“Might need help,” she added weakly.
“I’ve got her,” My dad said, his voice thick.
Heavy footfalls, careful ones, creaked on the stairs. Keegan moved aside to make room. I held my breath.
Miora appeared first, one hand white-knuckled on the rail, the other clinging to my dad’s arm. She looked small and ancient and fierce all at once, like a tree that had outlived too many storms. Her eyes were already brimming.
Behind her, Karvey ducked down enough to peer in, staying on the last few steps where the ceiling was highest. The light traced along his stone shoulders, making him look like he’d been carved out of moonrock.
Miora’s gaze swept the chamber once and then locked on Elira.
For a heartbeat, both women just stared.
Decades of separation, wars, curses, sealed doors, closed secrets compressed into that single instant.
“About time,” Miora croaked.
Elira’s face crumpled into a smile that nearly broke me.
“You look terrible,” she said fondly. “Come here.”
Miora tottered forward. For a second, I thought irrationally that the ghostliness would stop them from touching.
It didn’t.
Elira’s hands were solid enough when they closed around Miora’s. Their fingers laced, old knuckles bumping. Light flickered where they met, not harsh, just a soft nimbus, like a memory made visible.
Miora let out a breath that sounded like forty years of grief leaving her lungs.
“I told you,” Elira said, voice shaking now too. “I told you I’d find a way.”
“You always did,” Miora whispered. “Usually the most annoying way possible.”
“True,” Elira said. “You see this one?” She tipped her head toward me without looking away from Miora. “She’s worse.”
“Rude,” I said, though my voice was cracking. “I am right here.”
“Good,” Grandma Elira replied. “You should hear it.”
A heavier step sounded. My dad emerged from the stairwell and just… stopped, hand still braced on the wall.
For a moment, he didn’t look like my middle-aged, half-cursed father. He looked younger, eyes round, shoulders not yet bowed by guilt and bulldog years. A boy, seeing his mother.
“Mom?” he said.
It was small. Raw.
Elira turned. The light softened around her.
“Oh, Frank,” she breathed. “Come here, my love.”
He crossed the room in three strides and swept her into a hug that somehow worked, despite her edges being made of light and his being made of stubborn human grief. For a second his arms went through her, then her form thickened, condensing, making itself match him.
He clung, burying his face in her shoulder like he was eight again.
“You, I thought you,” he started.
“I know,” she soothed, fingers threading through his hair exactly the way I’d dreamed she might have once. “I’m sorry for that part. But there was no good way to say ‘I might become part ghost, part Ward, part rumor or worse of all, part nothing.’”
