen on the camera. He handed it to me.

I opened it with clumsy, trembling hands. It was an ultrasound. One I had never seen before. The date was from weeks before I lost the pregnancy. In the bottom corner, there was a handwritten note:

“Twins.”

I felt the world tilt. I stared at Daniel. “What is this?”

He began to cry again. “There were two babies.”

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe.

“The second gestational sac was too small. There was no heartbeat. The doctor said the other embryo would likely never develop, and that we should just focus on the viable pregnancy.”

My legs gave out. I had to sit down. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Because a week later, we lost Lucy too.” He looked at me, utterly destroyed. “I couldn’t bear to pile another death on top of you.”

I felt anger. Pain. Betrayal. But underneath it all, there was something else. Fear.

Because then I realized something horrific. Emily always talked about “my little sister.” Never “my lost sister.” Never “the baby.” As if, to her, it had been real from the very beginning. As if she had actually known someone.

That night, we didn’t let Emily sleep alone. We put her to bed between us. Daniel didn’t close his eyes. Neither did I.

At three in the morning, Emily began to toss and turn restlessly. She was sweating, frowning. Suddenly, she opened her eyes. She didn’t seem fully awake. She stared up at the corner of the ceiling, then whispered:

“She actually came today.”

Daniel went rigid. “Who came, princess?”

Emily gave a faint smile. “Lucy.”

An unbearable chill swept through the room.

“Where is she?” I asked, trying to sound calm.

Emily pointed under the bed.

And then, we heard the sound. Soft. Sharp. Like someone clapping twice from underneath the floorboards.

Daniel leaped up immediately. He flipped on the light. I threw my arms around Emily. He checked under the bed.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

But when he stood back up, his face was completely white.

“What is it?”

Daniel was holding something in his hand. The pink hospital wristband. The exact same one I had seen under the pillow hours earlier. Except now, there was something written on the back in black marker.

“NO ROOM.”

I felt a wave of nausea. Daniel dropped it instantly. Emily began to cry.

“She says you’re squishing her, Daddy.”

I don’t remember much of what followed. Only fragments. Daniel making an emergency call to a child therapist. Me crying in the bathroom. Emily refusing to step foot in her room alone. And that awful, lingering sensation that something was watching us from some corner of the house.

Over the next few days, everything got worse. Emily would wake up with small bruises on her arms. She said her little sister got angry when Daniel slept nearby. That “there was no space left.”

I wanted to believe it was just her imagination. Trauma. Anxiety. Anything but that.

But one afternoon, I found drawings hidden under her bed. Pages torn from her notebook. Drawn in black crayon. Three figures lying down: Emily, Daniel, and another girl.

With no eyes.

Beneath it was a child’s sentence, written in crooked letters:

“Daddy promised to sleep with both of us.”

When Daniel saw the drawing, he completely broke down. That night, he confessed to something else. Something that finished destroying us.

The night before I miscarried, he had gone to the hospital alone because I was asleep. He had spoken with the specialist. And the doctor had given him an option. To reduce the pregnancy to protect the stronger baby. To eliminate the smaller sac.

“There was no real chance it would survive,” he told me, sobbing. “It was a common procedure.”

I felt hatred rise up in my throat. “Did you do it?”

Daniel closed his eyes. “I signed the authorization.”

I don’t remember hitting him. I just know my hands ended up on him. Pushing him. Scratching him. Screaming.

Emily woke up terrified. And then, it happened.

Every light in the house went out. A violent crash shook the hallway, sounding as if a door had exploded. Daniel rushed to the light switch. Nothing worked. The house was plunged into pitch-black darkness.

And from Emily’s room, a laugh began to echo. Not a child’s laugh. Not completely. It was a wet, choking laugh. Small. Too small.

Emily started screaming. “She doesn’t want you to fight! She doesn’t want you to fight!”

We ran toward her bedroom using the flashlights on our phones. The door was closed. Locked from the inside. Daniel threw his weight against it once. Twice. Until he managed to burst it open.

And then we saw it.

The mattress was dipped, as if someone were sitting there. The blankets were moving slowly.

I dropped my phone. Daniel stepped back.

And Emily… Emily smiled.

“She has room now.”

The blankets lifted on their own. Just a little. Just enough to reveal the shape of a tiny body underneath. Very small. The size of a baby.

And then, we heard a wet sound. Like a sigh.

Daniel fell to his knees. “I’m sorry…”

The lights snapped back on all at once. Everything vanished. The bed was empty again. But Emily kept staring at the mattress.

“She says she isn’t cold anymore.”

After that night, we moved. We sold the house in less than a month. Daniel stopped going into Emily’s room. Therapy helped a bit. Over time, she stopped talking about Lucy.

Or so we thought.

Three years passed. Three years of trying to fake normalcy.

Until last night.

I was putting away clean laundry when I found a hidden box under Emily’s bed. Inside were drawings. Dozens of them. All of them depicted two girls. Always identical. One smiling. The other with no eyes.

And at the bottom of the box was the pink wristband. The exact same one.

We had burned it before we moved. I was sure of it.

I picked it up, trembling. And then I saw what was written on the back this time. In fresh, childish handwriting. Like it had just been written.

“Mommy… now there is room for all three of us.”