Chapter Seventeen: A Locket of Ghosts
The food on the table had long grown cold. I hadn't touched it.
Instead, I lay curled on my side, one hand pressed over my own sternum, as if I could feel the ghost of a locket that wasn't there. My fingers pressed into my skin, searching for the sharp, cool edge of gold. All they found was the thin cotton of his shirt and the frantic beat of my own heart.
There was no locket.
There never had been one in this room. The gold was a phantom, the photograph a trick of a desperate mind. Yet the feel of it lingered—a perfect, circular weight against my palm, the slight pinch of a stubborn clasp, the two small faces smiling from another lifetime.
A tremor passed through me. I closed my eyes, trying to force the memory to solidify, but it only grew more slippery. Was it a memory, or a story I'd told myself to feel less alone?
The harder I tried to see her face, the more it dissolved into light, a silhouette backlit by a sun I could no longer feel.
And then, like a wound reopening, the sensation—not the memory, but the feeling—came rushing back.
---
I was small again, the feeling of damp earth and crushed grass under my bare knees. The sun was a physical warmth on the back of my neck.
"Come on, slowpoke!"
The voice was bright, a laugh woven through it. Not an echo, but a resonance in my bones. I could feel a hand, smaller than mine now but bigger then, tugging me forward. The certainty of that grip. The trust.
We tumbled, a dizzying whirl of sky and green, landing in a puff of dandelion seeds. Giggles, breathless and tangled, mine and hers.
Lying on my back, staring at endless blue: "Let's never grow up."
A shift beside me. A shadow falling over my face, cool and kind. "When we grow up, let's never get married. Just live together forever in a big house with a garden."
A grin stretched my cheeks. "Deal."
The promise shimmered, palpable as a soap bubble. Then, like a ripple across water, the image wavered. The feeling of her beside me remained, but her face… I reached for it in my mind and grasped sunlight. And air.
I sat up in the dark room, gasping. I fumbled for a pen that wasn't there, on a desk I didn't have, needing to etch the sensation into something real.
Diary Entry That Never Was:
Ran barefoot. She was faster. The sun got stuck in her hair. She promised me a house for all our laughter. I hope it's true.
---
Another wave, this one a different texture. The feeling of sitting cross-legged, spine straight, scalp tingling. Not pain, but a gentle, persistent tugging. Fingers, deft and warm, weaving through my hair.
"Hold still. You're worse than a restless cat."
A mock pout from me. No movement. The tug and pull was rhythm, was safety. The separation of strands, the weaving together.
"Why do you always braid it?"
"Because you look adorable. And because I don't want you to look like you've been rolling in mud."
A giggle bubbled up. My hand lifted in the dark room now, touching my own loose, tangled hair. The ghost of a ribbon at the end of a braid.
Diary Entry That Never Was:
She braided my hair today. Her hands were a promise. I felt held together by them. I hope I can be her anchor someday too.
---
The illusions came faster, senseless but vivid. The pressure of a spoon against my lips, the taste of warm, bland rice. The sound of my own stubborn grumbling, met with a tone of affectionate tyranny.
"Eat, or I'll shove it in myself."
The surrender. The chewing. The focused scratching of a pen on paper, somehow easier because I was being fed.
"You're ridiculous."
"You're welcome."
Diary Entry That Never Was:
She feeds me when I forget to eat. She sees the hollow spaces before I feel them. This is love, I think. The kind that keeps you alive.
---
Steam. The smell of clean skin and something floral. The cold, hard press of a bathroom counter beneath me. A different touch on my face—cool, slick, smoothing over my cheeks.
"Hold still. You'll thank me when you're older."
"I don't like it. It's sticky."
Laughter. A dot of cool on the tip of my nose.
"Beauty is pain, darling."
"Then I don't want beauty!"
Then, hands cradling my face. Not my mother's hands. Hers. The world narrowing to that touch.
"Too late," a whisper, softer than the steam. "You're already beautiful."
Diary Poem That Never Was:
Her palms framed my face,
a temporary halo.
She called me beautiful,
and for a second,
the mirror believed her.
---
The cascade was breaking me. Chasing. Being carried. Whispered stories in the dark that held monsters at bay. A thousand moments of care, a scaffolding built around a small, fragile soul.
And the promise, the constant refrain, the foundational myth of my childhood:
"When we grow up…"
"Our house will have…"
"Promise me you won't forget."
I had promised. I knew I had. The weight of that broken vow was heavier than any phantom locket.
But who had I promised?
A name. I needed a name. A face.
I squeezed my eyes shut, pushing against the blank wall in my mind. A letter… it started with… A? Ar? Something like… sh? Ar-ah? It dissolved like sugar in water.
I jolted upright in the bed, a raw, dry sob tearing from my throat.
The room was bitterly real. The cold plate of food. The oppressive silence of the mansion. The scent of him lingering on the sheets.
The locket was an illusion. The diary was an illusion. The sister was an illusion.
But the ache was not. The profound, shaping love I remembered—the love that had taught me what care was supposed to feel like—that was real. It had to be. It was the bedrock under the quicksand.
I looked down at my empty, trembling hands. They had held the illusion of gold. They had braided illusionary hair. They had clung to an illusionary sister.
Was I insane? Had the trauma shattered me so completely that I was now weaving a comforting past from whole cloth?
Or was the truth worse?
What if the memories were real, but I was the illusion? What if the girl in those sun-drenched fields, the one who was loved so fiercely, had been someone else altogether, and I was just a ghost wearing her feelings?
A cold deeper than any the mansion could conjure seeped into my bones.
The door opened silently. He stood there, a shadow framed in light from the hall, watching me. He saw the tears, the trembling, the empty, grasping hands.
He didn't speak. He didn't need to. His eyes held a knowing, a deep, unsettling understanding that saw the phantom locket, heard the echo of laughter, witnessed the shattering of a past I couldn't even prove existed.
In that moment, I wasn't sure which was more terrifying: the beautiful, fragile illusions crumbling in my mind, or the solid, dangerous man in the doorway who seemed to be the only real thing left in the world.