Chapter 2
two
OLEANDER
Morning in Hollow Vale arrived with a shift in the gray.
When I opened my eyes, the bedroom was filled with a light that felt filtered through dirty wool.
I lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the familiar weight of Dominic’s arm across my waist. It took a full minute for the silence to remind me that he wasn't there. He was never going to be there again.
I got out of bed, dressed in layers, a charcoal sweater and my heavy wool coat, before stepping out into the hallway.
The scent of his cologne was gone, replaced by the smell of damp brick and something vaguely metallic.
I didn't linger. I needed to move, to see this place in the light, even if the light here felt like a lie.
Outside, the fog hadn't lifted. It had just changed altitude, sitting at knee level like the ground was breathing out a cold, white breath.
It clung to my shins as I walked, turning the world into a series of floating silhouettes.
The town was beautiful in the way a corpse can be beautiful, ornate, still, and undeniably ruined.
The architecture was a fever dream of Victorian ambition, ivy eating through red brick, ironwork rusting into delicate lace, and gargoyles that looked less like decorations and more like they were keeping watch.
Nothing about Dominic being in this place made sense.
I found the main street by following the sound of a distant, rhythmic banging, a loose shutter, maybe, or a ghost trying to get home. I didn’t believe in the paranormal like that, but far stranger things had happened recently.
When I reached Main Street, I was surprised to find some semblance of activity in the center.
There was a hardware store with dusty windows and a diner where condensation was so thick it looked like the glass was sweating.
Further down, I saw a bar with no name on the front, just a dark wood facade and a door that looked like it had been opened ten thousand times.
The few people I passed didn't stare. They acknowledged me with small, tight nods that were friendly enough but didn't invite follow-up. It was the kind of greeting you gave to someone you expected to see again, whether you wanted to or not.
Continuing on down the street, I stopped in front of the bookshop, fond memories of earlier days being surrounded by books making me wonder what would have happened had things turned out differently.
The sign was hand-painted, the gold leaf peeling away from the letters like dead skin.
I pushed the door open, a bell chiming with a sound that felt too bright for the atmosphere.
A woman stood behind the counter, her hair a shock of white against a dark cardigan. She didn't look up from the book she was marking until I reached the register, her eyes a pale, startling blue.
"Oh, good morning! You must be the one in the Ashworth place," she said.
"I'm Oleander," I said, my voice sounding thin in the cramped space. "I just moved in yesterday. I didn't realize news traveled that fast here."
She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "It’s a pretty close-knit town, Oleander. Someone saw you arrive last night and it’s spread like wildfire. The town’s glad to have you. It’s been waiting for that apartment to have a pulse again."
The phrasing landed wrong. She hadn't said the people or the neighbors. She had said the town, and she’d said it as if it were a person, a subject with its own set of lungs and a very long memory.
A chill ran down my spine as I turned away, pretending to scan the shelves, my heart doing a slow, heavy thud against my ribs.
I picked up a used paperback with a broken spine, some gothic mystery I’d likely never read. I just needed to hold something. Holding a book made any room feel less like a cage and more like a library. I paid her in cash, and she watched me leave with an expression that felt far too much like pity.
Back at the apartment, the silence was still waiting for me. I sat on the edge of the sofa, the book unopened in my lap, and looked at the box of Dominic’s papers sitting on the coffee table. I’d moved it from my trunk to the floor to the table, still avoiding that part of my life.
But with the cardboard staring at me, there wasn’t much else to do than open it.
The cardboard groaned as I pulled back the flaps.
On top were the expected things: legal deeds for the property, a lease agreement, utility receipts.
I picked up the lease. My fingers went cold. It was dated three years ago.
Dominic had owned this place for three years.
We had been married for five. That meant for three years, he had been coming here, keeping this life, this entire city, a secret.
He’d told me he was on business trips. He’d told me he was visiting his mother in Connecticut.
He had looked me in the eye and lied while he held the keys to this room in his pocket.
I looked at my left hand. The ring had come off at the funeral.
Liliana had slid it from my finger while I stood at the casket, too numb to protest. She'd said wearing a dead man's ring was a tether I didn't need.
I'd put it in the box with his papers and hadn't touched it since, though my finger still remembered the weight of it.
I dug deeper, my movements becoming frantic, a desperate search for an explanation that wouldn't hurt. At the bottom of the box, tucked under a stack of tax forms, was a notebook. It was thick, leather-bound, the cover scarred with deep scratches. I recognized it immediately. It was the one he used to keep in his library, the one he’d snap shut the second I walked into the room.
I opened the first page. The handwriting was Dominic’s, but it wasn't the elegant, flowing script he used for birthday cards.
It was dense and cramped, the ink bleeding into the paper.
The words weren't English. Or if they were, they were buried inside symbols I didn't recognize, harsh, jagged lines that looked like teeth.
Page after page of it, thousands of characters written with a manic precision that made my head ache.
It didn't look like he was writing a journal.
It looked like he was copying something down.
A transcription. I could almost see him, hunched over his desk at three in the morning, his eyes bloodshot, his hand cramping as he tried to capture every stroke of a language that didn't belong to the living.
I closed the notebook, the leather feeling oily against my palms. I stood up and walked to the closet, shoving the box onto the top shelf and slamming the door.
My hands shook as I went to the kitchen and poured a glass of bourbon, the liquid burning a path down my throat that I welcomed.
Anything to numb the realization that I hadn't known my husband at all.
Something out of the corner of my eye stole my attention, the shadows seemingly thickening, turning into something that looked almost solid. They seemed to pulse with a slow, rhythmic attention, watching me from the dark.
I didn't look at them directly. If I didn't acknowledge the shadows, they weren't real. If I didn't read the notebook, the secrets didn't exist.