Hallway again, narrower now, or maybe I’m wider, because my shoulders buzz with that low electric hum the drink sends through the bones, limbs heavy with whiskey-weight, and the carpet pattern performs its slow underwater wave, trying to remember the sea it never saw, and I’m moving between rooms without meaning to, without wanting to, and the doorframes snap past like half-remembered frames in an old film reel, when the hallway suddenly halts — not me, the hallway — hiccups, coughs once, holds its breath like it’s heard something very mysterious.

    And there he is. Jamie. Just standing there, leaning slightly, shoulder against the wall the way he always did when he was waiting for someone to catch up, hands loose at his sides, same old jacket with the frayed cuff he never bothered fixing, same stupid easy way he takes up space like the world gave him permission years ago and never took it back.

     My brain does a fast, frantic inventory: too drunk? wrong angle? someone else wearing his face like a borrowed coat? memory glitch? bad wiring? and my mouth opens on autopilot, almost says his name, almost makes it solid, almost drags it into the air where it would have to mean something.

     But I stop. Because the hallway feels different around him, quieter, compressed, air thinner, time thicker. Jamie looks… fine. Neither ghostly enough to be comforting, nor pale or flickering nor trailing cold mist. Just Jamie, haircut wrong by a year, too short at the back the way he never liked, beard doing that in-between thing he always hated and scratched at constantly, eyes sharp, awake, present, and that presence lands harder than any proper haunting ever could, hits the chest like a dropped stone.

     “Alright?” he says, casual, everyday, like we bumped into each other at the corner shop buying milk, like time didn’t snap clean in half somewhere behind us, and my chest does that internal drop-elevator plunge, stomach left somewhere on the fifth floor, because he sounds right — voice-grain exact, vowel-weight perfect, no echo, no distortion, no reverb from the other side, and the whiskey in me goes suddenly still, like it’s listening too, like even the drink knows better than to interrupt.

     “Yeah,” I say, because what else do you say when the impossible stands there wearing familiar shoes, and so we stand there, too close, not close enough, and, aye, the party noise is still there, muffled now, bass thud-thudding dully through the walls like a heart heard from another room, but the hallway holds us apart from it, a neutral zone, a pocket of quiet carved out of the night, and I notice stupid details the way the brain always does when the big thing is too big to hold: a chip in the skirting board, the faint smell of damp coats hanging on hooks, the soft clank of old pipes somewhere above us, ticking like a clock that’s forgotten what time it’s keeping.

     “You been here long?” I ask, yet instantly regret it, terrible question, stupid, clumsy, the kind of thing you say when you’re stalling for air. But Jamie smiles, the exact smile he used to do when he didn’t want to correct you outright but couldn’t help himself. “Long enough,” he says, and he knows and I know that’s not an answer, that’s a ghost answer, slippery, perfect, the kind that leaves you holding nothing.

     My head spins up explanations like it’s on commission: someone mentioned him earlier and the mind stitched him together from scraps, the drink’s crossed a line into dangerous territory, grief leaking sideways, hallway-light playing tricks, mirror-magic, brain doing amateur archaeology without gloves, digging up bones it should’ve left buried. But none of them land clean, because Jamie shifts his weight, clears his throat with that small dry rasp, scratches the side of his nose — unconscious habits, muscle-memory moves so precise you can’t fake them, can’t hallucinate boredom, can’t dream up the exact rhythm of someone else’s small restlessness.

     “You alright?” he asks, and there it is, the old script flipped, him checking in like he always did, like it was his quiet job in the world, and the question slices straight through the noise in my head, clean and bright, and I want to say no, I want to say you’re dead, I want to say you left or you stayed or you shouldn’t be here or why didn’t you take me with you, but instead I say, “You want a drink?”, and the moment hangs there, absurd and perfect, because that’s exactly the kind of thing I would’ve said back then, offering solutions where none existed, pouring liquid into silences, and Jamie laughs — short, surprised, real — and the sound knocks the air clean out of my lungs.

“Maybe later,” he says. Of course he does. Of course. Someone brushes past us — a real body, warm, loud, trailing laughter and perfume — and for a second Jamie flickers, almost visually, almost like a bad film effect, but socially, like he’s momentarily out of sync with the party’s frame rate, like the world’s moving at thirty frames a second and he’s running at twenty-eight, and when the body passes he’s solid again, still leaning, still patient, still Jamie.

     “Róisín’s here,” he says, suddenly, casually, like it’s just neutral information dropped between strangers, and my heart stutters, and misses half a beat. “Yeah,” I say, and he watches my face when I say it, watches the way the word lands. “You always did that thing,” he says, soft, “pretend you didn’t care when you did.” That’s not fair, that’s memory, that’s too accurate, too sharp, cuts deeper than the whiskey ever could.

     I laugh, a defensive, reflexive laugh, and the sound comes out wrong, too loud for the narrow space, and it bounces off the walls like something embarrassed, which makes Jamie tilt his head, the way he used to when he was adjusting to a frequency only he could hear. “You staying long?” he asks. I look past him, down the hallway, where the corridor bends, like it’s trying to escape being straight, like it knows something I don’t, and I realise with a sudden cold clarity that I don’t know the answer anymore, that the question itself feels borrowed from someone else’s life. “I don’t know,” I say.

     Jamie nods, satisfied, like that’s all he needed, and the bass surges behind us, and a door opens somewhere, and someone shouts my name from the living room, impatient, needy. When I look back, the hallway’s empty. Just the clank of pipes, the smell of coats, the chipped skirting board, and the night resumes its rhythm like nothing happened, like the world is too busy to notice when it briefly stops making sense.

    My hands are shaking now, drink forgotten in my fist, warm and useless, and the thought lands — quiet, heavy, undeniable: If that wasn’t Jamie, then my mind knows him too well, has kept every small gesture, every half-smile, every casual check-in filed away like evidence. And if it was… Well, the party keeps going, restless, greedy, and the hallway will remember. It remembers. And I’m not sure anymore which one is real, or which one I’m more afraid of.