My daughter draws pictures of things that haven’t happened yet. I’ve known this for almost a year and I’m only now writing it down because I needed time to understand that what I’m saying is not something a rational parent concludes after a long day. I’m not tired. I’m not unwell. I’m watching something I don’t have a framework for, and I need to describe it plainly.

Emma is seven. She draws with the focus of someone transcribing something they see rather than imagining it. Her pictures are detailed — house layouts, park benches, the blue bike with the white basket that belongs to our neighbor’s child. These are scenes from our neighborhood, rendered with the accuracy of surveillance footage. I’ve walked through the scenes in her drawings. They match.

But sometimes there are extra elements. In a drawing of the park from last October, Emma included Mr. Huang’s dog — the one he hasn’t adopted yet. She drew it clearly: a brown terrier with one white ear. Mr. Huang got that dog from the shelter six weeks later. Emma had never met it.

In a drawing of the grocery store, she added a woman in a red coat standing at the end of an aisle. This woman doesn’t exist in any photo I can find. She also doesn’t exist in the store’s security footage from that day. But the drawing is precise. Specific. A particular face.

Three weeks after Emma drew the woman in the red coat, my sister called. She’d been in the grocery store that day. There had been a woman in a red coat. My sister had collided with her at the end of an aisle and dropped her bags. They’d apologized to each other and gone their separate ways. She didn’t think about it again.

Emma drew my sister and the woman in the red coat standing in the aisle. My sister, in the drawing, is looking at the woman’s face. I asked Emma what my sister was doing in the picture.

Emma said: saying goodbye.

Two weeks later, the woman in the red coat was killed in a car accident on the highway. My sister read about it in the paper. She didn’t know the woman. They’d only met once.

Emma has drawn our house several times. She’s drawn it with all of us in it — me, her mother, her. The last drawing she made of the house was two days ago. She’s drawn it exactly as it looks. Except in the drawing, the front door is open. And there is a figure standing in the hallway. The figure has no face.

I asked Emma who it was.

She said: I don’t know. But it says it’s been here a long time. It says it’s been waiting for someone to see it.

She was drawing the living room when she said this. She was drawing it from the perspective of someone standing in the hallway. The perspective of the door.

The drawing has been on the fridge since she made it. I haven’t been able to bring myself to take it down. But I also can’t bring myself to look at it for longer than a few seconds at a time.

It’s watching from the hallway, the way it always does. I’m starting to believe it’s been there longer than Emma has.