5. OLEANDER
five
OLEANDER
I woke up alone in the wreckage of my sheets. The morning light in Hollow Vale didn't so much break through the windows as it seeped into the room, revealing the empty space beside me.
There was no note, no lingering warmth on the pillow beside me, nothing but the heavy, copper-and-salt scent of sex and the dull ache in my joints that reminded me I was still alive. I stayed perfectly still, because the moment I moved, the guilt would find me.
For an hour in the dark, I hadn't been thinking about the funeral or the way the dirt sounded hitting the mahogany casket or the way our house together had felt like a tomb after the guests left.
For the first time in seven months, I had felt the weight of my own skin.
I had been present. And in this town, in this bed, presence felt like the ultimate betrayal.
Pleasure was a door I wasn't supposed to walk through anymore.
I had spent so long being an extension of Dominic, the quiet editor to his brilliant, chaotic husband, the steady hand on his shoulder, that being my own person felt like a theft.
I rolled onto my side, my hand brushing against the discarded leather-bound notebook on the nightstand, the symbols on the cover seeming to pulse.
My phone vibrated on the floor, the screen illuminating a pile of discarded clothes.
Liliana. Again. I watched the name blink against the wood, a lifeline from a world that didn't have fog that sat at knee-level or buildings that decayed in spirals.
She was probably pacing her flat in London, a glass of wine in one hand and her phone in the other, waiting for me to tell her I'd made a mistake.
I couldn't answer her. I didn't have the words for any of it yet.
I let the call go to voicemail and climbed out of bed, my feet hitting the cold floorboards.
I needed to wash the feeling of Rowan's hands off my hips, even as my body screamed at me to remember them.
I needed to be numb again. Numb was how I survived the last year of my marriage.
I walked toward the bathroom, trying not to look at the way the light caught the small scar on my left hand, the one from the wine glass Dominic had crushed while explaining that I didn't understand the gravity of his work.
I understood it now. I was living in it.
The shower was a battle of rusted pipes and tepid water that smelled faintly of iron.
I leaned my forehead against the tiles, letting the spray hit the back of my neck.
I kept waiting for the familiar scent of Dominic’s cologne to rise through the steam, that sweet, suffocating smell that had haunted the hallway last night, but there was only the scent of wet stone.
The silence of the apartment felt heavier today, like the walls were holding their breath.
I dressed in layers and left the apartment.
I couldn't stay there. The air in the flat felt like it was thickening, turning into something I'd eventually have to swim through.
I needed the strange, beautiful rot of Hollow Vale to remind me that I wasn't the only thing in this world that was falling apart.
Outside, the afternoon light felt muted. The fog had thinned, clinging only to the recessed doorways and the spaces beneath the parked cars. I walked toward the East Side, past the row houses with their ironwork rusting into intricate, skeletal lace.
I found myself standing in front of an abandoned church, its single steeple snapped off like a twig against the hazy sky.
The stained glass in the high windows was mostly gone, but one pane remained, shattered into a pattern that looked almost deliberate.
It was a radial fracture, a spiral of jagged light that seemed to draw my attention to one, central point.
A man was crouched on the cracked sidewalk a few yards away.
He was lean and angular, with sandy blond hair that caught the strange light, and a camera strap was slung across his chest. He was perfectly still, his eye pressed to the viewfinder, his breath held as he waited for a shift in the atmosphere.
He looked like he was hunting something that didn't want to be caught.
I watched him for a full minute, struck by the intensity of his focus.
He looked vastly different than Rowan. This man looked like he was trying to translate the town into a language he could finally understand.
He moved his fingers over the lens with a surgeon’s precision, adjusting the focus until he let out a long, slow exhale and clicked the shutter.
He sensed me then. He didn't jump or tense; he simply turned his head, his amber eyes narrowing for a second before they cleared. Then he grinned. "You’re the new one," he said, straightening up and brushing the dust from his jeans. "Oleander. Right?"
"Does everyone in this town have a dossier on me?" I asked, my voice sounding raspy even to my own ears. “Because this is getting unsettling.”
"Not a dossier," he said, walking toward me with a rhythmic, easy stride. "Just eyes. And Hollow Vale is a small room. I’m Theo. I’d offer you my hand, but I’ve been crawling around on the pavement and I’m pretty sure I’m covered in the nineteenth century."
He gestured toward his dusty palms and then toward the church. He spoke with his hands, his movements quick and expressive, punctuating his words as if the air around him were a canvas.
"What were you looking at?" I asked, nodding toward the shattered window. "The glass?"
"The breaking," Theo corrected. He stepped closer, and I could smell woodsmoke and something sharp, like chemical developer. "Look at the way the cracks move. Most glass breaks in a web. This is... it’s a spiral. Everything here decays in curves, Oleander. The foundations sink in circles. The vines grow in Fibonacci sequences. It’s like the town isn't just rotting; it’s being choreographed. "
I looked at the window again. He was right.
The fractures didn't just radiate out; they curved, a graceful, violent swirl that mirrored the symbols in Dominic’s notebook.
