The wind shifted.
It wasn't unusual—storms came and went like breath—but this time, Seraphine felt it inside the house. A tickle along the glass, a thread of cold that touched the bones of the place.
She paused mid-step.
The silence pressed closer than usual.
From the highest window, she peered into the field, eyes tracing the soft bend of grass and the moss-slick rocks. Nothing moved.
But something was different.
She reached out—not through the glass, not past the boundary she couldn't cross—but with it. A kind of instinct, old and half-forgotten. Like remembering how to flex a phantom limb.
There.
A slip of paper, caught in the weeds just near the house's edge. Too close. It shouldn't have been there. Nothing ever came close.
And yet it fluttered, trembling like it knew it shouldn't belong.
She pressed her palm flat to the glass. Felt the hum of the house—soft, protective, ancient.
Then slowly, she leaned forward and whispered to it.
"Let me see."
The paper shuddered. Lifted. And then, impossibly, slid along the earth, curling through a crack in the invisible barrier. It landed gently on the wooden floor near her bare feet.
She stared at it for a long time before bending to pick it up.
It was damp and smudged, but not ruined. A sketch. Just a few strokes, rough and uncertain, but undeniably her house. The curve of the front steps. The shimmer of too-perfect windows. The outline of a door that no one should know existed.
Her breath caught.
He'd seen it.
Not just guessed. Not imagined.
He'd seen it.
The man with the dog. The one who came and never spoke. The one who waited.
She pressed the paper to her chest and closed her eyes. Everything was too loud all at once. The house. Her heartbeat. The space between them.
After a long moment, she moved to the far corner of the front room. There was a loose tile there—one that used to creak before she'd stopped it. She knelt, pulled it free, and took out a dried violet, flattened and brittle with age.
She placed it on a clean scrap of parchment. No words. Just the flower. Just the shape of something once alive.
She slid it gently against the glass, but it wouldn't pass.
Her fingers trembled.
Then—softly—she called to the house again.
"Please."
The flower vanished.
Lucien stood outside the old records office, hands shoved deep in his pockets. The town was small. Forgettable. One of those places where things were buried more often than they were spoken.
He didn't expect to find much. But he was good at following hunches.
The library inside was barely that—a collection of yellowed maps, records no one had read in decades, and a librarian too bored to care what he searched for.
He asked about the field. About who owned the land.
She shrugged. "No one lives out there."
"I didn't ask if someone lived there. I asked who used to."
That made her pause.
She pulled a box from under the counter. Dusty. Untouched. "Some manor house, I think. People used to call it something fancy. Glass… something. Like a joke."
Lucien opened the box slowly. Inside, a water-damaged photograph curled at the edges. A house—pale and too-bright. Half-faded, like it didn't want to be remembered.
There were no names. Just the faint outline of something he'd already seen.
He slipped a page from his notebook behind the photo and returned the box.
No one stopped him.
As he walked back through the town, dog trailing behind him with uneven steps, Lucien looked out toward the field in the distance.
There was something there. He knew it now.
Not a ghost.
Not quite.
But someone.
And maybe, if he stood still long enough, it would show itself again.