Page 12 of Cracked Doll

I know this shape. I've seen it before — stitched into black veils, worked into iron gates on a poster still folded somewhere in my room.

Tucked beneath the pendant, a folded scrap of black paper, the writing on it silver, elegant, the same unmistakable hand from the photograph.

I’m going to take you home, and I'm going to glue you back together, piece by piece, until you fit my hands perfectly. You've spent seven years running from your own reflection, little doll — that ends the moment you're mine. No more running from yourself. You're my cracked doll now, and no one else will ever lay a finger on your porcelain skin again without my permission.

Beneath the words, embossed faintly into the corner of the paper, two words that make my stomach drop clean through the floor:

The Midnight Menagerie.

I stare at the handwriting, at the pendant, at the carnival's name sitting there in plain black and silver, and none of it arranges itself into anything I can make sense of. The man from my window. The man who left roses on my hallway floor. The coven with their veils and their fortune-telling riddles, their poster with this same grinning skull worked into iron. All of it, somehow, the same thread, pulled taut around me without my ever having agreed to be caught in it.

Did he see me break down? Does he know what's going on with me? Does he know what I'm afraid of?

But how could he know? No one else knows. Not even my Papa, who never cared enough to notice.

So he doesn't know, right? But he wrote reflection…? He mentioned seven years…?

A sharp knock at the shop door nearly stops my heart outright. I scramble to shove the necklace and the note back into the box, snap the lid shut, and shove the whole thing beneath the counter before I force my face into something that might pass for calm and go to open up for whoever's decided this is the moment to buy a toy.

By evening, I've checked the poster against the pendant a dozen times, in every spare moment the shop allows me, and the logo matches exactly. Skull. Roses. The same hand-inked flourish beneath.

The post arrives late — a stiff white envelope from the electric company, red-stamped across the front: FINAL NOTICE. I open it behind the counter with hands that have gone cold. The amount owed is more than I've made in the shop all week.

I'm still staring at the figure when my father comes down from the flat above, unsteady on the stairs, a fresh bottle already sweating in one hand.

"Give me the money," he says, not a greeting, barely even a sentence, just an order flung across the shop like a slap.

"Papa—" I hold the notice up, my voice thin. "It's the electric. It's a last notice, they'll cut us off if we don't—"

"I don't give a damn what they'll do." The words come out slurred, vicious, edged with curses I won't repeat even in my own head. "Give me the money, Ophelia."

"Please, just listen—"

He crosses the shop faster than a man that drunk has any right to move, and grabs my chin, forcing my face up toward his, and I go rigid, refusing to let my eyes lift any higher than his collar.

"A ghost doesn't get to lecture me about bills," he snarls. "You hear me? A ghost of Cordelia, a ghost of Rosalind, standing there in my shop with that same bloody baby face you've had since you were twelve years old — haven't you aged a day, Ophelia? Haven't you? Is that on purpose? Are you trying to haunt me? By just getting taller and bigger, but your face remains the same?" His grip tightens, cruel. "Well, I won't feel it. Do you understand me? Not one ounce of remorse. Not for you, not for them, not for any of it."

He shoves past me to the till before I can answer, wrenches it open hard enough to rattle the whole counter, and takes nearly everything inside, coins scattering, a few notes fluttering to the floor that he doesn't bother retrieving. “And you better stop looking at me with the same eyes as her. The eyes of pleading as though I am doing something wrong. I am not. And I will not feel guilty because you think I should!”

Her? Who is this her?

"I keep thinking I've buried this family twice over. Once wasn't enough for me, apparently,” he drunkly mutters to himself more than me.

He staggers toward the door, bumps the frame hard on his way out, curses at the wood itself as though it's personally wronged him, and is gone, the bell singing thin and mocking behind him.

I press the heel of my hand against my eyes, refusing to let another tear fall tonight, and that's when I hear it.

"Ow! — bloody hell, watch where you're — oh, it's just you, no offense taken, love."

Amara pushes through the door a moment later, rubbing her shoulder, throwing a dark look over her shoulder at the street where my father's already vanished. "Your Papa just about flattened me out there. Rude sod."

"Sorry," I manage.

She waves it off, already wandering the shop in a swirl of black lace and deliberately smudged goth eyeliner, dark lipstick, her curls pinned up with what looks suspiciously like a genuine antique hairpin she's lifted off my own shelf. "Honestly, half these toys look like they've got a ghost trapped inside them," she says, picking up a chipped tin soldier and turning it thoughtfully in the lamplight. "You could sell them as haunted and I promise you, sold out by morning."

"Do they?" I ask, before I can stop myself. "Have ghosts, I mean."

"No idea." Amara grins, delighted by the question. "You tell me. Isn't this the house where three people died? Two little girls and your mum, all under one roof?" She says it so lightly, so without malice, that it lands almost gently instead of cruel — an honest question, not an accusation.