Blue Sea

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My husband stopped loving me since we moved into this house, my stepdaughter hates me and my best friend went missing. But this house was yet to take away something that I hold very dear. My name is Claire.I stood in the yard, bags still in the trunk, and I looked up at the white house with its black shutters, peeling paint and its overgrown lawn pressing against the porch boards, and I said the words out loud like I meant it. "You're right, Victor. It's perfect for us. I'm so glad we're here." Victor my husband, dark hair streaked silver, handsome in the distracted way of men who know they are handsome hugged me with one arm. His phone was already buzzing in his pocket. His eyes were already somewhere else. He mouthed sorry and turned his back to take the call, walking toward the street, and I was alone in the yard with my lie and this house and the bile rising in my throat. I was not supposed to come back. My sixteenyearold stepdaughter, Zara Victor's daughter from his first marriage was still in the back seat with her headset on, electricblue ends of her dark hair spilling over the window. I knocked. She looked at me with eyes like her father's flat, dark brown, already making a judgment and closed them again. Dismissed. I looked back at the house. When the sun went behind a cloud, the windows went dark, and I could have sworn the whole structure shifted. Windows like eyes. A door like a mouth. Every instinct I had said run. I had run before. Fifteen years ago I had run from this house and from this town and I had never come back. Never let myself think too carefully about why. There was a night I couldn't remember. A hospital. A summer that existed only in other people's stories. And now Victor's law firm was failing and we needed somewhere to live and my Aunt Vera the aunt my mother had called a monster, the aunt I had spent fifteen years not thinking about had left me this house. So here I was. I made myself walk through the door. That first night, Victor left for the airport. He had to get back to New York, he said. The firm. He would commute. We had agreed to this I had agreed to this but standing at the door watching his car disappear down the street I felt the particular cold of being left somewhere you don't want to be. Zara retreated to a room upstairs without a word. I spent the night on the couch. Somewhere around two in the morning, I woke to footsteps. Not the creak of old wood settling. Footsteps. Slow, deliberate, pacing the hallway overhead. Back and forth. I forced myself up the stairs. The hallway was empty. But at the far end, disappearing into the room Zara had taken a flash of white. A nightgown. I told myself it was Zara. I went back downstairs. I did not sleep again. The next morning, Zara came downstairs in red and blue pajamas. She had slept like the dead, she said. I looked at her red and blue pajamas. I looked at the empty hallway. And I thought: what did I see? I did not know then that this would become the question I asked about everything for the weeks that followed. I could not have known that the house had been waiting for me. That it had a history I had helped create. That a warning was already written on a mirror somewhere in these rooms left for me fifteen years ago and I had walked back in through the front door anyway. Two days in Redemption, Wisconsin and I already couldn't sleep, my husband was two states away, and my stepdaughter regarded me with the tolerant contempt usually reserved for slow traffic. I took Zara to Aunt May's Diner as a peace offering. It was the kind of place that had not changed since nineteen eighty seven red vinyl booths, a chrome counter, laminated menus with photographs of the food. Zara slid into a seat and looked at the room with the expression of someone who had been expecting exactly this and was furious about it anyway. "This is a dump." I was trying to come up with a response that was both honest and survivable when the waitress looked up from the coffee station and stopped moving entirely. She was small and darkhaired and wiry, and after a halfsecond her face broke into the largest smile I had seen in months. "Ellie?" Something in my chest cracked open. Leila Park. Fifteen years older but unmistakably Leila the childhood friend I had pushed to the back of my memory along with everything else from that summer her energy, her warmth, the way she moved through a room like she was the reason the room existed. She came around the counter and I was on my feet and we were hugging in the middle of the diner and I had forgotten, in all the years of being Claire, what it felt like to be held by someone who was simply, genuinely glad you existed. No agenda. No assessment. Just warmth. When we finally pulled apart she held me at arm's length and studied my face with the particular focus of someone who has been worrying about you from a distance for a very long time. "After that night," she said quietly, "we were all so worried. The hospital wouldn't let any of us visit." I fumbled. Said something about it being a long time ago. Changed the subject. She let me, with the grace of someone who has learned which silences to fill and which to leave. She filled in what she could: Iris was still here, still living just around the corner from the house. The town was the same. And then, with the careful tone of someone testing the temperature of ice before they step onto it: "Nathan Cole is still around. Local police