The Vance Estate didn’t look like a home. It looked like a terrarium designed for a species that couldn’t survive contact with the outside world.
I sat in my car at the top of the long, winding driveway, the engine idling rough against the silence of the ridge. The fog was thinner up here, thinning into wisps that curled around the steel beams of the house like phantom fingers.
My stepfather, Richard, had been an architect. He believed in “honesty in materials.” He believed that walls were for people with secrets, and so he had built a house made almost entirely of glass. From where I sat, I could see through the living room, past the floating staircase, and out the other side into the gray void of the valley drop-off.
It was a fishbowl. A cage where we were always on display, even if the only audience was the trees.
“Just go in,” I muttered, my hand slick against the steering wheel. “It’s just glass and steel. It can’t hurt you.”
But I knew better. Buildings hold memories like insulation holds heat.
I killed the engine. The silence that followed was absolute. No birds. No wind. Just the oppressive stillness of a place that had been holding its breath for fifteen years.
I stepped out of the car, the gravel crunching under my boots sounding like gunshots. I walked toward the front door—a massive slab of brushed steel that looked more like the entrance to a bank vault than a family residence.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the key ring I had taken from the safe deposit box in Seattle before I left. The key to the house was heavy, old-fashioned despite the modern design.
My hand trembled as I slid it into the lock.
Click.
The sound echoed. It bounced off the glass, amplifying, ringing in my ears. It sounded like a trigger being pulled.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The smell hit me first. It wasn’t the rot of the woods this time. It was Lemon Pledge and cold, conditioned air. It was the smell of sterile perfection.
I stood in the foyer, my heart hammering against my ribs. I waited for the shouting. I waited for the sound of Richard’s heavy footsteps on the floating stairs, for the clinking of ice in a scotch glass, for the soft, weeping sounds of my mother hiding in the pantry.
But there was nothing. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the thrum of my own blood.
“Hello?” I called out.
My voice sounded small, instantly swallowed by the high ceilings.
I walked into the living room. It was exactly as I had left it. The white leather sectional was pristine, positioned to face the view of the fog. The grand piano, which neither of us was allowed to touch because we might leave fingerprints, gleamed under a layer of silence.
It was a museum.
I ran a finger along the back of the sofa. No dust.
I frowned. I hadn’t hired a cleaning service. I hadn’t paid the property taxes in years—the estate was in a trust I refused to look at. Who was maintaining this?
“Mom?” I whispered, a reflex I couldn’t stop.
I looked at the mantle above the fireplace. Her collection of crystal figurines was still there. Tiny glass birds, deer, and dancers. Richard liked them because they were fragile. He liked things that broke easily.
I felt the sensation of eyes on the back of my neck.
I spun around, scanning the room.
Nothing but my own reflection staring back at me from a dozen different panes of glass. Distorted, pale, looking like a ghost haunting her own life. That was the trick of the Glass House. Wherever you stood, you saw yourself. You could never escape your own image.
You’re paranoid, Elara. It’s just a house.
I forced myself to move. I needed to go upstairs. I needed to go to the East Wing.
The floating staircase groaned under my weight. Every step felt like a transgression. I reached the landing and turned left, down the hallway that led to my old room.
The door was closed.
I stared at the white wood. I remembered the nights I used to sit behind this door, staring at the lock, wishing I had a chair to wedge under the handle. But Richard didn’t allow locks on the bedroom doors. Safety, he called it. Surveillance, I called it.
I gripped the handle. Cold brass.
I turned it and pushed.
The room breathed out a sigh of stale air.
It was a little girl’s room frozen in amber. The canopy bed with the pink ruffles that I had hated. The bookshelf filled with encyclopedias I had read cover to cover just to have somewhere to go. The desk where I wrote stories about girls who could fly away.
And at the foot of the bed, the toy chest.
It was made of cedar, heavy and bound in iron.
I walked toward it, my boots sinking into the plush pink carpet.
I needed to check. I needed to know.
In the woods, with Julian, the memory of burying Annabel had been so visceral, so violent, I had thrown up. But now, surrounded by the sterile reality of the house, doubt was creeping in.
Maybe I didn’t bury her, I thought, desperate for a lifeline. Maybe that was just a nightmare. Maybe I put her in the chest before I ran away. If she’s in there… then the memory is false. And if the memory is false, then the killer isn’t reenacting my past. He’s just a psycho who got lucky with a guess.
It was a flimsy hope, but I clung to it.
I knelt in front of the chest. The wood was smooth, polished.
