My wife thinks the camera has a glitch. I know what the glitch looks like. I dated her for 2 years.

I need to write this down before I lose my nerve or my mind or both.

My wife’s name is Hana. She is the kindest person I have ever known. She laughs at her own jokes before she finishes telling them. She folds the corner of book pages instead of using bookmarks even though she knows it drives me insane. She takes exactly four minutes in the morning to decide what to wear and then puts on the first thing she looked at anyway.

I have been married to her for eight months.

I need you to understand that I love her completely before I tell you what is in the photographs.

Her name was Reina.

We were together for two years — I was twenty three, she was twenty two, and from the outside it probably looked like any other intense young relationship. From the inside it was something else. Reina loved with a totality that was both the most extraordinary and most exhausting thing I have ever experienced. There was no halfway with her. No casual. No quiet. Everything was enormous — the good days were the best days of my life and the bad days were disasters and the line between them could shift in a single moment over something I hadn’t even registered as significant.

I want to be careful about how I describe her because she is dead and she cannot defend herself and I am aware that my perspective is only one perspective. What I will say is this: she needed more than I was able to give. I don’t mean that as a criticism of her. I mean it as a plain statement of fact. She needed a level of certainty and presence and complete devotion that I was twenty three years old and incapable of providing and the gap between what she needed and what I had kept widening until I couldn’t see across it anymore.

I ended it on a Tuesday in March. Four years ago now.

She did not take it well. That is the most inadequate sentence I have ever written and I know it and I am going to leave it there anyway because the details belong to her and I am not going to put them here.

What I will tell you is that six weeks after I ended it I got a phone call from her sister.

Reina had been found in her apartment on a Thursday morning.

She had been dead since Wednesday night.

I will not describe what followed. Grief that wasn’t mine to claim but that claimed me anyway. Guilt that I have carried in various forms for four years and will probably carry in various forms for the rest of my life. Therapy, which helped. Time, which helped less than people say it does but more than nothing.

I met Hana two years later. I told her about Reina on our fourth date because it felt dishonest not to. Hana listened the way she listens to everything — completely, without interruption, without judgment. When I finished she took my hand and said: “That wasn’t your fault.”

I did not believe her. But I loved her for saying it.

We got married fourteen months later on a Saturday in September and it was the best day of my life and I mean that without qualification or asterisk.

We honeymooned in Kyoto for ten days.

The photographs started on day two.

Hana is the photographer between us. She has a mirrorless camera she’s had for years — nothing professional, just a good camera she knows how to use — and she documents everything. Not obsessively. Just naturally, the way some people do, finding the frame in ordinary moments.

She took maybe two hundred photographs in Kyoto. Gardens, temples, food, the two of us in various combinations of tired and happy and overwhelmed by beauty.

On the second evening she was going through the day’s photos on the camera screen and she made a small sound — not alarmed, just curious — and showed me one.

“Look at this one,” she said. “Weird light.”

It was a photo of me standing in front of the Fushimi Inari gates. The red torii stretching back behind me into the treeline. Good photo — Hana has a good eye.

In the upper left corner, where the path curved away into the trees, there was a smear of light. White and vaguely vertical. The shape of something standing at the edge of frame.

“Lens flare,” I said.

“There was no sun in that direction,” Hana said. But she scrolled on and I watched her move past it and I told myself she was right, it was just light doing something strange, cameras do that.

I looked at the shape for another second before she scrolled.

It was the right height for a person.

I did not say this.

There were three more that trip. Each one I found before Hana did — I started checking the photos first when she handed me the camera, which I told myself was because I was interested and not because I was looking for something specific.

The second: a photo of Hana in a bamboo grove, laughing at something off frame. The white shape again, further back between the bamboo stalks. Still formless. Still vertical. Still the height of a person.

The third: a photo of both of us taken by a stranger we’d asked — the standard tourist portrait, temple behind us, arms around each other, smiling. I looked at this one for a long time in the bathroom of our hotel room at midnight while Hana slept.

The shape was closer. Still white, still without features, but closer to the frame and less smeared — more solid at the edges, like something becoming gradually more itself.

I deleted this one before Hana saw it. I told myself I was protecting her from being unsettled by a camera artefact on our honeymoon.

The fourth photo I also deleted. I am not going to describe what was different about the fourth photo except to say that by that point it no longer looked like a smear of light and I stood in the bathroom at 1 AM with my hands shaking and I looked at my own face in the bathroom mirror for a long time afterward.

We flew home four days later. I told Hana the rest of the trip was just a bad memory card. She believed me. She has no reason not to believe me.

I bought her a new memory card at the airport.

We have been home for eight months.

I need to tell you about the progression because the progression is the thing that has brought me to this point at 3 AM unable to sleep writing this on my phone.

Month one and two: Nothing. I started to believe it had been the location, something specific to that place, and that we had left it there. I slept better. I was almost normal.

Month three: Hana took photos at her work party. I checked them before she uploaded them. Third photo from the end — a group shot in a restaurant, Hana in the centre surrounded by colleagues. Far right edge of the frame. White shape. Closer than it had ever been in Kyoto. Close enough that I could see — and I want to be very precise here — the suggestion of a face. No features. Just the structure of a face. The shape a face makes.

