Page 26 of Weight of Shadows
"Don't do that. Don't use that tone with me," she snapped. "Tell me what's happening in that house."
I hung up. I didn't say goodbye, didn't offer an excuse. I just tapped the red button and watched the screen go black. I had never hung up on her before. Not once in thirty-one years. The silence that followed wasn't peaceful. It was an accusation.
I sat at the table and stared at the notebook for twenty minutes. The red light of the coffee maker finally clicked off, leaving the room in a dim, grey twilight. My chest felt tight, a physical constriction that made every breath a conscious effort.
I picked up the phone and called her back. She answered on the first ring, her breath hitching into the speaker.
"I'm sorry," I whispered. "Lili, I'm so sorry."
She was crying, the sound of her jagged, wet breaths breaking something inside me. I felt the guilt, but I couldn't feel the heat of it. I was just cold.
"Whatever you're not telling those men, Oleander, you have to tell them. All of it. Now."
"They already know enough," I said. "They know what I brought here. They know I'm the reason it's here."
"Then tell them the rest," she sobbed. "Tell them about the end. You watched Dominic descend into that madness. You saw the books, you saw the symbols, you saw him talking to things that weren't there, and you stayed quiet because you wanted to believe it was just a phase. You stayed quiet and it killed him. Do not do this to these men. Do not let your silence be the thing that buries them too."
"It wasn't that simple," I said, but it was. I had watched my husband's collapse without ever raising an alarm, because the alternative was admitting that the man I loved was becoming a monster.
"It is that simple," she said, her voice turning hard through the tears. "If you love them, if you even care about them staying alive, you will show them everything. You will give them the notebook. You will stop protecting a dead man who never protected you. Promise me, Oleander. Promise me you won't stay quiet this time."
"I promise," I said, but the word felt light. It felt like it had no mass. I stayed on the line until she stopped crying, until just her soft breathing reached my ears. Only then did I hang up.
I put the phone down and leaned back. The scent of sandalwood bloomed in the air behind me, so strong it was as if he were standing directly behind my chair. I didn't turn around. The cold was real. It was a sharp, biting chill that seeped into my marrow, making my teeth chatter.
She doesn't understand,a voice whispered. It wasn't a sound in the room. It was a thought that wasn't mine, vibrating in the space between my ears. It was smooth and cultured, the voice of the man who had taught me which wine to pair with duck and how to hide a bruise with professional-grade concealer.She never understood us, Oleander. She only sees the surface. But I see the edges. I see where you end and I begin.
I closed my eyes. The domesticity of it was the worst part. The way the ghost wasn't just haunting me. He was making me a home. He was making sure I was fed, that I was caffeinated, that I had my research close at hand. He was making sure I never had a reason to leave the apartment, because outside there were men who wanted things from me: honesty, vulnerability, a future that wasn't paved with ash.
I reached out and pulled the notebook toward me, the symbols on the cover seemingly darker than they had been an hour ago. The lines were telling me that I was being swallowed whole, and for the first time in my life, I was too tired to fight the current.
twenty-five
OLEANDER
The air in the bar felt like it was holding its breath. I pushed through the heavy wooden door, the midday sun cutting a sharp line across the floorboards before the darkness swallowed it. Julian was there, a solitary silhouette against the glow of the back bar. He wasn't playing. He was sitting on the piano bench with the lid closed, his hands resting on the dark, polished wood as if he were waiting for a pulse.
I sat down beside him, leaving a few inches of distance that felt like a canyon. We sat in the silence for a long minute, the only sound the distant hum of a refrigerator and the way the building groaned under the weight of its own history.
"You look like you haven't slept," Julian said. He didn't turn his head. "Or maybe you slept, but you didn't rest. There's a difference."
"The coffee maker turned on by itself this morning," I whispered. "Dominic's favorite blend. I could smell it before I even opened my eyes. And the notebook I buried in the back of a closet was sitting on the kitchen table when I woke up. It's become domestic, Julian. He's making me comfortable so I won't leave."
Julian finally looked at me, his dark eyes searching my face with a precision that made me want to flinch. He didn't offer pity. He just waited.
"He didn't just stumble into this," I said, the words spilling out fast and jagged. "Dominic. Toward the end, back home, he stopped being the man I married. He started buying these books, leather-bound things that smelled like old earth and copper. He'd stay up until four in the morning, transcribing symbols into a notebook. I'd wake up and find him standing in the middle of the living room, staring at nothing, humming that melody. The one you played."
I looked down at my hands. I could almost feel the cold of our old apartment, the way the light had seemed to die whenever Dominic entered a room. I had watched it happen, day by day, a slow-motion car crash that I'd convinced myself was just a hobby.
"I saw him drawing on the floor once," I continued, my voice trembling. "With salt and something darker. I asked him what he was doing, and he just looked at me with those hollow eyes and said he was making sure we'd never have to be apart. And I let him finish. I didn't call for help. I didn't walk out. I stayed because I didn't want to admit that my life was a horror story."
Julian's hands tightened on the piano lid. He let the confession hang in the air.
"I told you in this room that the melody was his. But it's worse than that, Julian. He used to hum it while he worked. While he drew those symbols. While he did whatever he was doing to thin the walls of this town. The melody wasn't just a song he liked. It was part of it. Part of whatever he was building."
Julian went very still beside me. I could see the realization moving across his face, slow and precise, the way he processed everything.
"If he was humming it during the rituals," Julian said, his voice barely above a breath, "then it's not just a calling card. It's functional. It's part of the mechanism."
