Devotion After Dark

CHAPTER TWELVE

There were things about him that did not add up, and the more Solenne tried to understand them, the less she trusted the explanations she made for herself.

Solenne had promised him she would forget, but the moment she stepped into her grandmother’s house, she knew she had no intention of keeping her word.

She tried to occupy herself with ordinary things. She helped arrange the books she had left scattered across the sitting room, straightened a stack of old magazines on the side table, and stayed in the kitchen longer than necessary while her grandmother prepared dinner. Each task demanded so little concentration that her thoughts kept returning to the same troublesome details. His hand had been unnaturally cold. He never seemed to appear during the brightest hours of the day. He declined food without hesitation, and he spoke about the town’s history with the certainty of someone recalling events he had witnessed himself.

Most unsettling was the way he had looked at her after she touched him. He had not seemed surprised by her discovery. He had seemed afraid of what she might do with it.

That distinction stayed with her.

Solenne sat at the dining table while her grandmother finished preparing their meal, turning a spoon between her fingers as she considered what to do next. She could confront him again, but she doubted he would offer anything more than another carefully worded warning. If he had been willing to explain himself, he would have done so when she asked. Pressing him without knowing what she was looking for would only give him another opportunity to avoid the question.

She needed something he could not dismiss so easily.

Her gaze drifted toward the window. Beyond the familiar garden and the low fence separating their property from the neighboring grounds, the old mansion stood partially obscured by trees. Even from this distance, its dark windows gave little indication of what lay inside. She had passed it often enough to recognize its neglected exterior, yet the place no longer seemed merely abandoned. Knowing that someone lived there had changed the way she looked at it.

Someone who did not want to be understood.

“Solenne, you're awfully quiet tonight,” her grandmother remarked as she placed a serving dish on the table. “Something bothering you?”

Solenne looked up, surprised by how quickly the question brought her back to the present. “Just thinking.”

“About what?”

“Nothing important.”

Her grandmother gave her a knowing look but did not immediately press her. Solenne lowered her gaze to the table, hoping the brief answer would satisfy her. She had no intention of mentioning the man next door, especially when she could not explain why the subject had begun to occupy so much of her attention.

After a moment, her grandmother returned to her seat.

“You should be careful about the things you let occupy your mind,” she said. “Sometimes, the more you think about something, the harder it becomes to leave it alone.”

Solenne's fingers stopped moving around the spoon.

The remark was ordinary enough, yet it struck too close to the thoughts she had been trying to conceal. She glanced toward her grandmother, searching her face for some indication that the warning had been deliberate. Her grandmother continued eating as though she had said nothing unusual.

“Do you know anything about the people who used to live in the mansion next door?” Solenne asked.

The question came out more casually than she felt.

Her grandmother's hand paused above her plate. It was a small movement, easily overlooked, but Solenne caught it before she could look away. A moment later, her grandmother resumed eating, her expression composed.

“Why are you asking about that house?”

“I was curious. It looks old enough to have a few stories attached to it.”

“Every old house has stories.”

“That doesn't mean you know them.”

Her grandmother looked at her then, and Solenne immediately regretted how pointed her answer had sounded. She had not meant to challenge her, but the brief hesitation had awakened another suspicion. Perhaps the strange man next door was not the only person who knew more than she was willing to admit.

Her grandmother set down her spoon.

“Some stories are not ours to tell,” she replied.

Solenne felt her stomach tighten. The words were too familiar. She had heard them in different forms since arriving, always when she asked about something that seemed perfectly reasonable to question. She wanted to ask what made this particular house different from every other old property in the neighborhood, but her grandmother's expression discouraged her from pursuing the matter at the table.

For now, Solenne decided to let the subject rest.

Not because she had been convinced, but because she had learned something useful: asking directly was unlikely to get her anywhere.

That evening, she waited until the house had grown quiet before returning to the sitting room. The old clock on the wall marked the passing minutes while she sat near the window, watching the neighboring property through a narrow gap in the curtains. She felt faintly ridiculous. She had no evidence of anything beyond a series of unusual habits and one unsettling encounter, yet she had begun behaving as though the house next door held an answer she needed to find.

Still, she could not make herself look away.

