Red fur, Dead Pixels

The fox appeared at dawn, its russet coat glowing against the gray London sky as it rifled through bins behind our building. I watched from the kitchen window, cradling the cold weight of his iPhone—that ghost device I'd kept charged for three months since the funeral. The screen still showed his last message: *Pick up wine x*

My hair had started falling out two weeks after he died. Stress, the doctor said, handing me a prescription I never filled. Now it grew back in tufts, uneven and defiant, much like the life I was building from the wreckage.

"You're haunting me," I whispered to the phone, to the fox, to the empty flat where his aftershave still lingered in the hallway like a stubborn guest.

The fox looked up then, eyes meeting mine through the glass. Not hungry—not anymore. Almost knowing. It held something in its jaws: a silk scarf, coral-colored, snaking from its muzzle. Nina's scarf. My friend who'd disappeared last summer, leaving behind questions the police never bothered to answer.

The fox trotted away, scarf trailing behind it like blood in water.

I unlocked the iPhone. His password—our anniversary—still worked. The photos app opened to a folder I'd never seen: *Fox & Nina*. Pictures of them. Together. The fox I'd been seeing wasn't any fox at all. The messages were deleted, but the metadata remained. Coordinates. Times. The woods where they'd scattered what was left of him.

My hands wouldn't stop shaking. The truth settled into my bones like winter: I'd been mourning the wrong ghost while the real one padded through my garden at dawn, watching me watch it, waiting for me to finally understand.

The phone pinged. New message from his number, impossible and real: *She has your hair.*