The house had gone cold again.
Not physically. But in the way breath fogged between silences, and secrets clawed at walls.
Stanley didn’t sleep. He sat in the library with Clara’s final box cracked open at his feet.
Inside?
A music box. Broken.
A crumpled photograph of a child with pale eyes.
And a sealed letter addressed to “The One Who Still Remembers.”
But Stanley didn’t.
That was the problem.
Upstairs, Orla traced the outline of Clara’s ring on her finger. Her mind throbbed with fragments—flashes that weren’t dreams, weren’t memories, but something else.
Something stitched into her.
“You alright?” Elias stood in her doorway, arms crossed.
She didn’t answer at first.
Then: “What was I before all of this?”
He stepped closer. “You don’t want to know.”
“That’s not your choic