She watched the mansion for long enough that her eyes began to ache. Nothing moved behind its windows, and the grounds remained still beneath the night sky. Just as she was beginning to consider the possibility that she had wasted her evening, a faint light appeared in one of the upper rooms.

Solenne straightened.

She knew that window. It was the same one she had noticed before, the one that had first made her question whether the mansion was truly empty. The light remained steady for several moments, illuminating a small portion of the curtain before disappearing.

She leaned closer to the glass, trying to make out any movement inside.

Nothing.

Her first instinct was to dismiss it as an ordinary lamp, perhaps switched off by someone who had finished reading. But she remembered how the man had reacted when she touched his hand, how quickly he had warned her to stop asking questions. The memory made the darkened window feel less like an unremarkable detail and more like an invitation she had no business accepting.

Solenne drew back from the curtains.

She was not going to enter the property. Whatever she suspected, she had no reason to put herself in a dangerous situation simply to satisfy her curiosity. But there were other ways to learn about a place, and she knew where she could begin.

The next morning, she would ask around town.

She would start with the older residents, the people who had lived in the area long enough to remember what the neighborhood had looked like decades ago. If the mansion had once belonged to a prominent family, someone would remember their name. If the house had been abandoned for years, someone would know when its occupants had left. And if the man next door had lived there longer than he appeared to have been alive, there might be a record of him somewhere.

It was a simple plan, but it gave her something more useful than speculation: a direction.

Solenne returned to her room and opened the small notebook she had brought with her. On a blank page, she began writing down everything she could remember about him, separating what she had observed from what she merely suspected. She noted his reluctance to appear during the day, his refusal to eat, his knowledge of the town's history, and the unnatural coldness of his hand. Beside each detail, she left space for an explanation.

The page looked almost absurdly ordinary. There was nothing on it that proved he was dangerous, much less anything that explained what he might be. Yet seeing the observations written down made it harder to dismiss them as the product of an overactive imagination.

At the bottom of the page, she wrote one final question.

Who are you?

She stared at the words, then closed the notebook.

For the first time since meeting him, Solenne felt that her curiosity had become something more deliberate. She was no longer content to wonder about the man who lived next door or to wait for him to volunteer an explanation. He had made it clear that he would rather she knew nothing, and her grandmother's reaction suggested that the silence surrounding the mansion extended beyond its gates.

She would have to find the truth herself.

The following day, Solenne began with the small neighborhood store, where conversations tended to linger long after customers had finished their purchases. She asked the elderly woman behind the counter whether she knew anything about the mansion, keeping her tone light enough to sound like a newcomer interested in local history.

The woman's expression changed the moment Solenne mentioned the property.

“Why do you want to know about that place?” she asked.

Solenne had expected curiosity, perhaps a few old stories or a complaint about the state of the grounds. She had not expected the woman to lower her voice.

“I noticed someone living there,” Solenne explained. “I thought the house was abandoned.”

The woman looked toward the road before answering. “People have said that for years.”

“Then who lives there now?”

For a moment, the woman appeared to consider whether she should answer. Her gaze returned to Solenne's face, lingering as though she were trying to decide whether the question came from innocent curiosity or something more serious.

“Some houses are better left alone, child.”

Solenne felt a familiar frustration rise in her chest. It was the same answer again, offered by someone who seemed to know precisely why she was asking but had no intention of explaining anything.

She thanked the woman and left without pressing her further.

The encounter had not given her the information she wanted, but it had confirmed one thing: the mansion's reputation had not faded with time. People remembered it, and they were reluctant to speak about it.

By the time Solenne returned home, her initial suspicion had settled into a quieter, more persistent certainty. She did not know what the man was hiding, and she refused to decide what he was before she had evidence. But she could no longer convince herself that his behavior was merely unusual.

That evening, she glanced toward the neighboring mansion again.

The upper window remained dark.

Solenne thought of the warning he had given her and the promise she had made in response. She had told him she would forget because she wanted him to believe the conversation was over. Now she understood that he had mistaken her willingness to stop asking questions for a willingness to stop searching.

She would not confront him again just yet. She would learn what she could from the town, from the house, and from the people who seemed determined to keep its history buried. When she finally spoke to him about it, she wanted more than a handful of suspicions he could dismiss with a look.

She wanted an answer he could not escape.

And if the truth proved more frightening than she expected, at least she would know what she had been risking by searching for it.