Silver Heart

Chapter Two

Freya POV

"On the phone." My voice cracked around the words. "Before you came into my room. Someone said 'Silver Heart' right before the line went dead. Esther, what does it mean?"

Esther's hand closed around the note so fast it nearly tore. She folded it once, twice, shoving it into her cardigan pocket like it might catch fire if she held it too long.

"It doesn't mean anything." Her eyes wouldn't hold mine. "A coincidence. Some cruel prank, that's all."

"That's not what your face is telling me."

"Freya." Esther's voice dropped low, glancing down the hallway toward the attendant's desk.

"Not here. We need to go home."

"You just said it doesn't mean anything. Why does it matter where we talk about nothing?"

She didn't answer. She gripped my elbow instead, steering me toward the exit with a strength I didn't know her thin arms carried. Her fingers dug in tight enough to bruise. Outside, the parking lot lights buzzed against a sky gone fully dark, and Esther walked fast, checking over her shoulder twice before we reached the car.

I filed it away. The folded note in her pocket. The way her hands wouldn't stop moving. The glance over her shoulder like something might be following us out of that building.

She wasn't grieving right now. She was scared.

The drive home passed in silence. Esther's knuckles stayed pale on the wheel. The radio stayed off, and I let her think the quiet between us was about Dad.

The house was dark and too quiet when we walked in. Dad's coat still hung by the door, right where he'd left it that morning.

Esther didn't let me linger. She walked me up the stairs and helped me out of my coat, her hands trembling around the buttons the whole time. She pulled the blanket over my shoulders once I'd sat down on the edge of the bed, the same steady care she'd given me since I was small enough to need it, even though I hadn't needed it like this in years.

"Get some rest." She pressed a kiss to my forehead. "I'll be downstairs if you need me."

"Esther." I caught her wrist before she could pull away. "Please. Just tell me what's going on."

Something moved behind her eyes. For half a second I thought she might actually answer. Then her jaw set, and the door was already easing shut behind her, the lock clicking soft in its frame.

I lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, counting the cracks in the plaster I'd memorized years ago. My whole body hummed too tight to sleep, grief and fear tangled together until I couldn't tell where one ended and the other started. Dad was dead. Esther was hiding something. Neither fact explained the other.

I closed my eyes anyway. Not to sleep. To wait.

Hours crawled by in the dark, the house settling around me in creaks I'd stopped noticing years ago. My eyelids grew heavy despite myself, sleep tugging at the edges, when a soft click cut through the quiet.

My door eased open an inch.

I kept my breathing slow, my face slack against the pillow. Every nerve underneath went sharp awake. A sliver of hallway light spilled across the floor. A shape hovered in the gap, watching. Counting my breaths, maybe, the way I was counting hers.

Then the door clicked shut again, and footsteps padded away down the hall.

I gave it thirty seconds. Then I threw the blanket back.

The floorboards were cold under my bare feet. I kept to the edges of each step, out of habit, the ones that never creaked. Down the hallway. Down the stairs.

A door clicked somewhere near the garage.

I flattened myself against the wall at the bottom of the stairs and edged closer, one careful step at a time, until the garage came into view.

Esther stood at the far corner, in front of a section of wall I hadn't looked at twice in years. A stack of old paint cans and moving boxes sat shoved to one side, like someone had cleared them on purpose.

A door.

Not a crumbling one. Not the collapsed, unstable mess Dad always warned me away from, back when I was eight and begging to turn it into a playroom. This door was solid, its hinges dark with fresh oil, and Esther's hand moved over the lock with the ease of someone who'd done this more times than I could count.

The door swung open. She slipped inside. It didn't latch behind her.

I stayed frozen against the wall, heart slamming so hard I clamped a hand over it.

Minutes dragged by. My legs cramped from crouching so still in the cold. What was in there? What needed hiding behind a lie Dad told me himself, more than once, with that same tight look on his face I'd never questioned until right now.

The door opened again.

I ducked back into the stairwell shadow and watched through the railing gap. Esther stepped out, locked the door, and hurried back toward the house without looking back. Her footsteps faded up the stairs. A door closed somewhere above.

Silence dropped over the garage.

I stayed still a moment longer, just to be sure, then crossed the concrete floor. The lock gave easy enough, Esther was too rattled to have spun the dial all the way.

Dad's voice rang clear in my memory. That room's not safe, Freya. Stay out of there.

Promise me.

I'd promised. I was eight, and I'd promised, and I'd never once questioned it in 10 years.

I pushed the door open anyway.

No rubble. No collapsed beams, no water damage, none of the ruin he'd described to keep an eight-year-old away for good. Just a narrow room, dry and undisturbed, lined with shelves I had never known existed inside my own house.

A single lamp burned low in the corner, still warm. My fingers found the edge of the nearest shelf, and I made myself look.

A photograph, torn clean down the middle. A face I didn't recognize. Pale eyes, fixed on the camera.

A folded page in Dad's handwriting. Unmistakably his, the same slant I'd know anywhere. Except the words weren't words. Symbols, rows of them, careful and deliberate, like a language built for no one but him.

And on the bottom shelf, wrapped in cloth gone soft with age: something heavy and cold enough to sting my palm the second I touched it.

Metal. Small enough to fit in one hand, and shaped like nothing I had ever seen.

A floorboard creaked behind me.

I froze, the object still in my palm.

"You weren't supposed to find this yet.”