now. Engaged." A rush of conflicting feelings moved through me anger first, quick and sharp, then something slower and harder to name. Nathan. I had forgotten Nathan too, the way I had apparently forgotten so much about that summer, filing him away in the same locked drawer as everything else. The boy who had asked me to meet him the day after a party fifteen years ago and then simply never shown up. Then Leila said the name that hit me like a physical blow. Evelyn. I gripped the edge of the table. Evelyn. Long blonde hair, green eyes, beautiful in the way that made every other girl feel invisible standing next to her all cheekbones and long lashes and a quality of being looked at that she carried without effort or apology. She had been part of our group. She had been my friend. And then she had The answer came back wrong. Fractured. A gap where a memory should have been. Leila's face when she said the name. That night. The way she said it, like she was placing something breakable down on a surface. Evelyn had disappeared on the same night I ended up in the hospital, and I had somehow, in fifteen years, managed to fold that knowledge away so completely I had to be handed it back in a diner in the town I had fled. I had forgotten her. The shame of that sat in my chest like a stone. Before I could say anything to Leila, the diner door swung open and the bell above it rang. Nathan Cole was older in the way that suited men jaw sharper, face more defined, the softness of the boy I had known burned off by years of weather and work. He was in his brown uniform, badge catching the morning light, and he moved through the diner with the easy authority of someone who knew every person in it and had professionally assessed all of them. He crossed to the counter. Leila called out his name. He turned. His eyes found me in the booth. His face rearranged itself into something carefully, professionally neutral. The kind of neutral that takes practice. He came over. He said it was good to see me back. He said welcome home to Redemption with the tone of a man delivering a verdict. He said he wanted to stop by the house later. He wanted to talk. He wouldn't say about what. I watched him go back to his coffee and I thought: a cop. Nathan Cole had become a cop. And the first thing a local cop in a small town says to the woman who just arrived from New York the woman who was the last person to see a missing girl fifteen years ago is: I want to talk. The coffee in front of me went cold. Iris arrived that afternoon without calling ahead. She knocked once and when I opened the door she just looked at me for a moment plain, freckled face, reddishbrown ponytail, the same steady brown eyes I had trusted without question when I was sixteen and then she held out her arms. We sat in the kitchen with tea. Aunt Vera's tea dried herbs in a ceramic pot, something that smelled like lavender and something else I couldn't name, something that made the kitchen feel briefly, impossibly safe. I talked. About Victor and his failing firm and the move neither of us had really wanted. About Zara's hostility and the footsteps at two in the morning and the redandblue pajamas that did not match the white nightgown I had seen. About the way the house felt not threatening, exactly, not yet, but awake. Occupied. Like the rooms had been waiting for me to come back and had opinions about it. Iris listened the way she always had without rushing me, without offering explanations before I had finished, without making me feel like the things I was saying were strange. Then she told me what I needed to know. The house's history Aunt Vera's house, the house I had just inherited went back further than Vera. Long before my aunt had made it her own with her herb garden and her dried bundles and her ceramic sunflower mugs, it had been the home of a man named Edward and his wife. The wife's name was Edith. She had been jealous of Edward's beautiful young maid, a woman named Rose. The jealousy had not stayed jealousy. It had curdled, slowly, into something darker and more fixed, and eventually into madness, and out of that madness Edith had stabbed Rose to death in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Then she had hanged herself in the same room. Both of them, Iris said quietly, were still in the house. Nobody who had ever lived near it seriously doubted it. Above us, the house creaked. Once. Twice. The same slow, deliberate sound I had heard from the couch the night before. Iris looked up at the ceiling with a small, dark smile. "Mad Edith," she said. "She's still here." I did not laugh. I was thinking about the white nightgown. The room at the end of the upstairs hall the room Zara had chosen without being directed there, had chosen and refused to leave. I was about to ask which room the murder had happened in when Iris glanced at the clock and said she had to go. Her mother needed her. She hugged me at the door, long and tight, and I felt for the first time since pulling into this town like I was not entirely alone. And then, hand on the door frame, she stopped. She turned back. She said it the way you say something you have been carrying a long time and are not entirely sure you should put down: the farewell party the night I ended up in the hospital, the night everything changed had been held here. In this house. I held the door frame. The yard tilted. The garden behind Iris went briefly out of focus. "I know you don't remember," she said quietly. "But Nathan does." She squeezed