Forbidden Echoes

Chapter Five: Thin Walls

He didn't go to the bathroom.

Justin lay there for a long time arguing himself out of it—out of crossing the six feet of hallway that separated his door from hers, out of the unlocked door on the other side of the shared bathroom, out of whatever half-formed impulse had gotten him as far as sitting up in bed before his better judgment caught hold of him by the collar and sat him back down.

She forgot to lock it, he told himself. That's all that is. People forget things.

It didn't mean anything.

It definitely didn't mean what some unhelpful, half-awake part of his brain kept insisting it might mean.

He stayed in his room.

The water ran for a while next door, then stopped. Her bathroom-side door clicked shut a few minutes later, quiet but audible, and something in his chest loosened that he hadn't realized had gone tight.

Sleep, when it came at all, came thin and unconvincing, the kind that left him more aware of the house than unconscious in it. He heard every tick of the pipes, every settling complaint of old wood contracting in the cold.

Around one in the morning, he gave up entirely, pulled on a T-shirt over the sweatpants he'd already been wearing, and decided that if he wasn't going to sleep, he could at least get a glass of water out of it.

The hallway floor groaned under him the second he stepped out—the thirteenth stair's quieter cousin, a board just outside his door that had complained about every footstep for as long as he could remember.

He'd long since stopped noticing it as anything but background noise.

Tonight, with someone new in the house and the whole place feeling somehow more awake than it had in months, it sounded enormous.

He made it three steps before her door opened.

"Okay, that's actually unsettling," Jessica said, her voice low, pitched for one in the morning. "Does the entire house file a report every time someone moves?"

She was standing in her doorway in an oversized T-shirt and sleep shorts, her hair down now instead of pulled back, arms crossed loosely against the night chill that always crept into the upstairs hallway once the heat clicked off.

She looked younger like this somehow—less assembled, less the version of herself she'd been presenting at dinner—and Justin made a conscious effort to keep his eyes on her face and nowhere else, an effort that felt more difficult than it had any right to.

"Pretty much," he said. "I told you it wasn't subtle. You could probably track a person's entire night just from the creaks. There's a whole language to it if you live here long enough."

"Terrifying. Remind me never to sneak out."

"You weren't planning to."

"Not tonight."

A small, tired smile.

"Couldn't sleep. New bed, new house, new... everything, I guess. You?"

"Same. Story of my life lately."

He nodded toward the stairs.

"I was getting water. There's a second glass if you want one. Kitchen's marginally less judgmental than the hallway."

She considered it for a second—he watched her genuinely consider it, weighing the offer the way she seemed to weigh most things, as though every small decision might be evidence of something larger.

Then she fell into step beside him without further comment.

They went downstairs together, the staircase narrating their progress in its usual collection of groans and complaints, the house seemingly determined to announce to every empty room that two people were awake and moving through it.

The kitchen, when they reached it, was dark except for the dim glow of the stove clock and the thin wash of moonlight through the window above the sink.

Justin filled two glasses without turning on the overhead light. Some instinct told him the dark suited the conversation better, that flipping a switch would flood out whatever fragile, unguarded thing was happening between two people who'd known each other for roughly thirty hours.

"Can I ask you something?" Jessica said, leaning against the counter, her glass cradled in both hands like something she needed to hold onto. "And you can tell me it's none of my business."

"Go for it."

"The clock. In the hallway. Nine fourteen."

She watched him carefully.

"Is that when she died?"

Justin had been asked variations of this question by exactly nobody since the funeral.

People tended to circle grief at a polite distance, ask how are you holding up, and accept whatever flat non-answer he offered.

The directness of it caught him somewhere unguarded.

"Yeah," he said. "Nine fourteen in the morning. My dad was the one who found her. He stopped the clock that same week—said he didn't have it in him to keep winding something that didn't matter anymore. I think it was the only honest thing he's done in eight months."

"That's not nothing," Jessica said quietly. "Honesty, I mean. From what I've gathered so far, that's not exactly his strong suit."

"You noticed that fast, huh."

"I notice things fast. Occupational hazard."

She caught herself, the sentence ending a half-beat too abruptly, as though she'd said more than she'd intended.

"What's your occupation?" Justin asked, half-teasing.

He watched her recalibrate.

"Surviving my mother's mess, mostly. Long résumé, terrible benefits."

She said it lightly, but there was something underneath the joke, something he recognized because he carried a version of it himself—grief dressed up as humor so it could be handed to other people without either of them having to actually hold it.

The house groaned again somewhere above them.

Wind in the attic vents.

The sound she'd been warned about.

It drifted down through the dark like something half-alive.

Jessica's eyes flicked toward the ceiling, then back to him.

"That the crying sound you mentioned?"

"That's the one. Just wind."

He reached past her to set his glass in the sink, close enough in the narrow kitchen that for half a second their arms nearly brushed.

They both went very still.

The way people do when proximity becomes its own kind of statement neither of them had agreed to make out loud.

He stepped back first.

"Sorry," he said.

"For what? It's a small kitchen."

But her voice had gone quieter, and the look she gave him in the dim moonlight lasted a fraction longer than the conversation strictly required.

Long enough that he felt it settle somewhere beneath his ribs.

Long enough that he understood, with the same unwelcome awareness he'd felt earlier that night, that whatever this was, pretending it wasn't there was going to take more effort than either of them currently possessed at one in the morning.

"We should probably sleep," he said. "Big day of pretending everything's normal tomorrow."

"Looking forward to it."

She pushed off the counter, falling back into step beside him as they climbed the stairs—the house once again narrating every movement, the thirteenth stair groaning beneath her, the hallway board complaining beneath him, an entire architecture of sound that made it impossible for either of them to move through the house without the other knowing exactly where they were.

At her door, she paused.

"Thanks," she said. "For the water. And for not making this weirder than it already is."

"I make everything weirder. Ask anyone."

"Then thanks for the exception."

She held his eyes for a moment longer than the doorway required, something unspoken sitting in the space between them that neither of them reached for.

Then she stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind her—softly, deliberately, the quietest sound either of them had made all night.

Justin stood in the hallway a moment longer, listening to the house settle back into its usual creaking silence, then crossed to his own door.

He lay awake for a long time afterward, staring at the ceiling, acutely aware of the thin wall between his room and hers and the fact that whatever boundary that wall was supposed to represent, it had already begun to feel less like a wall and more like a held breath.

Something flimsy.

Something temporary.

Something that wouldn't survive much more proximity than this house seemed determined to keep handing them.

Somewhere past two, just before sleep finally took him, he heard her bathroom door click open again on the other side.

This time, she didn't lock it either.