I deleted it. I said the photo came out blurry.

Month four: My brother’s birthday dinner. Family photos. I checked every one. Nothing. I slept well for three weeks.

Month five: Hana started a project photographing our neighbourhood — just walking and shooting, a hobby thing. She uploads everything to her laptop and goes through it in the evenings. I started sitting with her when she does this. She thinks it’s because I’m interested in her project.

In a photo of our own street — our building visible, our window on the third floor — the shape was standing on the pavement directly below our window. Looking up.

I said I was tired and went to bed and lay in the dark for four hours.

Month six: The face had features.

I don’t want to write about month six.

Month seven is when I understood that this was not random. Not location-specific, not a camera fault, not my mind constructing patterns from light and shadow and grief and guilt.

Month seven is when I understood that she was getting closer on purpose.

And month seven is when the first photograph appeared showing something that had not happened yet.

Hana took a photo of our kitchen on a Tuesday morning. Documentary impulse — she does this, captures ordinary mornings, the coffee cups and the light. She showed it to me that evening because she liked the light in it.

I looked at it for a long time.

Reina was standing in the kitchen doorway.

Not a smear. Not a shape. Not a suggestion. Standing in the doorway. Fully visible from the shoulders up, the rest of her obscured by the door frame. Her face — her actual face, the face I knew for two years — turned toward the camera. Toward Hana who had been holding the camera.

Her expression was the one she used to make when she was deciding something.

I looked at this photograph and I felt four years of processed grief and managed guilt come completely undone in approximately ten seconds.

And then I noticed the other thing.

On the kitchen counter in the photograph — between the coffee cups and the fruit bowl — there was a vase of white flowers.

We do not own a vase of white flowers. We did not have a vase of white flowers on that Tuesday morning. I looked from the photograph to the kitchen counter and the counter had the coffee cups and the fruit bowl and no vase, no flowers.

I checked the date stamp on the photo. Tuesday. That morning. The kitchen we were standing next to.

No vase.

I did not delete this one. I copied it to my own phone and deleted it from Hana’s camera and I have looked at it every day since.

Three weeks after the kitchen photograph I came home from work to find Hana arranging flowers in a vase on the kitchen counter.

White flowers.

The same vase. The same flowers. The exact arrangement from the photograph.

I stood in the doorway — the same doorway — and I watched my wife put the last stem in and step back and say “I found this at the market, isn’t it pretty” and I said yes, it’s pretty, and I did not tell her.

I did not tell her because how do you tell someone that. How do you hand your wife a photograph of a dead woman standing in your kitchen and say — she’s coming, she’s been getting closer for eight months, she’s in our home now, she wants something and I think what she wants is for you not to be here anymore.

I didn’t tell her.

I should have told her.

Last Thursday Hana took a photo of us. Just the two of us on the couch, the easy ordinary intimacy of a weeknight evening. She held the camera out and we leaned together and she clicked.

She showed me the photo immediately after. Still on the camera, screen facing me.

I looked at it for a long time.

We are on the couch. We are smiling. Hana looks exactly like herself.

I look exactly like myself.

Reina is standing directly behind the couch, one hand resting on Hana’s shoulder, face turned down toward Hana with that expression — that deciding expression — and her other hand is raised and her fingers are in Hana’s hair and Hana cannot see any of this and is smiling at the camera completely unaware.

This is the photograph I am looking at right now.

This is the photograph that made me get out of bed at 3 AM and start writing.

Because I have seen every stage of this progression. I have watched her go from a smear of light at the edge of a frame to a face in a doorway to a hand in my wife’s hair. I have watched her get closer and more solid and more present and more deliberate over eight months.

And I have seen what the photographs show before it happens.

The vase was in the photograph three weeks before it was in my kitchen.

I need you to understand what I am saying.

I am saying that the photograph I am looking at right now — Reina standing behind my wife with her hand in Hana’s hair and that expression on her face — is not showing me what is happening.

It is showing me what is going to happen.

And I do not know how long I have before it does.

I have been sitting here for two hours trying to decide what to do. I have thought about telling Hana everything. I have thought about leaving — taking Hana somewhere, anywhere, away from whatever this is. I have thought about whether there is someone who deals with this, some person or practice or ritual that addresses what it means when the dead decide they are not finished.

Here is what I keep coming back to:

Reina loved completely. Totally. Without halfway. It was the thing that made her impossible to be with and it was also the truest thing about her and I am standing in the middle of the night holding a photograph of that love turned into something that wants my wife gone and I feel — underneath all the fear, underneath all the desperation — I feel the specific grief of understanding that she never stopped.

She never stopped loving me.

She just stopped being alive.

And whatever she is now, whatever exists in the space between the lens and the light, it has been moving toward me for eight months with the same totality it always had. The same completeness. The same inability to accept less than everything.

I don’t know how to fight that.

I don’t know if it can be fought.

I am going to wake Hana up in a few minutes. I am going to tell her I love her. I am not going to tell her why I need to say it at 3 AM because she will ask questions I cannot answer.

Tomorrow I am going to figure out what to do.

Tonight I am going to sit here and look at the photograph and try to memorise my wife’s face the way it looks right now — smiling, unaware, completely herself — before whatever comes next.

I need her to stay exactly like this.

I need her to stay.