Page 5 of Cracked Doll

The scream that tears out of me doesn't sound human.

I shove him away — hard enough that he stumbles back against the cupboard — and I run. I don't remember the stairs. I don't remember the hallway. I remember the door to my room slamming behind me and my knees giving out somewhere between the threshold and the bed.

My chest won't work properly. I'm gasping, but no air seems to land anywhere useful, each breath shallower and faster than the last until I'm lightheaded, until the edges of the room start to swim and darken at the corners. My hands are shaking so hard I can't make a fist, can't grip the floorboards, can't do anything except claw uselessly at my own arms as if I could physically climb out of my skin and leave it behind me on the floor.

Not real. Not real. It's not real, it's not them, they're gone, they're gone, they're—

My heart is a fist slamming itself bloody against my ribs. Sound stops making sense — my father's voice from downstairs, still shouting, dissolves into something wordless and roaring, indistinguishable from the blood pounding in my own ears. My vision tunnels down to a single point of light from the streetlamp outside, swimming, doubling, and for one horrific moment I see two small shapes standing at the edge of it, black hair, pale eyes, watching —

I squeeze my eyes shut so hard colors burst behind the lids. My whole body curls in on itself, forehead pressed to the floorboards, arms wrapped around my knees, rocking, just slightly, the way I haven't done since I was twelve years old and a nurse held me down on a hospital bed and told me it was safe now, it was over now, when it has never once, not for a single day since, felt over.

I don't know how long I stay like that. Long enough that the shaking eventually slows. Long enough that my breath, ragged and wet, starts finding some kind of rhythm again. Long enough that the cold of the floor seeps all the way into my bones and I stop minding it, because at least the cold is real, at least the cold is mine, and not some pale reflection of a face that isn't supposed to exist anymore.

Eventually, I stop fighting it, and let the floor hold what's left of me.

October 3rd 2026.

Happy birthday, Ophelia.

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Chapter 2

I clean the kitchen before I do anything else.

The pot's dented where it hit the floor last night; I set it back on its hook regardless, sweep up a shard of glass from a bottle I don't remember breaking, wipe the table down until the wood shows through the grime of last night's dinner. My father is upstairs, sleeping off whatever's left of him. I found him at dawn slumped against the bottom stair, and I did what I always do — got my shoulder under his arm, walked him the rest of the way up, put him to bed like he's the child and I'm the parent, which, in every way that matters, is exactly what we are to each other now.

I don't look at him while I do it. I never do, on mornings like this. Some kindnesses are easier to give a person when you can't see their face.

By the time I unlock the shop's front door, the sun's climbed high enough to burn the last of the mist off the harbor, and I have exactly one goal: get through today.

The Tin Heart doesn't have real windows, not the kind that show you the street outside the way an ordinary shop would. Years ago — before I was old enough to remember it happening — my father had the front glass treated, some old trick with silvering and a particular slant to the pane, so that from inside, the glass swallows light instead of throwing it back. You can see out. The street sees in. But stand close and look straight at it and you'll find nothing looking back at you — no ghost of your own face hovering over the display of dolls, no accidental mirror to catch you unaware while you're meant to be working. I've never asked him why he had it done that way. I've always suspected, somewhere under the drink and the grief, some part of him understood exactly what I'd need before I ever needed it.

It's the only kindness this building has ever given me without my having to ask twice.

I spend the morning setting up the front display — new stock from Aldridge's, the wire and pigment and glass eyes I fetched yesterday, now sorted into their proper drawers — and I've just finished arranging a shelf of restored porcelain dolls, their faces gleaming and whole again under my hands, when the bell above the door rings.

Six women walk in.

They move together, in step, like something choreographed rather than accidental — long black dresses, high-collared, decades out of fashion in a way that makes even my own wardrobe look almost modern by comparison. Veils cover them from crown to collarbone, a fine black lace patterned with skulls and roses, thick enough that I can't make out a single feature beneath.

"Hello, Ophelia Sorrell," they say. Together. One voice out of six mouths, layered and strange, like an echo arriving before the sound that made it.

I stay very still behind the counter.

"Do you welcome us," one of them asks — alone, this time, though I couldn't say which, then another finishes — "to The Tin Heart?"

I find myself staring, and for one unguarded second I realize I'm actually looking at them — at the shapes of their veiled faces, the place their eyes should be — and nothing happens. No flicker of glass, no accidental reflection. Just black lace and, beneath it, when one tilts her head just so, skin so pale it looks bloodless, and hands folded at their waists with nails grown long and dark as claws.

"You're welcome," I manage. "Were you — looking for a toy?"

"Curious," they say, all six at once, and then, one at a time, the words passed hand to hand down the line like a coin:

"Your aura—"

"—has been displaced."

"Fractured."