"You’re cold," Theo whispered, his gaze dropping to my mouth for a fraction of a second before returning to my eyes. "You shouldn't be this cold, Oleander. Not in this light."
"I've been cold for a long time," I said, the honesty of it surprising me.
"Well," Theo said, his thumb grazing the inside of my wrist, a slow, deliberate movement that made my breath hitch. "We’ll have to do something about that. This town is good at a lot of things, but it’s terrible at keeping people warm. You have to find your own heat here."
He let go of my wrist, but the ghost of the touch remained, a burning line of sensation that felt like a brand. He started talking again, something about the aperture settings and the way the sun was about to dip behind the old clock tower, but I wasn't listening.
I was thinking about the shape in the shadow, about the way his hand had felt like a rescue. And I was thinking about Liliana, miles away in a city that made sense, while I stood in a town that was trying to teach me how to breathe in the dark. I didn't look back at the church as we started walking toward the center of town. I didn't want to know if the shadow-man from the photo was standing in the doorway, watching me leave.
We reached the corner where the main street began, the sky slowly turning into a deep purple. Theo stopped, his camera bag shifting against his hip. He looked at me, and for a moment, the playful detachment was gone.
"I'm going to the diner to edit these," he said, gesturing toward the camera. "You should come by. Or don't. But the coffee is decent, and the light in there is much more predictable than the light out here."
"I might," I said, which we both knew meant I would.
"See you around, Oleander," he said, a small, knowing smirk playing on his lips. "Try to stay in the sun while it's still here. The shadows are much hungrier after four o'clock."
He turned and walked away, leaving me standing on the sidewalk with the taste of woodsmoke on my tongue and a heatin my wrist that refused to fade. I watched him go until he disappeared into the deepening mist of the next block. I was alone again, but the silence felt different now. It felt like an invitation.
six
JULIAN
The piano bench was too cold. It shouldn't have been, not after I'd been sitting on it for twenty minutes, but the chill in the bar didn't care about body heat. It felt like it was coming from the floorboards, a slow, rising frost that seeped through the wood and into my marrow. I rested my fingers on the keys without pressing down, feeling the fake ivory, plastic made to look expensive, slick under my sweat. This was the ritual. The pre-set silence before I let the noise back in.
My left hand twitched. It was a muscle memory I hadn't authorized, a subconscious urge to reach for a specific chord. I knew the shape of it. A minor ninth that felt like a bruised rib. For three days, this melody had been pacing the cage of myskull, a restless, rhythmic thing that didn't have a name. I didn't recognize the composer. I didn't recognize the era. It just felt like a signal bleeding through from a different frequency, a song that had already been playing in the room before I arrived.
I forced my hands back to the center of the keyboard, running through the scales of the first piece on my setlist. I needed control tonight because the air in Hollow Vale felt thinner than usual, like the town was holding its breath.
Rowan had told me about him two nights ago, saying it like he was reporting something that had happened to him rather than something he'd chosen, which was how I knew it mattered. Our rules had always been simple: don't lie, don't bring it home, don't let it matter more than us. Rowan wasn't lying. But the way he'd said the name, like he was handling something fragile, that was new.
The bar was starting to fill, the low hum of voices blending into the clink of glassware and the muffled thud of the front door opening and closing. People didn't come here to talk; they came here to be alone together. It was a cemetery for the living, and I was the one who provided the eulogies.
I took a breath, the air tasting of stale beer and that sweet, unidentifiable scent that always hung over main street, and I began. My fingers moved with a precision I'd spent years perfecting at the conservatory, before the lights became too bright and the expectations became a ceiling I couldn't stop hitting my head against.
Here, in the dim red glow of the bar, I could just be the sound. I watched the dust motes dance in the amber light of the floor lamps, and for a moment, the world was just math and vibration.
Halfway through the second piece, the frequency shifted. I felt it before I saw him, a change in the room's pressure, like a window had been left open in a storm. My gaze drifted toward the bar, and that's when I saw the man. He was sitting alone,hunched over a glass of whiskey like it was the only thing keeping him upright, with dark curly hair that looked like he'd been running his hands through it for hours.
Something cold moved through my chest. I didn't know his face, but I knew the shape Rowan had described, brown eyes that seemed to be looking through me.
I could see the way his throat moved when he swallowed, the way his fingers tightened around the glass until his knuckles went white. He looked like he was witnessing a disaster in slow motion, or maybe he was the disaster himself.
My hands almost faltered. I hit a grace note too hard, the sound jarring against the quiet of the room, but he didn't blink. I'd seen a lot of broken things in Hollow Vale, but this man looked like he was made of glass that had already shattered and was just waiting for someone to move the pieces. I finished the set with a flourish I didn't feel, the final chord hanging in the air, vibrating until it was nothing more than a memory.
The silence that followed felt like a held breath. I stood up and walked toward the bar. I should have gone to the back and waited for the second set, but the melody in my head was pulling me toward him.
I sat two stools away. Ten minutes passed before either of us spoke.
"That was beautiful," he said, his voice barely above a whisper.
I turned my head. His voice had the same timbre as the melody I'd been hearing for three days. It was like hearing the lyrics to a song I'd only known as a tune.
"Thank you," I said. "Most people just use it as background for their drinks."
"It didn't feel like background," he replied. He finally looked at me, and the depth of the exhaustion in his eyes made my chest ache. "It felt like... an autopsy. Like you were taking things apart that I thought were hidden."
I felt a strange, sharp pull in my gut. I noticed the small scar on the back of his left hand, my gaze then dropping to his fingers. He wasn't wearing a wedding ring, but there was a faint, pale mark on his finger where one used to be.
