Page 3 of The Last Stitch

“Is this Miss Whitmore?” The woman's voice was gentle, practiced.

“Yes, this is she.”

A pause that stretched too long. “I'm sorry to call with difficult news. Your grandmother passed away this morning.”

The words struck. My breath stopped, caught somewhere between my ribs and throat. “No,” The word came from somewhere far away. “No, that's not. . . she was fine.” But she hadn't been fine. I'd seen it in her eyes, in that hug that lasted too long. I'd known, and I'd walked away anyway.

“I’m so very sorry,” the woman repeated, but her words couldn’t reach through the static filling my head.

The silence stretched until something inside me snapped.

Gran was gone. All my family now dead.

The next hour blurred together. I grabbed my coat, stumbling through Oxford's winding streets, my hands shaking as I fumbled with the key to her building. I climbed the stairs on unsteady legs, each step like swimming through thick water.

The door creaked open. For one fragile heartbeat, I expected her voice: Lily, darling, is that you?

Silence answered. The kind that presses against your eardrums, that breathes.

Everything remained exactly as she'd left it. Teacup on the side table, still holding the ghost of her tea. Book turned face-down, pages splayed like broken wings. The blanket draped over her chair, still holding the shape of her.

I didn't turn on the lights. Didn't remove my coat. I simply stood there, drowning in the reality of her absence.

Then the grief hit, and I crumpled into her chair. My hands found her shawl—the one she wore every evening. It still held her warmth, her scent. Cinnamon and vanilla. Home.

I pressed my palm to my mouth, trying to contain the sob building in my chest. It broke free anyway, loud and raw and unmoored.

When I finally lifted my head, the wooden box on the mantel caught my attention. Gran had never allowed me to explore its contents, even as a curious child. “Too precious for playful hands,” she'd always said with that mysterious smile.

My hands moved without conscious thought, lifting the lid and revealing what lay inside.

Photographs, yellowed and curling at the edges. Faces I didn’t recognize stared back, distant family perhaps, ancestors whose names had faded with decades. But one picture stopped me cold.

The woman in the photograph was breathtaking, her features sharp even in grainy black and white. Though the image held no color, I could tell that she had dark hair and light eyes. But what truly drew my attention was her necklace.

The same necklace was nestled in the box before me. A necklace that resembled the hourglass symbol on the letter.

I lifted it carefully. The chain was delicate but substantial, and the pendant itself was mesmerizing—concentric rings of golden filigree that shifted and interlocked around a tiny hourglass at its heart. Inside, the glass spheres, gold dust swirled, restless and alive, like something waiting to wake.

Faint engravings decorated the outermost ring, worn smooth by time and touch. I traced them with my thumb, feeling the grooves beneath my skin, and the dust inside quickened.

A sharp crack split the silence.

A bird struck the window. I flinched. The chain slithered through my fingers like water.

Glass shattered against the floor—the sound bright and final as a severed thread.

Energy pulsed outward from the shattered pendant. Electric. Humming. It rolled through the room like sound traveling underwater—thick, wrong, vibrating through bone and breath.

Cinnamon vanished. The air turned sharp with ozone, metallic as blood on the tongue. Every hair on my arms rose. The lightbulbs flickered once, flared white-hot, then burst in a rain of glass.

I staggered back, heart pulsing, every nerve screaming danger.

Then came the pressure—not dizziness, but displacement, like the world folding in on itself. The walls bent. Breathed. Books trembled on their shelves. Curtains rippled though no wind blew.

Light exploded around me—blinding, searing. It swallowed sound, swallowed thought, swallowed everything but the terrible brightness tearing the world apart.

My knees buckled. I tried to scream, but the light ate the sound.