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Something thumps against the wall to the right.

A flinch tugs my muscles. My pulse hastens.

Without much direction from my head, my feet guide me toward the doorless corridor, where the gold in the paisley seems to shimmer brighter, almost like lights against the red wallpaper.

Red. So much red.

Staring at it takes me back to an unbidden visual of the past.

With frantic strokes, my father runs a roller up and down the walls, mumbling and whimpering to himself.

“Daddy, what are you doing?”

Ignoring my question, he stretches the roller up toward the ceiling, and back down again.

“Are you okay?” I dare to ask again, fingers fidgeting, as the sight of him stirs an unsettling feeling in my stomach. It’s one of many strange behaviors in the last couple of months. Sometimes, he paces back and forth for hours, talking to himself. Other times, he’ll carry on like this. Two days ago, he went around sealing all the windows shut, and now, I can’t open the one in my bedroom. “Daddy?”

“Get away! Get away from here!” Eyes wide and crazed, he lurches toward me, drawing back the roller in his hand as if he might strike me with it.

On a gasp, I back myself to the bannister behind me, and my eyes shoot open to the emptiness of before. Nothing there but the red paisley wall.

Nothing there.

“He’s not there,” I mutter to myself. “There’s nothing there.”

Nothing but a dream.

A frigid emptiness settles in my chest, as I recall the last few months with him. How the warmth faded from his eyes. The laughter died. The way his focus shifted from me and the minutiae of everyday life, to his research. To the extent that I rarely saw him outside of his study, except for the odd little rituals, like the wallpapering, that left me questioning how much of his sanity had been spared.

I twist around and find Maw Maw still standing at the foot of the staircase, and something cold skitters across the back of my neck.

Don’t look away. The words of what I thought might’ve been the ghost of my mother, who visited me back at the cabin. No matter what.

Palms sweating, fingers fidgeting, I hesitate to turn back toward the corridor, terrified of what stands behind me.

But I do.

Partially cloaked in shadows, at the end of the hall, waits a spectral figure, whose slightly bent posture and form is vaguely familiar to me.

Goaded by both curiosity and uncertainty, I edge closer. “Daddy?”

When he lifts his gaze to mine, the recognition is instant. A warmth rushes over me, like the heat of the sun shining down on me. The knot in my stomach unwinds, my knees weaken.

The shine of tears in his eyes tears at my heart, and when he reaches out his arms for me, I collapse to my knees in front of him, allowing myself to be taken in by his embrace. A sob rips from my chest, and suddenly I feel everything again. All at once. Relief. Sadness. Joy. Pain.

All of it.

“I’m sorry, Sunshine,” he whispers in a shaky voice. “I really screwed things up.”

“It’s okay, Daddy.”

At a slight nudge against my cheek, I lift away from him, and push to my feet.

“Do you still have the key?” he asks.

“Yes. Of course. But I can’t find the door.”

“You can. You just refuse to see it, is all.” He points to the dark spot in the wall behind him. The one that I noticed before, but didn’t bother to examine closer.