Chapter 4
I cry until crying stops being a choice and becomes something my body is simply doing to me.
I let it. There's no version of tonight where I don't — I've learned that fighting it only makes it last longer, so instead I sink down onto the shop floor, my back against the counter, and I let every part of me shake loose at once.
My hands claw at my own arms. My breath comes in these awful, hitching gulps that don't sound like breathing at all.
I rock, slow, mindless, the way I've done since I was twelve years old, and somewhere in the middle of it I hear myself making a sound I don't recognize as my own voice — something low and wounded, an animal noise, nothing like language.
Cordelia. Rosalind. Their faces rise up behind my closed eyes, twelve years old forever, and mine rises with them — the same face, the same eyes, staring out at me from that photograph like proof that none of us ever really left that night.
The man who did it is in prison. That's what Papa always says, on the rare occasions he says anything about it at all — locked away, rotting where he belongs, for the rest of his miserable life — and I've never once had reason to doubt it, not until tonight, not until a stranger's photograph made every certainty in my life feel suddenly, sickeningly thin.
I don't remember deciding to stop crying.
I simply run out of whatever it is that fuels it, my body wrung completely empty, and somewhere in that emptiness sleep takes me, right there on the cold floorboards, curled small against the counter like something that's forgotten how to be anything but small.
I wake to silence and an empty shop.
For one disoriented moment I don't know where I am, or what hour it might be, or why my whole body aches like I've been beaten. Then I feel it — something small and hard clutched in my right hand, fingers cramped tight around it in my sleep.
The music box. The same dark lacquered thing that first held the rose.
I sit up slowly, my back protesting, and check the door out of pure animal instinct. Locked. From the inside. Exactly as I left it. No one's been in. No one's gotten out.
My hands shake as I turn the box, careful, angling it so the little hidden mirror faces my shoulder rather than my eyes, and wind the small brass lever until the lid springs free with its familiar, chiming note.
Inside, nestled where the rose had been, sits a necklace. A pendant, black as tar, worked into the shape of a small grinning skull, ringed all around with tiny black roses in exquisite, cruel detail.
I know this shape. I've seen it before — stitched into black veils, worked into iron gates on a poster still folded somewhere in my room.
Tucked beneath the pendant, a folded scrap of black paper, the writing on it silver, elegant, the same unmistakable hand from the photograph.
I’m going to take you home, and I'm going to glue you back together, piece by piece, until you fit my hands perfectly.
You've spent seven years running from your own reflection, little doll — that ends the moment you're mine.
No more running from yourself. You're my cracked doll now, and no one else will ever lay a finger on your porcelain skin again without my permission.
Beneath the words, embossed faintly into the corner of the paper, two words that make my stomach drop clean through the floor:
The Midnight Menagerie.
I stare at the handwriting, at the pendant, at the carnival's name sitting there in plain black and silver, and none of it arranges itself into anything I can make sense of.
The man from my window. The man who left roses on my hallway floor.
The coven with their veils and their fortune-telling riddles, their poster with this same grinning skull worked into iron.
All of it, somehow, the same thread, pulled taut around me without my ever having agreed to be caught in it.
Did he see me break down? Does he know what's going on with me? Does he know what I'm afraid of?
But how could he know? No one else knows. Not even my Papa, who never cared enough to notice.
So he doesn't know, right? But he wrote reflection…? He mentioned seven years…?
A sharp knock at the shop door nearly stops my heart outright.
I scramble to shove the necklace and the note back into the box, snap the lid shut, and shove the whole thing beneath the counter before I force my face into something that might pass for calm and go to open up for whoever's decided this is the moment to buy a toy.
By evening, I've checked the poster against the pendant a dozen times, in every spare moment the shop allows me, and the logo matches exactly. Skull. Roses. The same hand-inked flourish beneath.
The post arrives late — a stiff white envelope from the electric company, red-stamped across the front: FINAL NOTICE. I open it behind the counter with hands that have gone cold. The amount owed is more than I've made in the shop all week.
I'm still staring at the figure when my father comes down from the flat above, unsteady on the stairs, a fresh bottle already sweating in one hand.
"Give me the money," he says, not a greeting, barely even a sentence, just an order flung across the shop like a slap.
"Papa—" I hold the notice up, my voice thin. "It's the electric. It's a last notice, they'll cut us off if we don't—"
"I don't give a damn what they'll do." The words come out slurred, vicious, edged with curses I won't repeat even in my own head. "Give me the money, Ophelia."
"Please, just listen—"
He crosses the shop faster than a man that drunk has any right to move, and grabs my chin, forcing my face up toward his, and I go rigid, refusing to let my eyes lift any higher than his collar.
"A ghost doesn't get to lecture me about bills," he snarls.
"You hear me? A ghost of Cordelia, a ghost of Rosalind, standing there in my shop with that same bloody baby face you've had since you were twelve years old — haven't you aged a day, Ophelia?
