I lifted it carefully. Inside, the watercolours were soft and fading: a gold-dusted sun-child dancing through meadows, a silver moon-child drifting over shadowed fields. I didn’t remember her reading it to me—five is too young for memories to stick properly—but looking at the illustrations made my chest ache with a phantom nostalgia for a voice I couldn’t quite hear.
Dad filled the silence she left behind. He used to call me his “Little Sun”, tapping the golden girl on the page and swearing I had the same fire. It was a nickname that stuck long after I grew out of bedtimestories.
I turned to the verse my mother loved best—at least, that was what Dad always said.
“The first was a brilliance, like gold at the dawn,
She danced through the meadows and painted the morn.
The Dayfolk adored her; they called her their own?—
A sun-sparkle spirit, with laughter fully grown.”
A tightness gathered beneath my ribs. I closed the book gently. As I slid it back, something else caught my eye. A spine I’d never noticed before. Slim. Neat. Out of place among the dog-eared paperbacks.
I eased it free.
The Tides Beyond the Veil— by Liora Rowan.
My chest tightened. I ran my thumb over the silver lettering pressed into deep-blue linen. I knew she wrote, of course; Dad always told me about her time at the Ravenholt Archives, how she spent her days cataloguing the city’s history and her nights dreaming up her own. She loved inventing forgotten civilisations and sea myths, scribbling folklore into notebooks while the city slept.
But this one was new to the shelf. It must have found its way here after I moved out, perhaps when Eamon finally cleared out the boxes from the attic. It felt… private. Deliberate. Quietly beautiful in a way I wouldn’t have noticed as a kid.
I opened it. The pages were cream, rough-edged. I skimmed a passage.
“On the nights when the sea turned silver, some claimed the Aetherkind walked the tide-paths, figures shaped from mist and moonlight, appearing only when the world held its breath.”
Aetherkind.
Weird little word. It tasted like fantasy. The sort of thing she’d whisper in the dark to chase away nightmares—a gilded lie to make the world seem less sharp. I ran my thumb over the text. But even as I told myself it was just a story, the words felt significant, weighted with more than just ink.
I closed the book softly and slid it back between the others,hiding it away again. A silent fragment of a woman I barely knew—half-forgotten myths and quiet mysteries—tucked neatly into the room I once called mine.
The front door opened downstairs. Heavy footsteps echoed in the hall.
Eamon was home.
I stiffened. The peace of the room fractured. I had questions—about the case, about the twenty-year-old files, and the silence he’d kept. Faye’s slip at the station had opened a door I couldn’t unsee, and I wasn’t going to let the night end until I had the truth.
I pushedoff the bed and headed downstairs, each creak of the old wooden steps marking the descent into a conversation I already knew wouldn’t end well.
He was in the hallway, his back to me as he shrugged off his rain-soaked jacket. Even from behind, his broad, sturdy frame seemed to fill the narrow room, casting a shadow that swallowed the dim light of the corridor. He hung the thick coat on the hook with a weary slowness, then turned.
Exhaustion carved deep lines around his eyes, jaw set tight beneath a practical crop of salt-and-pepper hair.
“You’re home late,” he said, voice flat.
“So are you.” I leaned against the doorway, arms crossed.
His gaze swept over me in that old, clinical way—the cop stare that weighed and measured and catalogued. He saw the tension in my frame, the way I favoured my left side.
“We caught a bad one today,” I said. “Riverforge Docks.”
He brushed past me towards the kitchen and filled the kettle, the domestic ritual a barrier he put between us. “They’re all bad ones, Selene.”
“This was different.” I kept my eyes on his back, watching the tension gather across his spine. “A young woman. Calysteri. She wasdrained, Dad. Empty. No magic left, not even residue. Like someone hollowed her out.”
The kettle clicked on. He said nothing.