A cold prickle started at the base of my spine.
I wanted to look away, but Theo was watching me with a proprietary interest, his head tilted to the side as if he were trying to find the best angle to capture the expression on my face.
"It’s beautiful," I admitted, the word feeling like a confession. "And terrifying."
"The best things usually are," Theo said, his voice dropping into a softer, more intimate register. "Hollow Vale doesn't do boring. It rewards the people who are willing to look at the ugly parts long enough to see the design. Most people just see a ruin. I see a performance."
He raised his camera again, not to take a photo, but to show me the screen.
I stepped closer, my arm brushing against his sleeve.
He was warm, unnecessarily warm for the temperature of the air, and I felt my guard lower before I could stop it.
It was easy to talk to him in a way that felt different from Rowan.
He was just a man with a camera and an obsession with the way things fell apart.
"Look at this," he murmured, flicking through the digital gallery. "The light through the library stacks. The way the moss is reclaiming the old fountain in the square. It’s like the town is trying to turn back into something that hasn't been named yet."
The images were stunning. They were high-contrast and raw, capturing a version of Hollow Vale that felt more real than the one I was walking through.
He had a way of finding the humanity in the debris, a discarded shoe on a velvet chair, a child's drawing on a crumbling brick wall.
He collected moments of their passage and pinned them down with light.
He paused on an image of a dark alleyway, one I recognized from my walk the day before.
It was a shot of deep, ink-black shadow between two leaning buildings.
The composition was perfect, the sliver of golden light at the end of the tunnel highlighting the texture of the wet cobblestones.
But as I stared, the center of the image seemed to shift.
In the deepest part of the shadow, there was a shape.
It wasn't just a trick of the light or a smudge on the lens.
It was the silhouette of a man standing with his arms at his sides, perfectly still.
The proportions were wrong, the shoulders too broad.
It wasn't a shadow cast by an object. It was a shape that had its own weight.
"I love when the light does that," Theo said, his thumb already hovering over the button to flick to the next photo. "It creates these little ghost-artifacts. Pure pareidolia. The brain tries to find a face in the void because the void is too scary to look at on its own."
He flicked past it before I could say anything. I stood there, the breath caught in my lungs. It had looked like the photo-negative I'd seen in the hallway. It had looked like Dominic.
"Theo," I started, my mouth suddenly dry as bone. "Go back to that one."
"It’s just noise, Oleander," he said, but he didn't look back at the camera. He was looking at me, his amber eyes searching mine with a sudden, sharp intensity. "The town plays tricks. You have to learn what to ignore if you’re going to stay here. If you look too hard at the shadows, they start looking back. That’s the first rule of the Vale. "
He reached out then, his hand landing on my wrist to tilt the camera angle toward me.
His skin was scorching. It was so startlingly against the deep-seated cold that had been living under my skin since the funeral.
I stayed, though, my pulse drumming against the pads of his fingers, the warmth of him sinking through my sleeve and into my blood.
We stood there on the cracked sidewalk for a long beat, the silence of the abandoned church stretching out around us. He didn't move his hand. I didn't pull back. The air between us felt charged, a different kind of pressure than the one that sat in my apartment.
"You’re cold," Theo whispered, his gaze dropping to my mouth for a fraction of a second before returning to my eyes. "You shouldn't be this cold, Oleander. Not in this light."
"I've been cold for a long time," I said, the honesty of it surprising me.
"Well," Theo said, his thumb grazing the inside of my wrist, a slow, deliberate movement that made my breath hitch. "We’ll have to do something about that. This town is good at a lot of things, but it’s terrible at keeping people warm. You have to find your own heat here."
He let go of my wrist, but the ghost of the touch remained, a burning line of sensation that felt like a brand. He started talking again, something about the aperture settings and the way the sun was about to dip behind the old clock tower, but I wasn't listening.
I was thinking about the shape in the shadow, about the way his hand had felt like a rescue.
And I was thinking about Liliana, miles away in a city that made sense, while I stood in a town that was trying to teach me how to breathe in the dark.
I didn't look back at the church as we started walking toward the center of town.
I didn't want to know if the shadow-man from the photo was standing in the doorway, watching me leave.
We reached the corner where the main street began, the sky slowly turning into a deep purple. Theo stopped, his camera bag shifting against his hip. He looked at me, and for a moment, the playful detachment was gone.
"I'm going to the diner to edit these," he said, gesturing toward the camera. "You should come by. Or don't. But the coffee is decent, and the light in there is much more predictable than the light out here."
"I might," I said, which we both knew meant I would.
"See you around, Oleander," he said, a small, knowing smirk playing on his lips. "Try to stay in the sun while it's still here. The shadows are much hungrier after four o'clock."
He turned and walked away, leaving me standing on the sidewalk with the taste of woodsmoke on my tongue and a heat in my wrist that refused to fade.
I watched him go until he disappeared into the deepening mist of the next block.
I was alone again, but the silence felt different now. It felt like an invitation.