Page 13 of Weight of Shadows
"It was his," Oleander said finally. His voice was barely above a breath. "Dominic's. He used to hum it. Sunday mornings, late nights when he thought I was asleep. It wasn't a song, Julian. It was something else. Something connected to the things he was doing that I didn't want to see."
I let that settle. I'd suspected it since the first night, since my fingers had found those notes without my permission and the cold had pressed in from the corners of the bar like something leaning closer to listen. But hearing him confirm it was different. It made the melody real in a way that frightened me, because if it was real, then the thing using my hands to play it was real too.
"When I play it," I said, "my hands aren't mine. Something else is steering. It's like a signal bleeding through from a frequency I didn't tune into." I held up my fingers, watching the faint tremor that had become constant over the past week. "I've spent my whole life making music do what I tell it to. This is the first time the music has been telling me."
Oleander looked at my hands. I saw the grief hit him, not the slow, heavy grief he carried everywhere, but something sharper. The guilt of a man realizing his damage had reached further than he thought.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. "Julian, I'm so sorry. If this is because of me, if he's reaching through your music because of what I brought here..."
"I didn't ask you here so you could apologize," I said. "I asked you here because I need to understand what we're dealing with. The melody isn't random. It's not ambient. It's reaching for something, and every time you're in the room, it gets louder. If your husband left something in this town, I need to understand what it is, because whatever's happening to my music, I think you're the reason it started."
He was quiet for a long time. I could feel him weighing the words, the same way I'd watched him weigh them every night at the bar. He wanted to tell me. I could see it in the way his mouth moved, in the way his breath caught. But the habit of silence was deep in him, carved there by years of living with a man who apparently preferred secrets to honesty.
"I'm not ready to tell you everything," he said. "Not yet. But the melody is real. And it's connected to something Dominic opened in this town. Something I should have stopped and didn't."
It wasn't enough. But it was more than he'd given anyone else, and I could feel the cost of it in the way he held himself, waiting for me to recoil. I didn't. I reached over and let my hand rest on his. His skin was cold. It was always cold. I was starting to think the cold wasn't temperature. It was proximity.
"He's here, isn't he?" I asked. "Not just in the melody. Not just in the town. He's in this room right now."
Oleander didn't answer. He didn't have to. The air around the piano had thickened, that familiar pressure that preceded the melody every time it surfaced. The scent of cologne that wasn'this grew stronger, sweeter, pressing against the edges of the room like something trying to get in.
I opened the piano lid. The hinges creaked, a sound like a long exhale. Oleander tensed beside me, his hand tightening under mine.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"Taking it back," I said.
I played. Not the melody. Something of my own, jagged and deliberate, heavy with the kind of intent that didn't leave room for a passenger. I played the way I used to before Hollow Vale, before the breakdown, before I stopped trusting that the music belonged to me. Every note was a declaration that my hands were mine, that the piano was mine, that whatever had been bleeding through the keys didn't get to set up residence without my permission.
Oleander sat beside me and listened. He didn't move. He didn't speak. But I could feel the cold pulling back, just a fraction, as if the thing in the walls hadn't expected resistance. When I finished, the last chord hanging in the still air of the empty bar, the silence that followed was different from any silence I'd heard in Hollow Vale. It was clean. It was mine.
"Go to Theo next," I said, without looking at him. "He's been photographing things he can't explain and he deserves to know why. And then talk to Rowan. He's carrying something too, Oleander. Something this town put in him that he's never been able to name. You might be the only person who can help him understand what it is."
Oleander stood up. I felt the loss of his warmth against my side and resisted the urge to reach for him. That wasn't what this was, not yet. This was two people agreeing to stop looking away from the same thing, and that was enough for now.
He walked to the door. I heard him pause, the slight scuff of his boot on the wood, and I knew he was looking back at me. Ididn't turn around. I just sat at my piano with my hands in my lap, listening to the silence settle around me like something I'd earned.
The melody was still there. Faint, patient, hovering just beneath the surface. But for the first time in weeks, it was waiting for me instead of the other way around.
twelve
OLEANDER
The walk back from the bar was heavy, the fog pressing against my lungs, tasting of wet stone and old iron. I kept my head down, my boots thudding against the buckled sidewalk, trying to outrun the ghost of the piano melody Julian had played.
I reached the brick rowhouse and fumbled with the heavy brass key. My hands were shaking so badly the key sang against the lock. Inside, the hallway smelled of stagnant dust and the faint sweetness of his cologne.
I went straight for the phone on the kitchen counter. I hit Liliana's name. She answered on the first ring.
"Oleander?" Her voice was tight, the vowels clipped in that way she only got when she was three seconds away from a panicattack. "God, Oleander. I've been calling you since Tuesday. Do you have any idea what time it is here?"
"It's one AM, Lili. I know. I'm sorry." I sank onto the floor, my back against the refrigerator. The humming of the appliance was the only thing that felt real. "I just couldn't talk before. I wasn't ready to tell you."
"Tell me what?" She sounded wide awake now. "Are you hurt? Did something happen?"
"No. Yes. I don't know." I closed my eyes. "It's this place, Lili. The apartment Dominic left. Everything here is wrong. The fog doesn't move. The buildings look like they're leaning into each other, trying to share a secret. And the people... there are these three men. Rowan, Julian, and Theo."
I stopped, the names feeling like stones in my mouth. How could I explain the way Rowan took up all the space in a room, or the way Julian's music felt like it was written in my own blood? How could I tell her I slept with one, watching another, and being documented by the third?
