The Ghost Bride's Last Contract

The Wrong Confession

Before they went to the tower, Elias kissed Mae in the workshop kitchen.

It happened badly. She turned from the sink at the same moment he reached for a mug, and their shoulders struck. He swore. She laughed, then stopped laughing when neither of them moved away.

"This would be a terrible way to persuade me," he said.

"I wasn't going to."

"I was talking to myself."

That made her laugh again, and he kissed her while she was still smiling. It was brief, warm, and nothing like being appointed to somebody's fate. When he stepped back, she touched his sleeve to keep him near a moment longer.

Neither promised what they would do afterward.

At the tower, Iris had arranged access through the municipal caretaker. The bell had been taken out of service because its frame needed rebuilding. Elias had inspected the chamber the previous afternoon while Mae visited Nessa; he knew which boards were sound and where the old rope had been stored.

Orla's drawing had not shown that the clapper was still hanging inside the bell. Reaching it would be awkward, but Elias had brought a platform ladder and secured it before they began. A lifting strap kept the bell from swinging. He checked it twice.

Nessa waited at the bottom of the ladder. She had come without telling Alice where she was going. Mae disliked that but had not made the woman's arrival conditional on a better choice.

"You agreed to speak to your daughter today," Mae said.

"I will."

Orla watched her sister with an expression so intent it felt less like hope than hunger.

The veil's false claim was simple: Orla's silence had been chosen to preserve marital peace. Nessa had brought the letter in which Orla described trying to testify. It was enough to identify the lie in the binding; it was not a verdict upon everyone involved. Mae said only what the cut required.

At three that afternoon, she cut the stitch at Orla's throat.

The ghost drew a breath that shook the dust from the bell.

"You knew," she said to her sister.

On Elias's wrist, a ring of bruised skin appeared. His arm jerked upward. He caught the ladder with his other hand before the unseen rope pulled him off his feet.

Mae climbed toward the clapper. The old rope was there, braided around its iron stem beneath a crust of verdigris. She reached it with the shears.

"No," Orla said.

The bell shuddered against the lifting strap. Mae's hand struck bronze. Her shears fell and landed beside Nessa's shoes.

Elias gripped the ladder. "Orla."

"She tells Alice first."

Mae looked down. The ghost stood between Nessa and the doorway.

"We agreed she'd speak today."

"She'll forget. Living people always find a reason to forget. I want her daughter here. I want her to hear what her mother let happen."

Elias's wrist twisted. Mae could hear the strain in the timber under his hand. Orla had spent twenty-five years planning how to get a voice, and Mae had mistaken that wish for a wish to leave.

"Move away from him," Mae said.

"I am not touching him."

That was true. The transfer was doing it for her. She only needed to keep Mae from cutting the anchor before the stored fall completed.

Nessa took out her phone. Her fingers shook so badly that she dropped it. Iris picked it up, and Nessa called Alice from the caretaker's office at the bottom of the stairs. She could not speak steadily enough to explain. Alice heard distress and said she was coming.

Mae tried the ladder again. Orla pulled at the bell, her hands fixed to the bronze. The wood shivered under Mae's feet as the moving bell struck the ladder's upper rail. Elias stepped beneath it to hold it steady.

"Don't," Mae said.

"Then get down. We wait."

"You shouldn't have to."

"I'm aware."

The lifting strap held. Minutes passed. The bruise on Elias's wrist deepened into a groove. Mae loosened his sleeve and watched his fingers swell. He kept trying to flex them. Each attempt was smaller.

Orla looked at his hand once and turned away.

"Did he do this to you?" Mae asked her.

"He tied me to the bell rope. Said if I wanted the city to hear me, I could ring for it."

"And you think this is different?"

Orla's face closed. "Don't make him your excuse to hurry me. Everyone has been in a hurry since I died."

Mae wanted to shout. Elias caught the edge of her coat with his good hand. She sat beside him on the platform step and pressed her forehead against his shoulder for a second. It was a selfish comfort; she knew he had less to give than she did.

Alice arrived twenty-three minutes after the cut, breathless from the stairs. She stopped when she saw the ghost who looked like a younger version of her mother.

"Who is that?"

Nessa began with Orla's name.

"Your sister died in an accident," Alice said. "You told me. We put flowers on her grave."

"I told you what I told everyone."

Alice's gaze moved to the cloth on the floor. She reached down as though she might pick it up, then drew back. Mae recognized a child searching a room for one solid thing, even in a woman old enough to have left home.

"Is this why you wouldn't let me take the scholarship? The music one?"

Nessa shut her eyes. "You looked like her at the audition."

"You said we couldn't afford the travel."

"I'm sorry."

"You said Dad would have wanted me close."

Orla watched her niece. Whatever she had imagined bringing into the room, this small, ordinary theft had not been part of it. Mae saw her mouth move. No sound came out, though the veil was already gone.

Nessa went on. She told her about the shoes, then the lie at the inquest. Alice listened standing beside the door, her bag still over her shoulder. She had stopped looking at the ghost. Her mother's familiar face was now the stranger part of the room.

"Dad killed her?"

"Yes," Nessa said.

"You married him afterward?"

"Yes."

The answers sounded unbearable because Nessa did not cover them with anything.

Orla moved closer.

"Tell her you knew he was going to kill me."

Nessa's mouth opened. She looked at Elias's hand.

"Don't," he said.

She began to cry. "I knew he could hurt her. I didn't know he would kill her."

"You knew," Orla insisted.

"No."

The bell swung against the strap. One of its old anchor bolts shifted in the wall. Elias pulled Mae away from the ladder as it tipped, and the invisible rope jerked his marked arm upward.

The sound from his wrist was small. Mae would remember it longer than the crash of the ladder.

Alice screamed. Nessa moved toward her daughter, but Alice backed away.

Nessa reached for the strand of hair caught across Alice's mouth. It was the familiar gesture of a mother who had done it since childhood. Alice knocked her hand away. Beside them, Elias tried to close his injured fingers around the ladder rail. Mae put her own hand there instead. His fingers did not move again.