My Ex Haunts the Wrong Apartment

How it begins

My ex was singing in the wrong apartment.

He had been dead for two years.

He was also, in life, a terrible singer, which removed the last reasonable explanation.

I stood outside number twelve holding a bag of groceries and the emergency contact card I had never taken out of my wallet.

The woman who opened the door looked tired.

"Can you hear him too?"

I nodded.

"Thank God. I thought it was the plumbing."

Behind her, a voice drifted through a half-remembered song.

He always forgot the second verse.

"That's Oliver."

"Does he know you?"

The question was so practical that I nearly laughed.

"I used to think so."

She moved aside.

Her name was Ada. She had lived there six months and spent four of them trying to persuade an invisible man to stop rehearsing after midnight.

"He says he's waiting for Tess."

"That's me."

"Then he owes me an apology."

The singing stopped.

I stood in a stranger's sitting room beneath a lamp I liked immediately and waited for grief to behave as I remembered it.

Instead, I noticed that Ada had set out two cups.

"I made tea when you knocked," she said. "Seemed like the kind of visit."

Oliver's voice came from the window.

"Tess?"

I had imagined hearing him again so often that the actual sound felt strangely small.

"You're in the wrong flat."

"No," he said. "I wrote it down."

A sheet of paper lifted from Ada's table.

Number twelve.

We had lived at twenty-one.

Ada looked at the paper, then at me.

For a moment, despite everything, we shared the same exhausted smile.

"Typical," I said.

Oliver sounded offended.

Ada poured the tea.

It was the first ordinary thing anyone had done for me in the presence of his absence, and I found that harder to bear than the ghost.