I took a breath, held it, and threw the lid back.
The hinges shrieked—a high, piercing sound that made me flinch.
I looked inside.
stuffed animals stared back at me with glass bead eyes. A teddy bear with a missing ear. A velveteen rabbit worn bald in patches. Board games stacked haphazardly.
But in the center, there was a void.
A rectangular space in the velvet lining, shaped exactly like a doll box.
Annabel was gone.
I let out a breath that was half-sob, half-laugh. “She’s gone. I really did it. I buried her.”
I reached in, my hand hovering over the empty space. I expected to feel nothing but the velvet.
Instead, my fingertips brushed against something gritty.
I froze.
I pulled my hand back and looked at my fingers.
Red clay.
It was smeared across my skin. Wet. Cold.
I looked back into the chest. Now that I was looking for it, I saw it. A smear of mud on the inside of the lid. A few crumbles of dirt on the white belly of the teddy bear. And in the empty space where Annabel should have been, a distinct, reddish stain on the blue velvet.
The air in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
If I had buried Annabel twenty years ago… the chest should be clean. The spot should be dusty, maybe, but not muddy.
Mud meant something had been put in here. Or taken out.
Recently.
My heart began to hammer a frantic rhythm against my ribs.
I grabbed the teddy bear—Mr. Fluffles, a ridiculous name for a bear that had witnessed so many tears—and turned him over.
His back was damp.
I dropped him as if he had bitten me.
Someone had been here.
Someone had opened this chest.
My mind raced, trying to reconstruct the timeline. The killer had sent me the photo of the dug-up doll three days ago. That meant he had unearthed her from the garden.
But why was there mud in the chest?
Unless…
Unless he had brought her back.
Unless he had carried the dirty, unearthed doll into the house, up the stairs, into my room, and placed her back in her coffin for a moment. Why? To gloat? To relive the moment? Or had he come here looking for her, not realizing I had buried her outside, and tracked mud in during his search?
No. The stain was in the shape of the doll.
He had put her back. And then he had taken her again.
He had been in this room. Maybe he had sat on this bed. Maybe he had touched the pillows where I used to sleep.
I scrambled backward, away from the chest, crab-walking across the carpet until my back hit the desk.
He has a key.
The thought was a lightning bolt.
The front door hadn’t been forced. The windows were intact. The alarm system—which I hadn’t armed—was silent.
I looked at the window. The glass was dark now, the sun having fully set behind the ridge. The room was illuminated only by the hallway light, casting long, distorted shadows across the floor.
I was in a glass box, lit up like a stage, and outside was the dark auditorium of the woods.
If he was watching, he could see me right now. He could see the terror on my face. He could see me realizing that my sanctuary was violated.
I scrambled to my feet and ran to the window, my hands fumbling for the cord to the blinds.
There were no blinds. Richard didn’t believe in them. Why hide the view? he used to say.
I backed away, my breathing coming in shallow, sharp gasps.
“Get out,” I whispered. “Get out, get out, get out.”
I spun around to run, to grab my keys and flee back to the motel, back to Julian, back to anywhere with solid walls.
But as I turned toward the door, I saw it.
On the back of the white bedroom door, hanging from the brass hook where I used to hang my bathrobe.
A raincoat.
A bright, yellow raincoat. Small. Child-sized.
It was dripping.
A puddle of water had formed on the carpet beneath it.
I stared at it, my brain refusing to process the visual data. That wasn’t my coat. I didn’t own a yellow raincoat.
I took a step closer, mesmerizingly terrified.
I reached out and touched the sleeve. It was soaked. Ice cold.
And in the pocket, weighing the plastic down, was a shape.
I didn’t want to reach in. I would have rather put my hand in a fire. But my hand moved on its own, trembling, sliding into the wet pocket.
My fingers closed around cold metal.
I pulled it out.
It was a music box key. Small, silver, shaped like a butterfly.
I knew this key. It belonged to the music box that played Greensleeves. The one Richard used to play when he was “disappointed” in me.
I dropped the key. It hit the floor with a dull thud.
The raincoat wasn’t just wet. It was warm on the inside.
Someone hadn’t just been here recently.
The water on the floor was still spreading.
I spun around, scanning the room, the closet, the dark corners.
He’s here.
The realization crashed into me with the force of a physical blow.
The killer wasn’t a memory. He wasn’t a ghost. He was in the house.
And then, from the hallway, I heard it.
Soft. Deliberate.
Creak.
The sound of the third step on the floating staircase. The one that always groaned.
Someone was coming up the stairs.