my hand and walked down the path, and I stood in the doorway of my dead aunt's house and understood that the cop who wanted to talk to me was not coming about a noise complaint. Nathan came in his uniform. He sat at my kitchen table with his notebook open and his pen uncapped and he asked me, in the measured tone of a man who had asked this question many times in many rooms, to tell him what I remembered about that night. I told him I had been badly intoxicated that night. That anything I had said or done then was unreliable. That fifteen years was a long time to expect anyone to produce useful memories. He let the deflection sit for a moment. Then he said: "One of us is still missing." The silence after that had a weight and a shape. I did not try to fill it. He told me a police report existed. A formal statement I had given from a hospital bed fifteen years ago a statement my own mother had apparently allowed while trying to shield me from everything else. My words, on record, in my name, and I had no memory of a single syllable of them. He told me he had been at that party. He remembered the night. He remembered how drunk I was, how early in the evening I had started, how by the time things wound down I could barely stand. He remembered seeing me with Evelyn last. He remembered. I sat very still and I thought: there is a version of that night that exists without me. A version that other people carry, that is documented, that a cop with dark blue eyes is reading from a notebook. And I cannot get to it. The door is locked and I do not have the key. Outside the kitchen window the garden had gone dark. The stone path disappeared into the tall grass. I stared at it and thought about what Iris had said about this house, about what had happened in the room upstairs. About the white nightgown. About the footsteps. What secrets, I thought, have I buried in this ground? Nathan looked at me for a long moment when he stood to go. The cop expression was still there but underneath it, just barely, something else something that might have been concern, or something older than concern. "This isn't over," he said, and walked to his car. I called my cousin Alex the one person from my New York life who had told me, flat and firm and repeatedly, not to come back to Redemption. He picked up on the second ring. I told him about Nathan. About the police report. About that summer. His voice went from easy to cold in a single sentence. "You know what I remember about that night, Claire? Nothing. Because you told me nothing. You came back from that hospital and you shut the door on all of it and I watched you do it and I let you. I shouldn't have let you." He was right. I had been so deliberate about it so careful to not think, to not ask, to construct a life in New York that had nothing to do with one summer in Wisconsin when I was sixteen. And now the summer had come looking for me. My mother called an hour after Alex hung up. She had heard somehow small towns always know. Her voice was tight with the particular anxiety of a woman who has spent fifteen years trying to put something behind her and has just discovered it refused to stay. "That house isn't safe. You know that." "I don't know anything," I said. "That's exactly the problem." She told me to come home. I said Zara had just walked in. I hung up. I sat on the porch swing as the sky went purple above the tree line, and I held my wine glass, and I listened to the town of Redemption settle into its evening, and I asked myself the question I had been circling since I arrived: I almost died here fifteen years ago. I gave a police statement I have no memory of giving. The house I am sleeping in was a murder scene. And something is pacing my upstairs hallway at two in the morning. Was it starting again? Or had it never stopped? I told myself I was adjusting. That old houses make sounds. That wood expands and contracts with the temperature. That a woman alone in a strange place even a place she had once lived, even a place she had run from is going to hear things wrong in the dark. Is going to fill silence with shapes that aren't there. I told myself this with increasing conviction for four days. Then the nightmares started. I had chosen to sleep in my old room rather than Aunt Vera's master bedroom. The master bedroom felt occupied. Not dangerous not yet but inhabited in the way a chair feels inhabited when someone has just stood up from it. The air in there had a quality I did not want to sleep inside. The door stayed closed. The first nightmare came on the third night. I was in the kitchen Aunt Vera's kitchen, with the copper pots and the herb bundles and the ceramic sunflower mug but it was night in the dream, and the quality of the light was wrong, and my aunt was standing at the stove with her back to me. I knew it was her before she turned. The set of her shoulders. The particular way she stood when she was making something she thought you needed. She turned. She held out a cup. Dark tea thick, almost black, with a smell that was both sweet and deeply wrong. "You're going to need it," she said. Her voice was exactly as I remembered it. Warm. Certain. And then her face changed. The eyes first. Then the mouth too wide, opening past what was natural, full of teeth that came to points. Her voice dropped into something that was no longer warm at all. I jolted awake to a real sound. Not from the dream. From the house. A crash. From the room at the end of the hall. The library had been ransacked. Every