Haven't you? Is that on purpose? Are you trying to haunt me?
By just getting taller and bigger, but your face remains the same?
" His grip tightens, cruel. "Well, I won't feel it.
Do you understand me? Not one ounce of remorse.
Not for you, not for them, not for any of it. "
He shoves past me to the till before I can answer, wrenches it open hard enough to rattle the whole counter, and takes nearly everything inside, coins scattering, a few notes fluttering to the floor that he doesn't bother retrieving.
“And you better stop looking at me with the same eyes as her. The eyes of pleading as though I am doing something wrong. I am not. And I will not feel guilty because you think I should!”
Her? Who is this her?
"I keep thinking I've buried this family twice over. Once wasn't enough for me, apparently,” he drunkly mutters to himself more than me.
He staggers toward the door, bumps the frame hard on his way out, curses at the wood itself as though it's personally wronged him, and is gone, the bell singing thin and mocking behind him.
I press the heel of my hand against my eyes, refusing to let another tear fall tonight, and that's when I hear it.
"Ow! — bloody hell, watch where you're — oh, it's just you, no offense taken, love."
Amara pushes through the door a moment later, rubbing her shoulder, throwing a dark look over her shoulder at the street where my father's already vanished. "Your Papa just about flattened me out there. Rude sod."
"Sorry," I manage.
She waves it off, already wandering the shop in a swirl of black lace and deliberately smudged goth eyeliner, dark lipstick, her curls pinned up with what looks suspiciously like a genuine antique hairpin she's lifted off my own shelf.
"Honestly, half these toys look like they've got a ghost trapped inside them," she says, picking up a chipped tin soldier and turning it thoughtfully in the lamplight.
"You could sell them as haunted and I promise you, sold out by morning. "
"Do they?" I ask, before I can stop myself. "Have ghosts, I mean."
"No idea." Amara grins, delighted by the question. "You tell me. Isn't this the house where three people died? Two little girls and your mum, all under one roof?" She says it so lightly, so without malice, that it lands almost gently instead of cruel — an honest question, not an accusation.
I don't know how to answer that. I shake my head instead and look down at the counter.
She picks up the porcelain doll from the display shelf — ice-blue eyes, black curls — and holds it up beside my own face, comparing the two with an exaggerated squint.
"Christ, this one looks just like you," she says, laughing, setting it back down before her gaze drifts, inevitably, to the folded poster still sitting by the till. "Oh — you've got one too."
"It was given to me," I say carefully.
"Perfect. Saves me the trouble." She beams. "I actually came to ask if you fancied checking out The Midnight Menagerie tonight."
"Tonight," I repeat.
"You have to be nineteen to get in," Amara says, already talking faster, already deciding this on both our behalves.
"Which I have been, for a grand total of four months now, thank you very much, and I still haven't had anyone to go with.
Until now." She gestures at herself, at me.
"It's dark, it's gothic, it's not for kids — which, no offense, is basically your whole personality in a dress. We'd fit right in."
"I don't think—"
"Come on."
"Amara, I really don't—"
"Come on." She grabs both my hands, undeterred, grinning like she's already won. "One night. You don't even have to talk to anyone if you don't want to. Just come look at pretty, spooky things with me."
"Aren't you afraid," I say quietly, "of being seen with the odd girl of Whitby?"
Amara actually laughs at that, loud and genuine. "Bugger the odd girl of Whitby. I'd rather be seen with someone interesting than with half the boring gits in this town." She squeezes my hands once, firm. "So. Yes or yes?"
I don't remember agreeing, exactly, but somehow, a few minutes later, she's already flipping the shop sign to closed and pulling the blinds, humming something under her breath while I gather the till and lock the wire display cases, the two of us moving in a strange, easy rhythm neither of us planned.
"Right," she says, once the last bolt is thrown. "Upstairs. Get changed. And for God's sake, wear something black — not that you own anything else, lucky cow."
I make her wait in the sitting room while I go to my own to change, my heart still not entirely settled from the day, from the necklace hidden beneath the counter, from everything I don't yet have words for.
I shower quickly, wash the day off my skin, towel my hair as best I can, and wrap myself in the black towel from the rail before padding barefoot to my wardrobe.
I pull the door open.
And scream.
A man steps out of the dark of my own closet, one hand closing hard around my waist before I can so much as stumble backward, hauling me flush against him, his other hand clamping firm over my mouth, muffling the second scream before it can fully form.
"Shh." His voice, low, amused, unbearably close against my ear. "I do love how loud you can scream, little doll." His grip tightens, deliberate, possessive. "But I'll admit — I'd much rather hear you screaming my name for an entirely different reason."
Down the hall, faint and growing louder, I hear Amara's voice calling through the flat.
"Ophelia? You alright in there?”