Her fingers brush my knuckles. It’s not enough to matter to anyone with sense. It’s enough to matter to me.
“Did you ever regret it?” she asks. “Staying here all this time? Alone, even after my grandmother passed?”
“Some days,” I say. “But the longer I stayed, the more the house stopped feeling like something to fix. And the more I started feeling like something it had decided to keep.”
Her gaze flicks to the fire. “That sounds nice.”
“It was,” I say. “It is. But it took time. Longer than I’d like to admit. And it didn’t come from fighting what this place is. When it started softening around me, letting me belong in ways I never expected, it felt like proof that staying was the only choice I could live with.”
She nods once. A small motion, barely there. Like if she moves too much, she’ll fall apart completely. Her hand is still close to mine. I don’t touch it, but I don’t pull away, either.
“I thought leaving was the only choice I could live with.”
“You were only eighteen then.”
“I was stubborn.”
“You still are.”
She grants me that with a small, tired smile. “You’re not exactly a walk in the park yourself.”
We sit with the quiet until it thickens. A breeze rattles the windowpanes, and Elsie pulls the blanket higher over her knees.
“Earlier, you spoke of the house like it was a person,” she says softly. “Do you think this place truly has a heart of its own? That it feels things, too. I mean, that it’s not just enchanted by magic but ... fully sentient?”
I nod once. “Elspeth, all the Hart women—they poured so much of themselves into these walls. I know it remembers. I know it feels. Despite its dormancy, it’s always listening. And it’d be foolish to pretend otherwise.”
She folds her hands. “The thought of that scares me.”
“Because you don’t believe it?”
“Because I’m starting to,” she says, and the honesty of it pulls something in my chest. “And believing it means acknowledging I left a place that’s etched into my marrow, carved there by all the women who came before me. A place that may have truly loved me in the way that only a living thing can. I don’t know what to do with that, either.”
I don’t have a clean answer. I don’t think there is one.
I look at the hearth until the heat needles my cheeks. I think of Elspeth in this chair, knitting cratered wool into serviceable blankets, telling me stories she pretended were about the town but were really about how to stay.
“You were a kid,” I say. “Kids leave.”
What I don’t say is that now she’s back—and trying to get rid of the house—that’s the real betrayal. She’s grown. There’s no excuse for walking away now. But calling her on it would break the one rule I’ve set for myself.
Her laughter is soft, a little bitter. “You just don’t want the house to hear you call me a traitor.”
“I don’t want the house to hear the parts we don’t mean,” I say. “Or the parts we do and can’t take back.”
As we fall quiet, Hemingway appears. He makes a slow circuit of the rug, taps one paw against my boot like a salute, then hops up onto the ottoman between us and settles in.
Elsie reaches out without thinking and rubs under his chin. The purr starts up slow, a little machine humming to life, and then swells until it fills the room like another presence.
“You really thought he was gone?”
“I didn’t let myself think about him at all,” she says. “Same as the rest of it.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
“It’s not,” she says with the ghost of a smile. “Not even a little.”
I take a sip of the tea she nudged toward me. It’s gone lukewarm, the cinnamon settled at the bottom like silt. I drink it anyway. The flavor reminds me of Elspeth’s kitchen and of this morning and of how steady Elsie’s hands were when she re-wrapped my bandage.
