The Girl in the Yellow Raincoat

The rain had a way of swallowing the city whole — smearing headlights into liquid fire, turning strangers into shadows.

Evan was halfway across Pine Street when he saw her.

A girl, no more than nine, stood at the crosswalk.

Bright yellow raincoat.

Bare feet.

No umbrella.

She wasn’t shivering. She wasn’t moving. She was just… staring.

The light changed. A tide of umbrellas surged forward.

But she didn’t step off the curb.

Didn’t even blink.

By the time Evan reached the far side, she was gone.

That night, the rain was still falling when he glanced out his apartment window.

She was there again.

Same spot. Same coat. Same stare.

And this time, she was looking up. Directly at him.

The next morning, he passed the crosswalk.

No girl.

Only a small, crumpled paper flower lying in the gutter — its petals a perfect, unnatural yellow.

When he bent to pick it up, a smell drifted up — faint lavender wrapped in the earthy scent of rain.

And it hit him like a strike of lightning:

That smell had been in his mother’s hospital room the night she died, ten years ago.

The sightings multiplied.

Some days she stood at the crosswalk.

Some days she appeared in puddle reflections, watching.

Once, she was there in the glass door of the subway car as it pulled away — her gaze fixed, her paper flower pressed against the glass.

And always, there was the same yellow flower. Left on his desk at work. On the seat of the bus. Inside the pocket of his coat.

Evan told himself it was a coincidence.

That he was imagining it.

But the truth was, he’d started walking streets just to see her again.

It was a Friday night when the weather broke open, the rain hammering the city in silver sheets.

Evan didn’t avoid the crosswalk this time.

He went straight there.

She was waiting.

“What do you want from me?” he shouted over the traffic.

She tilted her head, eyes too calm for a child.

“Tell me!” His voice was sharper now, almost a plea.

She stepped off the curb. Cars passed through her like mist.

When she reached him, she pressed something into his palm.

It was a photograph.

The picture showed a boy in a hospital bed — maybe six or seven years old — smiling weakly at the camera.

And in the background, sitting on the window ledge, was a little girl in a yellow raincoat, holding a paper flower.

Evan’s breath caught.

It was him.

Her voice, when it came, was barely louder than the rain.

“You left me there.”

Evan shook his head. “I don’t understand—”

But the memories were already rising like floodwater.

The children’s ward. The girl by the window. The storm outside.

He’d been too sick to play, but she’d kept him company, telling him stories about the city she’d never seen.

Before lights-out, she’d handed him a paper flower.

“You’ll come back tomorrow,” she’d said.

He had promised.

But the next morning, his mother was gone. And in the weeks that followed, his father pulled him out of the hospital and never spoke of it again.

“I didn’t know,” he said now. His voice cracked. “I thought you—”

She stepped back into the rain.

“You promised.”

And then she was gone.

Evan stood there, soaked to the bone, clutching the photograph.

On the back, in small, careful handwriting, was a single sentence:

“Come back before it rains again.”

That night, Evan couldn’t sleep.

Not because of the ghost.

But because deep down, he knew the hospital was still there — and some promises don’t end just because the person is gone.