It started with the smell. Not smoke, not yet, but the bitter, metallic scent of something old burning just out of sight, like a storm cooking too high above the clouds, the kind you can feel in your teeth before it ever touches skin. I woke with the taste of it on my tongue, dry and sharp, like the coppery tang of blood after biting down too hard. My scarf had slipped in the night, coiled around my arm like it knew better than to stay near my throat. The knife was still there under the pillow, still warm from the shape of my hand, and I didn't remember reaching for it, didn't remember dreaming, but something inside me had woken up long before my eyes did, something ancient and wide-awake and listening.
I moved slowly, not because I was tired—I wasn't—but because the house had settled into a kind of silence that didn't feel like rest. It felt like waiting, holding its breath the way rabbits do when they think you haven't seen them yet, frozen and small and pretending to be part of the grass. But I'd seen it. I'd seen everything now. The walls didn't creak the way they usually did. The shadows didn't shift with the sun. Everything was still, the kind of stillness that only comes before something breaks, and I felt that breaking already starting to hum beneath my skin.
Downstairs, Davis was already sitting at the table, staring into a bowl he hadn't touched, and the spoon floated limp against the rim like it had forgotten how to be useful. His eyes flicked up when I came in, and something passed between us, something heavier than words, something we didn't know how to name but both carried all the same. He didn't ask if I'd slept. He didn't ask what I'd dreamed. He just nodded once, like we were soldiers sharing a trench, like we understood that speaking would ruin whatever kept us alive, and I took my seat across from him without making a sound.
Carina wasn't there.
That meant something.
The fireplace was cold. Not unused, no, the ashes were fresh but abandoned, scattered like someone had left in a hurry, like someone had burned something before sunrise and didn't want to be seen doing it. The scent of it still lingered in the corners of the room, like it was afraid to leave, like it knew what had been done. I glanced at the hearth, then at Davis, and for the first time, I saw it: his hand was bandaged. Not neatly. Not the way he usually did it. The cloth was too clean, too white, too new, like a rushed job to cover something more important than skin. A mistake. Or maybe a message. Or maybe both.
I said nothing. Neither did he.
The silence stretched between us, thick and brittle. And above us, the house watched. It pressed down from the ceiling beams and curled around the corners of the room, and I had the terrible feeling that if I reached out, I could touch it, this thing we didn't talk about, this thing that was changing all of us whether we noticed or not. The air had weight now. Not just from dust or memory or the storm coiling on the horizon. From something else. Something with teeth.
I stood slowly, not because I was finished eating—there had been no food to begin with—but because sitting still had started to feel dangerous, like the chair would grow roots and hold me down if I didn't move soon, like the floorboards beneath us had started learning our names and might whisper them when no one else was listening. My hand brushed the back of Davis's chair as I passed, just enough for him to know I'd seen his bandages, just enough for him to feel the weight of my silence, and he didn't flinch or pull away. That was a kind of answer, too.
The hallway outside the kitchen was darker than it should've been. The curtains were drawn, but not by me. Someone had gone through and pinned them shut with little silver needles, the kind our mother used to use when hemming our clothes for winter, the kind I hadn't seen in years. I tugged one out and the fabric peeled back like old skin, letting a slice of pale morning light spill across the carpet, and for a moment, it looked like the house was bleeding.
Carina's door was closed. That wasn't strange by itself. What was strange was the smell, faint but sharp, like burnt sugar mixed with something sour, something rotten. I leaned closer and inhaled, then regretted it. The scent caught in my throat and stayed there, clinging like cobwebs. I pressed my ear to the wood and heard nothing. No breathing. No movement. Just the steady silence of something too carefully staged. Like a trap.
I didn't open it. Not yet.
Instead, I turned back toward the stairs, but paused as I passed the linen cupboard. It was slightly ajar, and the edge of a blanket trailed onto the floor, as if someone had pulled it free in the dark and forgotten to shove it back inside. I pushed the door open with two fingers. The shelves were bare. Completely. Every sheet, every towel, every scrap of cloth was gone. In their place sat a single book. Black cover, unmarked spine. Thick, too, heavier than it looked. I reached out and felt the chill of the binding, like it had been waiting in a cellar for years. Inside, the pages were blank. All of them. Hundreds of white sheets stitched into leather, whispering when I flipped them, like dry leaves skittering across a stone floor. It shouldn't have been there. And yet I couldn't make myself put it back.
I took it with me.
I climbed the stairs, one slow footfall at a time, counting them like I used to when I was little and afraid of what might be waiting at the top. Thirteen steps. Always thirteen. But this morning, when I reached the landing and looked back, there were fourteen. I counted again. Still fourteen. I blinked, tried to shake it off, but the number clung to me the way the burnt-sugar smell had clung to Carina's door, the way the silence had wrapped around Davis's wrist.
