At first, I didn’t think much of my son’s drawings. Kids draw what they see, right? But my little boy, Jamie, wasn’t like other kids. He didn’t draw from imagination. Every picture he made was of something or someone real.
So when that same unfamiliar man kept showing up again and again in his drawings, I set up a camera.
And what it captured nearly stopped my heart.
It was just the two of us me Jamie and against the world. Some days, that felt less like a saying and more like a hard truth.
I worked two jobs to keep our small house standing and our kitchen stocked. Mornings, I served pancakes and coffee at the diner down the street until my feet burned. Nights, after Jamie was asleep, I did data entry online, squinting at the screen under the hum of a weak lamp.
It wasn’t glamorous, but it kept us going, and it paid for the one thing that truly lit Jamie’s little world: his art classes.
Jamie loved to draw. “Loved” doesn’t even cover it; he lived and breathed it.
His teacher once told me he had a photographic memory. Every stroke he made came from something he had seen himself. He never drew dragons or superheroes or things he “made up.” He drew what was right in front of him, what was real.
At first, his drawings were innocent and sweet. The flowers in our garden. Our crooked old mailbox. Mrs. Palmer’s cat is napping on our porch.
But one afternoon, Jamie came running into the kitchen, his face glowing with excitement.
“Mommy! I drew my friend!”
I wiped my hands on a dish towel and knelt to look.
The picture was simple but clear, a man, tall and lean, standing by our backyard fence. He wore a hat pulled low over his face.
“Your friend?” I asked, smiling nervously. “Who is he, sweetheart?”
Jamie just shrugged and said, “He’s nice.”
That smile froze on my face.
“And where did you see him?”
“Outside,” he said cheerfully. “He waves at me.”
I tried to laugh it off. Kids have imaginary friends all the time, right? Maybe he’d seen a neighbor passing by, or someone walking their dog. That had to be it.
But the next day, there was another drawing.
Then another.
And another.
Each one showed the same man always wearing that hat, always near our yard.
A week later, I was sorting through Jamie’s art folder. I planned to keep a few of his favorite pieces and throw the rest away to make room for new ones.
That’s when I noticed it in eighteen drawings. Every single one of the same man. Same hat. Same build. Always in our yard, always watching.
Sometimes he was standing near the apple tree.
Sometimes by the garden shed.
Once, on the porch.
Once… by the front door.
And then my stomach dropped.
The last drawing showed him inside the house.
Standing by Jamie’s toy chest.
Smiling.
I dropped the papers, my hands trembling.
“No,” I whispered. “That’s not possible. You don’t draw things that aren’t real…”
Jamie toddled in, holding his juice box.
“Do you like my pictures, Mommy?”
I forced my voice to stay calm. “Honey… when did you see this man in your room?”
“Sometimes he peeks in,” he said simply. “When I’m playing.”
I felt the air leave my lungs.
There were no new neighbors, no repairmen, no strangers lingering around. Everyone on our street had lived there for years.
So who was this man?
And why was he watching my son?
That night, I barely slept. Every creak of the house made me flinch. I checked the locks twice, then three times. I kept my phone by the bed and the hallway light on.
By morning, I’d made up my mind. Whatever it cost, I was getting cameras.
“Mommy, why are you putting that up?” Jamie asked as I screwed a small black camera above the back door.
“Because,” I said, forcing a smile, “I want to see if your ‘friend’ ever comes back.”
He just nodded, not understanding.
Inside, my heart was pounding. I knew what I was really afraid of — that his “friend” wasn’t imaginary at all.
And I was right.
For the first few nights, I sat on the couch with my laptop open, watching the camera feed like a guard on night duty.
Nothing happened.
After a week, I stopped staying up and just checked the recordings in the morning. Still nothing.
Oddly enough, Jamie’s drawings changed, too. He went back to sketching our cat, the garden, and the sky. The man disappeared from his paper world.
But Jamie himself changed. He drew more slowly. He didn’t hum while coloring anymore.
One afternoon, he murmured without looking up, “My friend doesn’t come anymore. Because of your camera.”
I knelt beside him. “Sweetheart, sometimes we have to stay safe. We don’t play with strangers.”
He didn’t argue. He just pressed his lips together and walked to his room.
The guilt tugged at me like I’d taken something precious away from him. But it was better this way. Safer.
Or so I thought.
The next morning, I opened the camera app as usual. I expected to see our empty lawn and still fence.
Instead, my blood ran cold.
It was a little after midnight, right after I’d checked on Jamie, kissed his forehead, and gone to bed.
The porch light flickered on. Then a shadow appeared, climbing over the fence.
I zoomed in. The figure moved low and fast, like someone who had done this many times before. A hood hid their face.
Then they slipped through the yard and right up to Jamie’s window.
“No,” I whispered, my voice trembling. “No, no, no.”