shelf stripped. Books in piles and fans across the hardwood floor, some open, some facedown, some brokenspined. A side table overturned. A lamp on its side, shade cracked, cord trailing. Knickknacks and picture frames strewn through the debris. The room looked like something had moved through it with intent not vandalism, not rage, but search. Like something had been looking for something specific and had not found it. In the middle of it all, Zara stood with her back to me. She was pulling books from the last standing shelf with the slow, mechanical rhythm of someone running a programme. Pulling them out. Dropping them. Pulling out the next one. Her face, when I moved around to see it, was smooth and pale and still in the cold moonlight every muscle at rest, eyes halflidded, the particular emptiness of a sleepwalker that looks like peace and is anything but. I picked my way through the broken glass toward her. "Zara." She stopped. She turned. Her eyes were open but the person behind them was not there the colour of her irises present, the light behind them absent. She looked at me for a moment that lasted too long. Then she said, clearly and precisely, the way you say something you have memorised: "You know." Every hair on my body stood. "I know what?" She tilted her head. Her voice did not change. It had the quality of a recording right pitch, right rhythm, but without the breath beneath it that makes a voice human. "The evil that was done. It's right in front of your nose." I opened my mouth to ask her what evil, what was done, what does that mean and her eyes rolled back in her head and she went down, all at once, like something had released her. I caught her before she hit the floor. I held her in the wreckage of the library, in the cold moonlight, surrounded by scattered books and broken glass, and I thought: she was looking for something. Something she believed was hidden in this room. What is she looking for? She woke in my arms on the library floor, disoriented, eyes wide, calling for her mother. The name landed in the room with a particular weight. Her mother Victor's first wife, who had left when Zara was small and had not come back. All the hostility gone from her face, just a sixteenyearold girl not knowing where she was or how she had got there. I helped her upstairs. Got her aspirin and water. Sat on the edge of the bed while she drank. She let me, which was more than she had allowed in days. When I tucked the quilt around her and stood to go, I glanced at the dresser mirror. And something hit me not a thought, not an idea, but a physical flash of memory. Myself at sixteen, sitting crosslegged on a floor very much like this one, on a warm afternoon, holding someone's sweaty hand in the dark we had made ourselves with curtains and closed windows. This room. This mirror. Something had happened in this room. Something I had been part of. The room where Rose was murdered. The room Zara had chosen. I stood in the doorway for a long time after she fell asleep, looking at the mirror, before I made myself go to bed. In the morning she told me flatly she had not been sleepwalking. She didn't know what I was talking about. She looked at me with her father's eyes and her father's tone a specific quality of patience that is not patience at all but a form of pressure, daring you to push back so they can respond to the pushing and she said it as though the previous night did not exist. I did not tell Victor. Zara had begged me not to, with the eyes of a child genuinely frightened, and I had agreed. And because I did not know how to explain it without sounding like exactly what Victor would say I was sounding like. How do you tell your husband that his daughter stood in a ransacked library in the middle of the night and told you that you know the evil that was done? In what order do you say those words to a man who responds to every difficult thing by looking at you with quiet, patient certainty that the problem is you? I cleaned the library myself. Restacked the books. Swept the glass. Standing at the shelves, running my hand along the spines, I kept asking myself: she was looking for something. Every shelf emptied, systematic, from left to right. What is hidden in this room that she needed to find? Nathan came back two days later. Not for a formal visit no notebook this time, no pen. He stood in the doorway of the study while I cleaned it, arms crossed, face doing its professional nothing. He said the statement I had given fifteen years ago was incomplete. That there were gaps in it that a fifteenyearold with no lawyer had not known how to fill. That those gaps still mattered, still affected the shape of what they knew, and that he needed me to try. "I'll think about it," I said. He looked at me for a moment. The cop expression and something underneath it something that wanted to say more than the cop expression allowed. "I know you don't remember," he said. "But the gaps matter. Even the edges of what you don't remember." He walked back to his car. Zara appeared on the porch a minute later. She had been listening from inside, in the way she always listened positioned just out of sight, close enough to catch everything. She asked what he wanted. I told her he had questions about a girl who had gone missing years ago. She looked at me for a long moment with her father's appraising look, the one that makes you feel you are being catalogued. Then she said, with the precise, targeted cruelty of someone who knows exactly which nerve