My room felt colder than it had last night. Not winter-cold. Not outside-cold. But bone-deep, marrow-deep, the kind of cold that has nothing to do with weather and everything to do with memory. I shut the door behind me and dropped the black book onto the desk, but even after I stepped away, I could still feel it watching me. Not from the cover. Not from the blank pages. From the space it had filled. Like something else had been dislodged by bringing it here. Something that didn't want to be moved.
I turned toward the window. The sky had begun to change, clouds pulling into long, thin streaks like claw marks across a wounded sky. Below them, the treetops bent in strange directions, as if they weren't being pushed by the wind but pulled by something underneath, something deep and slow and deliberate. I leaned my forehead against the glass and tried to remember what day it was, not because I'd forgotten but because days had started to feel like lies, like pieces of a story someone else was telling, and I was only listening from the cracks in the wall.
I didn't know what Carina had done. Not exactly. But I knew it was her. The fire. The missing cloth. The book. The silence. It all pointed in the same direction. And I had learned, finally, to trust my sense of direction, even when it made no sense at all.
I went back to the desk. Opened the book again. Page after page of blank white nothing. Until it wasn't. Somewhere near the center, a word appeared. Just one. Written in my handwriting.
Ash.
I stared at the word until the pages began to blur around it, the stark white beginning to flicker at the corners of my vision like moth wings caught too close to flame, and for a long moment I could not breathe, not because I was afraid of what it meant, but because something deep in me recognized it, as if I'd already spoken it once in another life and was now being reminded of my voice echoing back. Ash. It was more than a word. It was a residue, a remainder, the name of what's left after everything else is taken away, and seeing it written in my careful scrawl made the back of my neck tighten, like fingers brushing too softly over bare skin in the dark.
I turned the page, expecting more, hoping for something an explanation, a sentence, even another word to make sense of the first but the next sheet was clean, and the one after that too, each one blank as bone, save for the faintest shadow of something written and then rubbed away, as if someone had been trying to speak to me through time but lost their voice halfway through the telling. I touched the page, let my fingertips trace invisible shapes I couldn't name, and in the silence of the room, I could almost hear breathing, soft and even and not mine. But when I looked over my shoulder, the room was still empty, the corners undisturbed, the air unmoving except for the thin sway of the curtain by the cracked window.
Outside, the light had begun to thicken, the morning bleeding into a dull, overcast glow that made everything appear hollowed out and slightly unreal, like I was walking through a painting that hadn't dried properly. In the trees beyond the house, birds were silent, not a single rustle or whistle or wingbeat to break the hush, and I wondered not for the first time if they had learned to fear this place the way I had, if even the smallest wild things had started to recognize that something in this house was shifting into a shape it was never meant to hold.
I closed the book and wrapped it tightly in the scarf I'd taken back from Michael's chest the day he left, not because I thought it would protect anything, but because I needed to do something with my hands, something to keep them from trembling now that the air had begun to feel charged again, like the seconds just before lightning strikes. The scarf smelled faintly of him, still smoke and pine and something warm beneath it all, but now that warmth felt distant, like a memory pressed between two panes of glass, visible but untouchable, always just a little out of reach.
Downstairs, the silence had changed again. Not the absence of sound, but the arrival of something new, ew a kind of rhythm, faint and irregular, like the drip of water into a basin left too long in shadow. I followed it carefully, barefoot to keep the boards from crying out underfoot, and with each step, the sound grew clearer: a slow, deliberate tapping, like fingernails on old wood or the ticking of a grandfather clock that had lost its way and kept time only out of habit. It was coming from the parlor.
I pressed my palm against the doorframe before entering, steadying myself with the familiar feel of the grain beneath my skin, and as I stepped through, the tapping stopped. The fireplace was still cold, the ashes darker than they had been before, and someone had drawn something into them with the tip of a stick or a spoon, spirals, careful and tight, looping over and over until the edges broke apart into dust. At first I thought it was nonsense, just a nervous hand making idle patterns, but as I stepped closer, I saw it was the same spiral drawn again and again in the margins of my old notebooks, the same shape Michael used to sketch absentmindedly on the backs of receipts when he thought no one was looking.
And then I saw the corner of Carina's skirt trailing from behind the wingback chair, not moving, not twitching, just lying there like it had been discarded, and every hair on the back of my arms stood up as I crossed the rug, my breath stuck in the hollow just beneath my ribs. I circled the chair slowly, heart pounding loud in my ears, and when I finally saw her, seated upright and silent, her eyes wide open but fixed on nothing, her hands resting calmly on her lap, I knew something inside her had shifted too, not broken no, that would be too easy but calcified, turned inward, like she was no longer trying to hide what she'd done but daring someone to ask her about it.