The world kept moving, indifferent to the way hers had shattered.
Cars rolled past on familiar streets. Neighbors who once whispered her name now stared too long before pretending not to. People invented stories — comforting stories, digestible stories — because the truth was too jagged for anyone to swallow.
Annabelle stood alone in her childhood bedroom, the late afternoon sun spilling weak gold across the faded wallpaper. Dust floated lazily in the beams, moving like suspended ash. The walls were still painted lilac, the color she had insisted on at sixteen, though the edges had begun to peel. Everything felt smaller now, as though the room hadn't waited for her but shrank in her absence.
She faced the mirror above her dresser.
A girl looked back — but not the girl who had disappeared ten years ago.
Her once long, wavy hair was now uneven, cut at the shoulders with a roughness that didn't belong to scissors. Her skin had a pale undertone that wasn't sickness but something… colder, like moonlight permanently brushed across her bones. Beneath her eyes, faint shadows clung like fingerprints left by something that didn't quite let go.
And on her right wrist, faint indentations circled her skin — not scars, but the shape of vines that had once held her with gentle, merciless purpose. When she moved her hand, they glimmered for a heartbeat, like something ancient still recognized her.
Annabelle lifted trembling fingers and touched the glass.
Her reflection didn't feel like her.
She didn't feel like her.
A whisper brushed her ear—not a voice, but the memory of one.
Soft.
Breaking.
"Don't make me live without you."
Her breath hitched — her chest tightening as though the words themselves pressed a palm against her lungs.
Her sister's voice.
Alive and raw and still in the world.
Annabelle's eyes stung as she shook her head.
"No," she whispered, her voice cracking at the edges. "Not now. Please… I can't—"
The room fell into silence.
But it was not the silence of emptiness.
It was the silence of something listening.
The kind that made every hair on her arms rise.
The kind that felt like someone exhaled gently against the back of her neck.
Annabelle swallowed hard and stepped away from the mirror, her knees unsteady as though part of the woods still clung to her ankles.
She wasn't imagining it.
The bond hadn't broken.
And deep in her bones, beneath fear and exhaustion and guilt—
She felt her sister's presence.
Alive.
Watching.
Waiting.