they are choosing: "Maybe I'll have a talk with my dad." I kept my face still. Inside I was calculating exactly how much she had heard. Three days after Nathan's visit I was walking back from the pharmacy when a woman appeared in the doorway of the shop I had just passed. She was homeless, or looked it layered in scarves despite the warmth of the morning, a collection of jackets one over the other, a small cart beside her loaded with bags. She had the particular unhurried quality of someone who has nowhere to be and has made peace with it. She looked up from the cart when I passed. She stopped. She looked at me the way you look at someone you have been expecting. "You." Just that one word. But the weight behind it the particular certainty, the absence of surprise made it land like an accusation. Her eyes were very dark and not unkind. The eyes of someone who knows something and is waiting to see whether you know it too. She smiled. Missing teeth. "You know, don't you?" I walked faster. I did not look back. But I stood in the pharmacy car park for a full minute before I could make myself get in the car. I had heard those words before. You know. Zara had said them. In the ransacked library. In the middle of the night. Eyes empty, voice running on something other than Zara. A homeless woman who had never met me. A sixteenyearold girl in a sleepwalking trance. The same four words. The same certainty. What is it that I know? The second sleepwalking episode happened eight nights after the first. I woke to the footsteps before I was fully conscious the rhythm of them already working its way into my sleep, the specific weight and pace of them pulling me up from whatever I had been dreaming. Slow. Deliberate. Not the creak of old boards. A person walking. I found Zara in the upstairs hallway. She was standing against the wall with her arms at her sides and her eyes wide open not the halflidded emptiness of the first time, but fully, terribly open, staring at something in the middle distance that was not there. Her face had the smoothedout stillness of the trance state. Every muscle at rest except the ones holding her upright. I touched her arm. She turned toward me slowly. And she said, in a voice that was hers in pitch and intonation and completely empty of her in every other way: "Then, why did you kill me?" I stopped breathing. The hallway went very still. The house went very still. Even the usual night sounds of old wood and old pipes suspended themselves, as if the house was listening to what came next. "The evil that was done," she said. "You know what evil was done." Her eyes rolled back. She went down. I caught her again. And I held her on the hallway floor and I looked at the closed doors Aunt Vera's master bedroom, still closed, still pressing its particular presence through the wood and I thought about the room at the end of the hall where Rose was stabbed to death, where something had been awakened long before I came back, where Zara sleeps and wakes up not remembering. This house has been talking to me since I arrived. What is it trying to say? She denied it again. Nothing. She didn't know what I was talking about. Said it with the flat certainty of someone reciting a prepared position. I sat across the table from her and I watched her not eat her toast and I thought about all the things that were stacking up without explanation: the ransacked library, the white nightgown that couldn’t have been Zara’s, the woman on the high street, the two episodes of sleepwalking in the same room the room where a woman was murdered a hundred years ago, the room that Zara had chosen without being told. I thought about the history of this house. About Edith, who had been jealous of Rose and had not been taken seriously until she was standing over a body. About Rose, who had been afraid and had not been listened to. About my Aunt Vera, who had lived alone here for decades and was called a monster by the woman who was supposed to love her. I was thirtyone years old. I had come back to the house of my nightmares. I was sleeping two doors down from a room where a murder had taken place, and my stepdaughter was waking up in the middle of the night to deliver messages she did not remember. And I still could not account for a single thing I had done the summer I was sixteen. I was going to need more than wine. Leila had texted to say the whole gang was going out. I had not wanted to go. I had wanted to sit in Aunt Vera's kitchen with the herbscented air and the copper pots and try to think clearly about what was happening in the upstairs hallway. But the upstairs hallway would be there when I got home, and I needed very badly to be in a room full of people who were not affected by this house. The Tipsy Cow was everything a Friday night bar in a small Wisconsin town is supposed to be: loud, warm, smelling of beer and fried food and decades of Friday nights, packed with people who had sat in the same seats with the same people since high school and would probably still be doing it when they were eighty. I found Iris and Leila in the corner booth. Beside Leila was a woman I had not met sharpfaced, black ponytail pulled back with a silver clip, jewellery layered over a fitted black top, appraising me with the comprehensive efficiency of someone who has already formed an opinion and is now checking it against the evidence. "Diana," Leila said. "Owen's wife. You remember Owen?" A vague memory surfaced: Owen tall, redhaired, bad teenage acne that had not yet