The window was old and heavy. Even I struggled to open it. But the figure… lifted it easily.
My heart thudded in my ears. I scrubbed through the video one minute, two, five… ten.
Nothing. Just darkness. Then—
“There!”
The figure was climbing back out. They turned, just for a second, and the porch light hit their face.
I froze.
“Yes!” I gasped. “I can call the police now.”
But then I saw it.
That face.
And everything inside me shattered.
My hand slipped. The phone clattered to the floor.
Because I knew that face.
I knew it better than my own.
And I couldn’t call the police. Not yet.
Not after what I’d seen.
That morning, I didn’t touch my coffee. I just sat there, staring at the paused image on the laptop. The face of a man I had once loved and hoped to never see again.
I knew where to find him.
My best friend had mentioned, just weeks ago, that she’d seen him working as a janitor at the bus depot on the edge of town. I’d brushed it off at the time.
But now… now I had to go.
I pulled on my coat and glanced toward Jamie’s room. He was still sleeping, his tiny hand curled under his cheek.
“I’ll fix this,” I whispered. “I promise.”
A few minutes later, our neighbor, Mrs. Delgado, knocked on the door. She had agreed to stay with Jamie while I ran my “errands.”
“Don’t worry,” she said with a kind smile, stepping in with her thermos of tea. “I’ll keep an eye on him. Go do what you need to do.”
“Thank you,” I said softly. “I won’t be long.”
The bus depot was quiet when I arrived, just the echo of sweeping and the hum of buses idling in the distance.
And there he was.
Caleb.
He looked older, smaller somehow, pushing a mop across the tiled floor. His once-dark hair was streaked with gray, and the lines on his face told years of regret.
“Caleb,” I said, my voice steady but sharp.
He froze. The mop handle slipped from his fingers and hit the ground with a hollow clang. Slowly, he turned.
He didn’t look surprised, just… tired.
“Hi, Julia,” he said softly.
I felt every muscle in my body tighten. “You have some nerve. Breaking into my yard. Into my home. Into our son’s room.”
His lips trembled. “I didn’t break in. I swear, I never touched him. I just… wanted to see him.”
“You watched him through his window like some kind of creep.”
“I know how it looks,” he said quickly, his voice cracking. “But I didn’t mean for it to be like that. I saw him outside one day, drawing in the yard. He looked so much like you and so happy. I just… stood there. Then he looked up, and he waved at me. So I waved back. That’s all.”
“And then you came back,” I snapped.
He nodded slowly. “He waved again the next day. He talked to me through the fence. I thought—” His voice faltered. “I thought maybe he knew who I was.”
I clenched my fists. “You lost that right a long time ago.”
Caleb looked down at the mop water. His reflection rippled. “I know. I made the worst mistake of my life. I walked away from you from him because I was scared. Because when Lauren got pregnant, I thought I had to do the ‘right’ thing.”
I laughed bitterly. “And how did that work out for you?”
“She left,” he said, barely above a whisper. “Took my daughter and moved across the country. Haven’t seen either of them since.”
For a moment, the silence between us was suffocating.
“I never stopped thinking about Jamie,” Caleb said finally. “Every birthday, every Christmas. I used to search his name online, hoping to see a picture of him. I didn’t dare to come back… not until I saw him there. I just wanted to see the kind of boy he’s become.”
Tears stung my eyes, but I blinked them away. “He’s not a boy you get to claim. You don’t get to just walk back in and decide you’re his father again.”
“I’m not asking for forgiveness,” he whispered. “Just… if you’d let me see him sometimes. Even from a distance.”
I shook my head. “I’ll never forgive you, Caleb. Not for leaving me to raise him alone. Not for vanishing when he needed you most.”
He nodded slowly, accepting the blow. “I don’t blame you.”
I exhaled deeply, my anger giving way to something softer — exhaustion, maybe.
“But,” I said finally, “he deserves to know you exist. If you want to see him, come to me. You ask. You don’t sneak around our home again. Ever.”
His eyes glistened. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” I said. “Thank the little boy who still believes people can be good.”
When I turned to leave, Caleb stayed there, shoulders shaking, mop forgotten on the ground.
I didn’t look back.
Because as much as I wanted to hate him, I couldn’t deny what I’d seen in Jamie’s drawings: the same small smile, the same tilt of the head.
My son hadn’t been imagining a stranger.
He’d been drawing his father.
And now, maybe, both of them would get another chance, one built on truth, not shadows.
That night, I sat on the couch, watching Jamie sleep through the baby monitor. The security camera light blinked quietly above the back door.
The house felt different now, not lighter, not yet, but steadier somehow.
Sometimes the past doesn’t stay buried. Sometimes it climbs over the fence, uninvited and unrecognizable.
But maybe, if we’re lucky, it’s not always here to haunt us.
Sometimes, it’s just trying to come home.