He went back to the station.
He told himself he wasn't going to. He lay in bed for an extra twenty minutes past when he woke, staring at the ceiling with deliberate blankness, convincing himself that today would be a day of ordinary things like school, lunch, and the long walk home. Normal. Forward. Undisturbed.
He was at the station by 7:15.
The rain had thinned to a fine mist overnight, the kind that doesn't fall so much as simply exist everywhere at once, settling on your eyelashes and the back of your hands without you noticing until you're already damp. The platform was empty. The tracks were empty. No train this early on a Sunday. Just the mist, and the grey sky pressing low, and the exact spot at the far end of the platform where she had stood.
He walked to it and stopped.
The concrete was no different here. Same dull surface, same faint gleam from last night's rain.
He crouched down slowly and looked at it. At the station's far end, where the platform met its railing, there was a shallow puddle barely more than a film of water and in the very center of it, an irregularity. A small dry circle, perfect and precise, about the size of a shoe's heel.
He remembered the smell before he even reached the door: old paper, wood polish, and something faintly damp, not unpleasant just old. It was the scent of a place that had absorbed many years of quiet.
He sat at a table near the back and opened his notebook. He had meant to write down what he remembered of her the yellow dress, the angle of her head, the specific stillness of her expression.
Instead he sat with the pen hovering and wrote nothing, because every time he tried to describe her, the words felt too small and too certain, and what he remembered was neither.
She didn't look like a ghost.
Ghosts in stories are pale and cold and reaching. She wasn't reaching for anything. She looked like someone who already knew where she was going and was simply waiting for the right moment to move.
He put the pen down.