The phrasing landed wrong. She hadn't said the people or the neighbors. She had said the town, and she’d said it as if it were a person, a subject with its own set of lungs and a very long memory. A chill ran down my spine as I turned away, pretending to scan the shelves, my heart doing a slow, heavy thud against my ribs.
I picked up a used paperback with a broken spine, some gothic mystery I’d likely never read. I just needed to hold something. Holding a book made any room feel less like a cage and more like a library. I paid her in cash, and she watched me leave with an expression that felt far too much like pity.
Back at the apartment, the silence was still waiting for me. I sat on the edge of the sofa, the book unopened in my lap, and looked at the box of Dominic’s papers sitting on the coffee table. I’d moved it from my trunk to the floor to the table, still avoiding that part of my life.
But with the cardboard staring at me, there wasn’t much else to do than open it. The cardboard groaned as I pulled back the flaps. On top were the expected things: legal deeds for the property, a lease agreement, utility receipts. I picked up the lease. My fingers went cold. It was dated three years ago.
Dominic had owned this place for three years. We had been married for five. That meant for three years, he had been coming here, keeping this life, this entire city, a secret. He’d told me he was on business trips. He’d told me he was visiting his mother in Connecticut. He had looked me in the eye and lied while he held the keys to this room in his pocket.
I looked at my left hand. The ring had come off at the funeral. Liliana had slid it from my finger while I stood at the casket, too numb to protest. She'd said wearing a dead man's ring was a tether I didn't need. I'd put it in the box with his papers and hadn't touched it since, though my finger still remembered the weight of it.
I dug deeper, my movements becoming frantic, a desperate search for an explanation that wouldn't hurt. At the bottom of the box, tucked under a stack of tax forms, was a notebook. It was thick, leather-bound, the cover scarred with deep scratches. I recognized it immediately. It was the one he used to keep in his library, the one he’d snap shut the second I walked into the room.
I opened the first page. The handwriting was Dominic’s, but it wasn't the elegant, flowing script he used for birthday cards. It was dense and cramped, the ink bleeding into the paper. The words weren't English. Or if they were, they were buried inside symbols I didn't recognize, harsh, jagged lines that looked like teeth. Page after page of it, thousands of characters written with a manic precision that made my head ache.
It didn't look like he was writing a journal. It looked like he was copying something down. A transcription. I could almost see him, hunched over his desk at three in the morning, his eyes bloodshot, his hand cramping as he tried to capture every stroke of a language that didn't belong to the living.
I closed the notebook, the leather feeling oily against my palms. I stood up and walked to the closet, shoving the box ontothe top shelf and slamming the door. My hands shook as I went to the kitchen and poured a glass of bourbon, the liquid burning a path down my throat that I welcomed. Anything to numb the realization that I hadn't known my husband at all.
Something out of the corner of my eye stole my attention, the shadows seemingly thickening, turning into something that looked almost solid. They seemed to pulse with a slow, rhythmic attention, watching me from the dark.
I didn't look at them directly. If I didn't acknowledge the shadows, they weren't real. If I didn't read the notebook, the secrets didn't exist.
three
OLEANDER
It felt like someone or something was sitting in the velvet armchair in the corner of the living room, legs crossed, fingers steepled, watching me with the infinite patience of a predator waiting for its prey to stop twitching. Every time I turned my head, the air seemed to settle, as if a presence had just shifted out of my line of sight.
I couldn't stay there. The leather-bound notebook I’d found earlier sat on the kitchen table, its manic symbols and Dominic’s cramped, feverish handwriting humming with a frequency I could feel in my teeth. I grabbed my coat and fled, the heavy brass key biting into my palm as I locked the door against the silence that no longer felt silent.
The streets of Hollow Vale weren't an improvement. After a day of being here, the eeriness of the town felt worse, almost heavier than when I arrived. I walked toward the center of the grid, until I saw the dark wood facade of the bar. I pushed open the old door, heat hitting me first, followed by a scent that was both sweet and heavy, like rotting lilies and expensive tobacco.
It was dim inside, lit by amber and red lamps that made the dust motes look like sparks of fire. A piano sat on a low platform in the far corner, its lid closed and the bench empty, but the air around it felt expectant, as if the wood were vibrating with songs it hadn't yet been allowed to play. It was really beginning to worry me that everything felt... alive here. I went straight to the bar and climbed onto a stool that felt too high, my feet dangling like a child’s.
"Whiskey," I said to the bartender. "Neat. The strongest one you have."
He poured a glass of something amber and pushed it toward me. I drank half of it in one go, the liquid searing a path down my throat. It was exactly what I needed. I wanted the edges of the world to blur until the memory of Dominic’s handwriting was just a smudge of ink in the back of my mind.
By the third glass, the tension in my shoulders had started to dissolve into a dull, manageable ache. The room felt softer, the voices of the few other patrons blending into a low, oceanic hum. I let my gaze wander, cataloging the bottles behind the bar, the way the light pooled on the polished mahogany, and then my eyes snagged on the far end of the room. He was sitting in the deepest shadow, a man who seemed to be made of different material than the rest of the world.
He wasn't moving. Everyone else in the bar was shifting, leaning into conversations, checking phones, or tapping fingers against glass, but he was a statue. He was big, broad-shouldered and solid, with long, dark hair that fell past his shoulders andobscured half of his face. A beard, thick and shot through with silver at the edges, covered a jaw that looked like it had been carved from granite. He wore a heavy dark coat thrown over what appeared to be a bare chest, or perhaps a shirt unbuttoned nearly to the waist, revealing skin that looked weathered and tough.
He was holding a glass of dark liquid, but he wasn't drinking. He was just... being. And the shadows around him were wrong. They didn't fall away from him; they clung to him, dense and ink-black, pooling across his shoulders and down his arms as if the dark were a physical garment he had chosen to wear. I stared, the whiskey having stripped away the layer of my brain that usually cautioned me against looking too closely at dangerous things.
He felt it. The weight of my gaze must have been a physical pressure, because he looked up. His eyes caught the red light from a nearby lamp, and for a second, they looked like polished glass, pale green or grey, sharp enough to cut through the gloom.
He studied me with the unhurried, predatory attention of someone who had just decided the rest of the room no longer mattered. I should have turned back to my drink. I should have looked at my hands, at the bar, at anything else. But I was trapped in the gravity of those eyes, and I couldn’t look away.
Then, he moved. It was a fluid, deliberate motion, surprisingly graceful for a man of his size. He picked up his untouched glass and stood, crossing the bar with a stride that suggested the crowd was merely a minor inconvenience he chose to ignore. He didn't stop until he reached the stool beside mine, sitting down so close that I could feel the heat radiating off him.
He smelled of cedar, woodsmoke, and something darker, more metallic underneath, the scent of cold earth and old iron. I could see the pulse in his neck, the way his hair was matted and wild.He set his glass on the bar and stared at the reflection of the amber lights in the dark wood.
"You look like you came here to make a bad decision," he said. His voice was a low, resonant rumble that I felt in my bones more than I heard with my ears.
I didn't answer. He finally turned his head, those pale, piercing eyes pinning me in place. The silver in his beard caught the light, making him look older and more ancient than what I assumed was his early thirties. "You smell like cold rooms and old grief," he said. "You smell like things that should have stayed buried."
I tightened my grip on my glass, the condensation slick against my palm. "I'm just living there. It was left to me. I didn't ask for any of... whatever this is."
