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A shadow moves across the far wall. Slow. Twitching. Like it hasn’t decided what it wants to be.

My eyes blur. The bleach stings. Or maybe that’s tears.

I don’t remember crying.

I don’t cry.

I spin around, nothing. Just empty space. The smell of smoke and fire.

I turn back.

Kerr’s face is in the stain.

Just for an instant.

Split down the center. Eyes wide. Mouth open mid-scream, the kind that never leaves your bones.

I blink and it’s gone. Just foam. Just wood.

“Shut up,” I whisper to the stain. To my head. To all of it.

I stand. Stretch. My back spasms from the hours hunched over, but I ignore it. The shed looks clean. Too clean. Surface-clean. Not good enough. I grab the blowtorch from the wall and light it. The flame hisses to life, blue, pure, unforgiving. I run it over the workbench, slow and steady. The wood blackens. Pops. Cracks. Smoke curls upward. A scream curls with it.

No.

Not real.

Not now.

I press my hand to the wall to steady myself. My breath comes back in ragged pieces, pulled from somewhere deep. It’s over. They’re dead. I killed them. The shed settles around me again. The scream fades. The face disappears.

I’m here.

I’m in my body.

And I’m still in control.

I kill ghosts.

I don’t listen to them.

The wood beneath the flame is charred now. The stain is gone, burned away, molecule by molecule. I turn off the torch. The silence presses in again. But this time, it doesn’t press back.

The PI is still out there. My father is still watching. But I’m calm now. Grounded. Clean.

For now.

Outside, the pigs greet me with angry grunts, their pink snouts poking through the slats of the pen. They know it’s feeding time, and they don’t like being ignored.

“Hold on,” I mutter, wiping my hands on my jeans.

The pen is a mess. White flecks of bones are scattered in the mud, their jagged edges gleaming against the dark muck. I curse under my breath and grab a rake, pulling the remains into a pile. My stomach churns as I sift through the filth, searching for anything identifiable, a tooth, a shard of bone too large to have passed through a pig.

Once the pen is clear, I move to the pile of dung in the corner. The pigs’ digestive systems are efficient, but not perfect. I sift through the muck with a grim determination, pulling out fragments of bone and anything else that might betray me.

The smell is overwhelming, a sickening mix of manure and decay that clings to my clothes and hair. I shovel the muck into a wheelbarrow and haul it to the fire pit at the edge of the property.

“Sorry, boys and girls,” I say, glancing back at the pigs. They’re still squealing, pacing the edges of the pen. “You’ll eat later.”