"Yes."
"The melody is the sound the door makes." Julian said it flat, like he was reading a diagnosis. His hands lifted off the piano lid and he looked at them. "Every time I play it, I'm not just channeling a ghost's memory. I'm turning the key. I've been opening the door wider every time I sit down at this instrument."
The weight of that settled between us. Julian stared at his own fingers with an expression I hadn't seen on him before. It was the look of a musician realizing his instrument had been turned into a weapon, and that he'd been pulling the trigger for weeks.
"I could have stopped him," I said. "I watched him build a cage and I stepped inside it because I loved the way he held the key. Now that cage is this town, and all of you are caught in it with me."
The silence that followed was pressurized. Julian shifted, his shoulder brushing mine for a fraction of a second. The contact was electric, a grounding wire.
"Did you love him?" Julian asked quietly. "Even when you saw the salt on the floor? Even when the light started to change?"
"Yes," I whispered. "I loved him until there was nothing left of him to love. And even then, I loved the memory of who he used to be."
"Then how is this different?" Julian asked. His voice wasn't accusing. It was weary. "You're sitting here telling me you're a monster because you stayed. Because you looked at something broken and decided it was worth your time."
He turned toward me, his eyes steady. "I stayed with Rowan after he killed a man. I wasn't there when it happened. I didn't see the light go out. But I saw the blood on Rowan's hands when he came home. I saw the way he looked at me, like he was waiting for me to scream, for me to run."
I held my breath. I had known there was something in Rowan's past, but hearing Julian name it made the floor feel like it was tilting.
"I didn't stay because I was certain he was right," Julian said. "The town, the darkness, the corruption, it's all a justification after the fact. I stayed because I chose Rowan over certainty. I don't know if that's love or if it's the thing that broke me the first time, but I know what it feels like to sit next to someone who's done something terrible and decide they're still worth sitting next to."
Julian reached out, his fingers settling on the back of my hand. His skin was warm, a stark contrast to the permanent chill that seemed to follow me everywhere.
"We're all choosing the version of the truth we can live with, Oleander," he said. "Dominic opened a door, but you're the one standing in the threshold. You think you're the reason it's still open because of your guilt, but maybe you're also the only person in this town who knows how to close it."
He pulled his hand back and looked at the closed piano lid. He didn't open it. He just rested his palms flat on the wood, and I understood. He wasn't going to play. Not today. Not until he knew what the music was actually doing every time his fingers touched the keys. The instrument sat between us, beautiful and silent and suddenly dangerous.
"Julian," I said. "I'm sorry. For all of it."
"I know," he said. He didn't say it was okay, because it wasn't. But he didn't stand up either. He just sat there beside me on the narrow bench, his shoulder against mine, both of us looking at a piano that neither of us was ready to open.
twenty-six
THEO
The knocking was different this time. Light, uneven, carrying a weight that made the wood of my door groan before I even touched the handle. I knew it was Oleander.
I pulled the door open. Oleander stood there, looking like a man who had spent the last several hours losing an argument with himself. His hair was a mess of damp curls and his coat seemed to swallow the light around him. He looked exhausted. He looked like the only thing in this town that wasn't rotting in a spiral.
"Theo," he said. Just my name.
I stepped back to let him pass. The air he brought with him was colder than the draft coming through the window frames, smelling faintly of old paper and sandalwood.
He stopped dead in the center of the living room. I watched his back go rigid as he took in the transformation of my space.
The walls were gone. Or rather, the paint was gone, buried under layers of glossy prints and matte contact sheets. Hundreds of them. I'd used red twine and pushpins, mapping the anomalies of Hollow Vale like a detective hunting a killer who didn't exist in three dimensions. Photos of the sinking church. Photos of the way the shadows pooled under the pier. And, more than anything else, photos of the silhouettes, the dark shapes that shouldn't have been in the frame but always were.
"You've been busy," Oleander whispered. He walked toward the wall, his fingers hovering inches away from a shot of the abandoned schoolhouse. In the corner of the window, a dark blur shaped like a man stood watching the camera.
"It's a puzzle," I said, leaning against the doorframe. "I'm an artist, Oleander. I document things. I find the patterns. That's what I do when things get loud."
He turned to look at me. "It's not a puzzle, Theo. It's a barricade. You're building a wall of paper so you don't have to look at what's actually standing in the room with you."
I laughed, but it sounded brittle. "I'm looking at everything. That's the whole point of the twine, Oleander. It's all connected. The way the buildings lean, the way the fog sits, the way your husband's ghost seems to have a favorite bench in the park."
Oleander stepped toward me. Then another step. He didn't stop until he was in my space, until the heat radiating from him was the only thing fighting the cold of the apartment. He reached out and touched my chest, right where my camera usually hung from its strap. The strap was there, but the camera was on the table behind me.
"Put the camera down, Theo," he said.
