The Ghost Who Left Flowers

Every Monday, fresh marigolds appeared in apartment 4B.

The building had been empty for eleven years. Tara knew because she was the architect hired to restore it, and because the dust recorded every footprint except the ones that mattered.

She locked the windows. She changed the door lock. The following Monday, marigolds waited on the kitchen table beside two cups of tea—one warm, one cold.

“This is inefficient haunting,” Tara said aloud.

A pencil rolled across the table and wrote one word in the dust: Wait.

At sunset, a man appeared by the balcony. He was transparent around the edges and wore an old railway uniform.

“You can see me,” he said.

“You are standing in my structural survey.”

His name was Sameer. He had left flowers for his fiancée every Monday. On the day he died, she waited in 4B until sunrise, then vanished from his memory of the world.

Tara searched municipal records and old newspapers. Sameer's fiancée, Noor, had not vanished. She had moved away, become a teacher, and lived to eighty-six.

In a retirement-home interview, Noor had mentioned one regret: she never returned to tell Sameer that she had forgiven him for being late.

“She forgave you,” Tara told the ghost.

Sameer smiled, but did not disappear.

“Apparently closure has paperwork,” she said.

They spent three months restoring the apartment. Sameer remembered where the original tiles had been. Tara taught him to use voice search, though the phone heard only silence.

On Mondays he left marigolds. On Tuesdays she brought coffee. Somewhere between the repaired balcony and the painted kitchen, Tara stopped wanting him to leave.

“That is a problem,” Sameer said gently.

“I am an architect. Problems are billable.”

When the restoration ended, Tara placed Noor's photograph beside the marigolds and read her interview aloud.

Sameer's outline brightened.

“If I go,” he said, “who will make your tea?”

“You always make one cup cold.”

“I lack body heat.”

She laughed, then cried because he was fading.

Sameer touched her cheek. For the first time, his hand was warm.

“You waited,” he whispered.

“Only three months.”

“It was enough.”

He disappeared at sunrise.

A year later, Tara moved into 4B. Every Monday she bought marigolds, made one cup of tea, and left the second chair empty—not because she expected a ghost, but because love had once sat there.

Then one rainy Monday, someone knocked. The new railway engineer from upstairs held a parcel delivered to the wrong flat and a bunch of marigolds wrapped in newspaper.

“These came with it,” he said. “I don't know why.”

Tara looked past him. At the end of the corridor, a familiar transparent figure tipped his cap and vanished.

“Come in,” she told the engineer. “The tea is still warm.”