Prologue
Seeing is believing…or at least that’s what they say. But what happens when you see the dead?
Do you believe? Or do you believe you're going crazy?
For as long as I could remember, I could see the things that linger just beyond our plane of existence. When I was four, I told my abuela that at night I would see a woman in a white lace dress sitting just at the foot of my bed.
She would come every night and sing an old lullaby that still lives in my head. Lulling me to go to sleep or else El Coco, or the boogyman, would come and get me. But that wasn’t what scared me the most; what left its mark on my young mind was the fact that I could see right through her.
As I described to my abuela the beautiful woman with long black hair veiled in silk, I searched her weathered face for signs of disbelief, but found only a knowing grimness in her eyes—it turned out she had the sight, just like me.
She crossed herself quickly, muttering something under her breath that sounded like a prayer, pressing her fingers to her lips, the rosary around her wrist swinging frantically.
“La Llorona,” she whispered, her accent thickening with each syllable. “You must never speak to her, nina. Never answer if she calls your name.”
The kitchen suddenly felt colder. Outside, the afternoon sun slanted through the curtains, but it couldn't touch the chill that had settled into my bones.
“But she’s nice,” I insisted, my small fingers tracing patterns on the wooden table. “She doesn’t cry like in the story. She just sings to me.”
Abuela’s hand shot out, gripping my wrist with surprising strength for a woman her age. “Listen to me. The dead don't visit without reason.”
I tried to tell my mother about the ghostly woman who shook my grandmother to her core, but she dismissed it as childhood imagination, a phase I would grow out of.
I didn't.
Fifteen years later, the dead still visit me. They whisper secrets in languages I shouldn't understand but somehow do. They appear in supermarket aisles, on subway platforms, and sometimes—like right now—just across the room.
“Well, hello there,” I say to the old man sitting on my bed as soon as I unlock my dorm room door, his translucent form barely disturbing the fabric.
He nods, his eyes cloudy with cataracts that death hadn’t cured. “Can you help me?”
“Of course.”
I learned not to be startled by these visitations. The shock wore off somewhere around puberty, when I realized these encounters weren't going away. Instead, I developed a system—acknowledge them, listen if they spoke, and never, ever tell anyone living about what I saw.
Until the day I saw my own death—that’s when everything changed.