Maman closed the book and looked at him seriously. “Ever seen what happens when you press too hard on a memory? It breaks into pieces. Some pieces sharp enough to cut.”
“You’re saying the mirrors would fracture.”
“I’m saying the memories would fracture. And anything holding them together—bonds, connections, the lines between one soul and another—those would fracture too.” She picked up the vault diagram. again. “The Church bought most of their work. Private collectors took the rest. And some—” She tapped the sketch. “—some got locked away in places like this.”
“Tell me about Lacroix & Sons Mirrorworks,” Bastien said.
Maman set down the sketch. “Old family. Glass trade going back to the 1720s. They made mirrors for churches. Sacred glass. The kind you put in a confession booth when you want to see yourself true.”
“And they disappeared.”
“1789. All of them, same night.” She paused, choosing her words. “Nobody knew where they went or why. The shop stood empty three years before the city sold it for back taxes.”
Bastien made notes in the margin of his sketch. The timeline matched Charlotte’s death, the period when her research had consumed her completely. “What makes glass sacred?”
“Intent.” Maman stood and crossed to her shelves, returning with a vial of amber liquid. “Lacroix mirrors weren’t made to just show what’s in front of them. They were made to remember it.”
She uncorked the vial and tilted three drops onto the altar sketch. The liquid spread across the paper, following lines Bastien hadn’t drawn.
Light flared from the page. Not heat. Just illumination with no source, revealing watermarks that formed words he’d never written.
Memory weighs more than glass. Confession leaves deeper marks than time.
The light faded. The liquid evaporated.
“Echo Imprints,” Maman said. “Memory fragments left in glass when strong emotion happens nearby. Most mirrors forget within hours. Sacred glass remembers forever.”
She crossed back to her shelves and selected a small hand mirror, its frame tarnished silver, its surface clouded with age. She brought it back to the table and set it between them.
“Mirrors don’t trap souls, mon cœur. They remember emotion.” Her fingers traced the mirror’s frame without touching the glass. “Like how wood holds the shape of hands that worked it, glass holds the shape of feelings directed at it.”
She held the mirror up to the lamplight. Bastien could see the cloudiness wasn’t dirt or deterioration—it was density. Layer upon layer of accumulated impression, emotion compressed into the glass itself over years of use.
“This one belonged to my grandmother,” Maman said. “She used it every morning for forty years. Same spot at her dressing table, same time before dawn. You know what’s in there?”
Bastien looked at the clouded surface and saw nothing unusual. Just old glass, reflecting lamplight and his own distorted features.
“Her hope,” Maman said quietly. “Every morning she’d look in this mirror and see herself and think about the day ahead. All that hope—forty years of it—soaked into the glass. You can feel it, if you know how.”
She offered him the mirror. “Try. Put your hand flat against the glass. Don’t look at it, just feel.”
Bastien took the mirror carefully. The frame was cool against his palm, the silver gone black in places where fingers had gripped it over decades. He pressed his hand to the glass surface.
Cold at first, then warming under his skin. Temperature equalizing as his body heat transferred through. And beneath that, something else. A vibration too subtle to be physical. Frequency that existed somewhere between sensation and sound. Emotion rendered into something his hand could detect without his brain understanding how.
Hope. The word came to him not as thought but as knowledge. Pure and uncomplicated. The kind of hope that woke up each morning believing today might be better than yesterday. That carried a person through decades of ordinary days, making each one significant simply by showing up for it.
He pulled away. The feeling lingered on his palm, warm and bright.
“That’s an Echo Imprint,” Maman said. “Harmless, most times. Beautiful, even. But the ones in that vault you found—those weren’t made from hope. They were made from confession. From secrets and grief and guilt spoken directly into glass that was designed to hold them forever.”
“Charlotte stood in front of those mirrors and told them everything.” Bastien set the hand mirror down, but he could still feel his grandmother’s hope against his skin. An echo of an echo. “More than confessing. She was building something.”
“She was sealing pieces of herself inside them. Memories, yes. But also will. Intent. The part of consciousness that makes decisions.” Maman set the hand mirror down carefully, reverently. “Someone is teaching the mirrors to remember differently now. Not just emotion, but intent. Will. Active thought instead of passive impression.”
“The mirrors in that vault were storing everything.”
“Not just storing. Holding it active.” She looked at him over her reading glasses. “Who did Charlotte love most?”
