Chapter 1 #2
I gather my things and go. Behind me, as the door swings shut, I catch the tail end of someone muttering something about that odd Sorrell girl — and Amara's voice, sharp and sudden: "What's your problem? Seriously — what is your problem?"
I smile, just a little, all the way home.
The shop is dark when I return, and the till is exactly as empty as I knew it would be.
I don't bother checking twice. I climb the narrow stair behind the counter, past the sitting room where the sober apologies and the drunk cruelties happen in the same worn chair, up to the top floor where my room sits at the end of the hall.
I pass the other door without meaning to look at it. I always look at it anyway.
It hasn't been opened in seven years. Dust on the handle, a thin skin of cobweb in the frame.
Behind it: two small beds, untouched. Toys my father made with his own hands, for the daughters he still had three of, once.
I used to think I'd go in on my eighteenth birthday.
I used to think a lot of things I no longer believe.
My own room is small, plain, deliberately empty of anything that could catch light and throw it back at me. I sit at the window instead, knees drawn up, and watch Whitby fold itself into evening.
From up here you can see the whole shape of the town — the abbey ruins black against a sky bruising toward violet, gulls circling the harbor one last time before dark, gas-lamps blinking on along the cobbles like a string of small, deliberate stars.
It really is the most beautiful place in the world, this town that loves its ghosts.
I've just never quite been able to love it back, not fully, not when it insists on being so beautiful while everything inside these walls falls apart.
I let myself remember them. Just for tonight, just because it's the one night I let myself.
Cordelia's laugh, too loud for her size.
Rosalind, always the gentlest of us, plaiting my hair while I plaited hers, three heads bent together, three faces so alike our own mother — before she died bringing us into the world — could hardly have told us apart if she'd lived to try.
Black hair. Ice-blue eyes. We were identical enough that strangers used to gasp.
Now I'm the only one left to be gasped at.
Tears slide down without my permission. I don't fight them tonight. Tonight, I never do.
And that's when I feel it again — the watching. Stronger this time. Close.
I know better than to look straight at the window. Instead I reach for the thin black veil I keep folded on the sill for exactly this purpose, and settle it over my face, a soft, safe blur between my eyes and the world, and only then do I look down.
A man. Standing across the street, utterly still while everyone else moves around him, looking directly up at my window like he's been standing there for some time already.
I can't make out his face through the veil and the dark and the distance — only the shape of him, tall, coated in black, unmoving.
And a camera, lifted to his eye.
I don't wait to see if he takes the picture. I'm already moving, already slamming the window shut, already backing into the dark of my own room with my heart trying to beat its way straight out of my chest.
I don't remember falling asleep. I remember waking to noise.
Something breaking, downstairs. A man's voice, low and rough, cursing at nothing.
I know that sound the way I know my own pulse.
I go down barefoot, in my nightdress, careful on the stairs.
Light spills from the kitchen, unsteady, candlelight rather than the electric bulb we can't always afford to run.
My father stands in the middle of it, swaying, his shirt half untucked, buttons done up wrong, a bottle hanging loose from one hand.
A pot lies where he's thrown it, clattering still against the floor.
He's not an old man. He only looks like one, most nights.
"Papa," I say quietly, from the doorway.
He turns too fast, nearly loses his footing. "Where's my dinner," he growls — not a question, an accusation.
I point, wordless, to the covered plate I left for him hours ago. He rips the lid off and eats with his hands, barely bothering with the spoon beside it, food catching in his unkempt beard, and I stand very still and let him.
When he's done he drains the last of the bottle in one long pull and tries to stand — and goes down hard instead, catching the table edge on the way, cursing again as his knees hit the floor.
I rush to him despite everything. "Papa, are you all right—"
His hand closes around my wrist. Hard. Harder than it needs to be.
"Look at me," he says.
I go very still. "Papa—"
"Look. At. Me." His voice cracks up an octave, raw and furious and something else beneath it, something that sounds almost like grief wearing anger as a mask. "You never look at me. Do you know what that's like? To live with a girl who won't even look at her own father?"
"Please," I whisper. "You know why I can't—"
"I know exactly why." His grip tightens.
His eyes, when I risk a glance at his face, are wet, wild, furious.
"Because you're not supposed to be the one left.
Because every time I look at you I see them — do you understand me?
Every single time. Your face, their face, I can't tell where one ends and the other begins anymore, and God help me, I don't know if I'm looking at my daughter or two ghosts wearing her skin—"
He then laughs bitterly, cutting himself off. “And then you grew to look exactly like her. You turned into that woman and began to haunt me in a whole other way? Trying to make me feel guilty about what happened to her?”
I have no idea who he is talking about this time.
"Papa, stop—"
"Look at me!" It's a scream now, raw enough to hurt his own throat, and his other hand comes up to grip my chin, forcing my face up, up, toward his —
And I look.
I don't mean to. I don't decide to. His grip is too strong and my body too tired to fight it, and for one unbearable second I am staring straight into my father's eyes — brown, bloodshot, swimming with drink and grief — and there, small and pale and unmistakable in the dark wet center of them: my own face.
My own eyes. Staring back at me from inside the one person who should never, ever have to see them there.
"You've got her eyes. Not Cordelia's. Not Rosalind's. Hers.”
The scream that tears out of me doesn't sound human.
I shove him away — hard enough that he stumbles back against the cupboard — and I run. I don't remember the stairs. I don't remember the hallway. I remember the door to my room slamming behind me and my knees giving out somewhere between the threshold and the bed.
My chest won't work properly. I'm gasping, but no air seems to land anywhere useful, each breath shallower and faster than the last until I'm lightheaded, until the edges of the room start to swim and darken at the corners.
My hands are shaking so hard I can't make a fist, can't grip the floorboards, can't do anything except claw uselessly at my own arms as if I could physically climb out of my skin and leave it behind me on the floor.
Not real. Not real. It's not real, it's not them, they're gone, they're gone, they're—
My heart is a fist slamming itself bloody against my ribs.
Sound stops making sense — my father's voice from downstairs, still shouting, dissolves into something wordless and roaring, indistinguishable from the blood pounding in my own ears.
My vision tunnels down to a single point of light from the streetlamp outside, swimming, doubling, and for one horrific moment I see two small shapes standing at the edge of it, black hair, pale eyes, watching —
I squeeze my eyes shut so hard colors burst behind the lids.
My whole body curls in on itself, forehead pressed to the floorboards, arms wrapped around my knees, rocking, just slightly, the way I haven't done since I was twelve years old and a nurse held me down on a hospital bed and told me it was safe now, it was over now, when it has never once, not for a single day since, felt over.
I don't know how long I stay like that. Long enough that the shaking eventually slows.
Long enough that my breath, ragged and wet, starts finding some kind of rhythm again.
Long enough that the cold of the floor seeps all the way into my bones and I stop minding it, because at least the cold is real, at least the cold is mine, and not some pale reflection of a face that isn't supposed to exist anymore.
Eventually, I stop fighting it, and let the floor hold what's left of me.
October 3rd 2026.
Happy birthday, Ophelia.