healed, good at making people laugh at their own expense. One of Nathan's crowd from back then. "Is he here?" "Around somewhere." Diana said, with the tone of a woman who has stopped tracking. I slid into the booth and ordered wine and tried, for the first time since arriving in Redemption, to simply be a person at a bar with old friends on a Friday night, without anything pacing the hallway upstairs. It lasted about twenty minutes. Leila had a talent for getting to the point that I had forgotten about. She put down her glass, looked at me across the table, and asked: "Have you seen a ghost?" I said nothing. My face apparently said yes. Diana made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Crazy Vera's house. Of course you're seeing things. That woman grew herbs under the floorboards and charged people to stand near them." I heard myself say: "Don't call her that." The booth went quiet. Diana raised an eyebrow. Iris looked into her wine with what might have been a smile. I had not expected to say it, and I could not entirely explain it except that every day I spent in Aunt Vera's house, every tea jar I opened, every faded note in the margins of her books, every dried bundle of herbs labelled in her careful handwriting, told me something different from what my mother had told me. Vera was not a monster. She was a woman who had lived alone with complicated gifts and strange company and had not apologised for either. "She was my aunt," I said. "She was kind." Diana looked at me for a moment, then picked up her drink. A draw. Owen appeared at the edge of the booth older, the red hair thinning now, the crooked grin still arriving a beat ahead of the rest of him and slid in next to Leila. He introduced himself to me with a cheerful nod and settled in and immediately became the warmest presence at the table, the way some people are warm simply as a structural feature of their personality. The argument about ghosts expanded. Owen was gleefully sceptical. Leila was invested in the supernatural. Diana held her ground with the energy of someone who has staked their worldview on the nonexistence of anything that cannot be explained. Iris was quiet. Then Leila asked me directly: had I seen anything? Not felt, not heard seen? And I said yes. And I told them about the night I had looked down the hallway and seen the white nightgown disappearing into Zara's room, and how Zara had been in red and blue pajamas in the morning, and about the footsteps that were not the house settling, and about Zara in the library with her empty eyes saying the evil that was done like she was reading from a document. By the time I finished, Leila's hands were flat on the table and Owen had stopped grinning. Diana said: "The room she sleeps in." She said it like she knew something. I looked at her. "The room Edith’s maid died in," Diana said. "Rose. That's the room." Iris had gone very still beside me. "There's something I haven't told you," Iris said. She said it to the table rather than to any of us specifically. Then she looked up and she looked at me. She said it carefully, in the way she had been saying careful things to me since we were sixteen with the precision of someone who measures the weight of words before she puts them down. She said that a few days before Evelyn disappeared before that night, before the party, before any of it she and I had been in the house together. That I had been hearing things. That I had not been sleeping well because of sounds at night that I couldn't explain. That we had decided, with the particular teenage logic of girls who believe they are braver than they are, to do something about it. "We held a séance," Iris said. Something moved in my chest. A door, not quite opening more like the handle turning. "In the house?" Leila said. "In the room upstairs." Iris looked at the table. "The one that " She didn't finish. She didn't need to. I opened my mouth, and the memory came back. Not everything. A fragment. An afternoon the sun bright outside the windows, which made the darkness inside worse somehow. The curtains drawn. Candles. The smell of sandalwood incense, thick and sweet and catching in the back of the throat. Iris's hands in mine, her palms sweaty. And then the sensation sudden and absolute and unmistakable that we were not alone in that room. "We asked if Edith was there," I said. My voice was very quiet. "We didn't really think anything would happen." Iris's grip on her wine glass tightened. "There was a feeling," she said slowly. "Like something was near us. You could almost feel it breathing." "I asked who was there," I said. "And then all the air went out of the room at once," Iris said. "A whoosh. And every candle went out." "Two of them fell over," I said. "And then " Iris stopped. Picked up her wine. Did not drink from it. Stared into it. The whole table was silent. Even Diana. I was the one who finished it. "On the mirror," I said. "There was a flash of words." The bar kept going around us. Someone laughed at the pool table. The jukebox played something with a beat. None of it touched the silence that had settled over this booth. "What did it say?" Leila breathed. Iris still couldn't speak. Her eyes had gone somewhere I recognised the same place my eyes went when I thought too carefully about that summer. And now I was back in the same house. I thought about Zara's empty eyes and her words “Why did you kill me?” I opened my mouth. The table leaned in. And I said what the mirror said. "It's coming." "Beware."