Chapter 2 #3
He paused, considering the shape of his next question.
"Do you have family who would object to such an arrangement?”
"No." I held his gaze steadily. "My father was my only family."
"What about friends or attachments that might complicate your discretion?"
He searched my face as he asked, looking for an answer I could not identify.
"None."
The word emerged hollow, carrying a weight I had not intended. If he found it sad, and perhaps he should have, nothing in his expression acknowledged it. He simply nodded, filing the information away.
"The work would begin tomorrow, if you are available."
My heart stuttered. "Tomorrow?"
"Is that a problem?"
"No. I just…” I faltered, caught between relief and panic. I had not expected him to decide so soon. In truth, I had not expected to be hired at all. "I thought there would be other candidates to consider."
"There are." He set the journal aside on his cluttered desk. "But I have seen enough to make my decision."
"You are offering me the position?"
"I believe I am."
He moved to the window, hands clasped behind his back as he stared out at the gardens and the greenhouse structures beyond.
"Provided you accept the terms I have outlined—room and board, absolute confidentiality, and complete dedication to the research. Can you agree to those terms, Miss Reed?"
I should have felt triumphant. This was everything I wanted—access to the research, proximity to someone who might have answers, and the possibility of restoring my memory.
Yet the stillness of his posture unsettled me.
Tension held across his shoulders, suggesting my answer mattered to him far more than it should.
"Yes," I said anyway, because what other choice did I have? "I accept."
He nodded, without turning from the window, his shoulders relaxing by the smallest degree. "My housekeeper will prepare a room for you. Bring whatever belongings you need.”
His voice was strained, as though he already regretted his decision even as he formalized it. Before I was able to examine the tone more thoroughly, he turned back to me, expression composed.
"Is there anything else you need to know?"
A multitude of questions crowded my throat, demanding release, but I asked none of them.
"No," I said, shaking my head. "Thank you, Dr. Ambrose, for this opportunity."
"Do not thank me yet."
A line formed between his brows, the first real fracture in his steadiness. The words carried an edge of warning not quite interpretable.
He moved to the door, opening it in clear dismissal. I stood, smoothed my skirts with hands that had finally stopped their visible trembling, and followed.
As I passed him, his attention drifted once more to my throat. His features softened with what I might have sworn was pity, though the emotion made no sense.
"Hawthorne will show you out," he said, voice gentling, the clinical distance slipping from his demeanor. "I will be expecting you tomorrow afternoon."
"Of course," I replied.
I stepped into the corridor, and the door closed firmly behind me.
Hawthorne appeared without sound, my coat already draped over his arm as if he had been waiting for the exact moment I would emerge. He stepped forward and helped me into it with hands that were wrong somehow—too firm, but too smooth, like polished wood where flesh ought to be.
I took the opportunity to study him more closely—the unnatural consistency of his skin, the way his eyes failed to focus on anything, sliding past objects like he perceived the world through some other sense entirely.
What was wrong with him?
I thought, uncomfortably, that the voice might not have been wrong in its earlier assessment.
Perhaps we were both monsters.
Hawthorne opened the front door, and damp air rushed in, vicious after the warmth of the house. I stepped out into the rain, and the world beyond the threshold was suddenly thin, less real, somehow, like I had crossed back from somewhere substantial into a pale copy of it.
I turned back, just once.
Ambrose House loomed in silent grandeur, its ordinary facade revealing nothing of the strangeness within.
A pull wound through my lungs until each breath came shallower than the last. My body leaned toward the house before I had fully registered the impulse, and my feet shifted automatically, eager to carry me back across the threshold without consulting my conscious will.
Go back!
The voice came harsher this time, coiling through my mind with such force that I actually winced.
I stilled, pressing my fingers against my breastbone as I fought for air.
“Stop that,” I hissed under my breath.
I turned away with considerable effort and began the walk home—my mind filled with amber eyes, an unusual servant who barely seemed human, and an uncomfortable certainty that I had been in that house many times before.
The loneliness followed, as it always did. A hollow absence pressed against my ribs with each step, and beneath it, quieter but no less persistent, my little companion whispered that I was walking away from something I desperately needed to remember.