The Glass House was quiet.
For the first time in my life, the silence didn’t feel like a held breath. It didn’t feel like the pause before a plate smashed against a wall or a heavy boot stomped on a floorboard. It was just… quiet. The neutral, empty silence of a structure made of steel and silica, stripped of its ghosts.
I sat at the desk in my old bedroom. It was the same desk where I had written stories about girls who grew wings and flew away, the same desk where I had done my homework while listening to the scratching in the walls.
Now, the walls were silent. The hole I had smashed with the hammer was still there, a jagged wound in the drywall, but it no longer looked like a mouth. It just looked like broken gypsum and lath.
I opened my laptop. The screen glowed, a stark white square in the gray morning light filtering through the trees.
My email inbox was a red wall of anxiety. Seventeen messages from Mack.
SUBJECT: WHERE ARE YOU? SUBJECT: POLICE SCANNER SAYS SHOOTING AT MILL?? SUBJECT: VANCE, I NEED THE COPY. NOW.
I knew what he wanted. He wanted the “Sandman” story. He wanted the gruesome details of the tea party, the bodies in the morgue, the terrifying manhunt through the ruins of the lumber industry. He wanted a monster. He wanted a headline that would sell subscriptions and keep people awake at night, double-checking their locks.
I typed a headline: THE MONSTER OF OAKHAVEN: HOW A SERIAL KILLER STALKED THE SHROUD.
I stared at it. The cursor blinked at the end of the sentence, a rhythmic, demanding pulse.
It was the story that would make my career. It was the story that would get me a book deal, a spot on the morning talk shows, maybe even a Pulitzer if I spun the prose purple enough.
I highlighted the text.
Delete.
I didn’t want to write about a monster. Monsters are easy. Monsters are anomalies; you kill them, and the world goes back to being safe.
Elias wasn’t an anomaly. He was a product.
I looked out the window. The sun was burning off the last of the fog, revealing the jagged scars of the logging roads on the distant hills. This town—this beautiful, rotting place—had built its fortune on cutting things down. Trees. History. Children.
I started typing again. This time, I didn’t think about the word count. I didn’t think about the advertisers or the click-through rate. I just let the truth bleed out of my fingertips.
TITLE: THE BOY IN THE WALLS
By Elara Vance
Oakhaven, Washington, is a town that prides itself on its memory. We remember the Great Fire of 1902. We remember the boom years of the timber trade. We remember the names of every mayor, every sheriff, and every Logging King who built a mansion on the ridge.
But we are defined not by what we remember, but by who we choose to forget.
For twenty years, we told ourselves a story about a boy named Elias Thorne. We told ourselves he was wild. We told ourselves he was dangerous. And when the river rose in 1999, we told ourselves he was gone, and we sighed with relief because it meant we no longer had to look at the bruises on his arms or the hunger in his eyes.
I paused, taking a sip of cold coffee. The taste was bitter, grounding.
I wrote about the shed. I wrote about the shoes Julian had hidden under the porch—the size nines that proved the size seven found on the riverbank was a lie agreed upon by a town desperate for closure. I wrote about Mrs. Higgins and her tea, about the way the “good people” of the valley turned a blind eye to a child living like a stray dog because his existence was an inconvenience to a powerful man’s reputation.
Elias Thorne did not die in the flood. He died by inches, day by day, starved of kindness until he became something else. He became a mirror. He took the violence we fed him—the beatings, the rejection, the isolation—and he reflected it back at us.
My fingers flew across the keys. It wasn’t just an article; it was an exorcism.
I wrote about the games. I didn’t use my name—I called the girl “The Witness”—but I described the imaginary worlds created to escape the reality of abuse. I described how Elias, watching from the shadows, had mistaken those survival mechanisms for instructions.
He wasn’t reenacting a fantasy. He was trying to rewrite a tragedy. He believed that if he played the game perfectly, if he followed the rules of the tea party and the sleeping princess, he could fix what was broken. He could wake the dead. He could save the girl.
I stopped when I got to the end. To the Sawmill.
I didn’t write about the gunshot. I didn’t write about the way his body fell into the dark water of the sump pit, vanishing just as he had twenty years ago. I didn’t write about the way Julian had held me while I screamed.
Instead, I wrote about the silence that followed.
The monster is gone. The police will tell you the threat has ended. They will patch the holes in the walls and bury the bodies, and by next year, the Doll Festival will burn effigies of the Sandman to chase away the bad dreams.
But fire doesn’t burn away guilt. And it doesn’t bring back the lost.
Elias Thorne was a murderer. But before that, he was a boy who wanted a name. He was a boy who wanted a home. And Oakhaven gave him neither.
We made him. We broke him. And then we blamed him for being sharp.
I sat back, my breath coming in shallow hitches.
It was done.
It wasn’t the article Mack wanted. It was an accusation. It implicated the Sheriff, the former Deputy Thorne, the social services, the teachers who looked the other way. It implicated me.
Mack would hate it. He might fire me. He might say it was too personal, too editorial, too risky.
I didn’t care.
I hovered the cursor over the SEND button.
For fifteen years, I had used my job as a shield. I had written about other people’s tragedies so I wouldn’t have to look at my own. I had turned into a pane of glass—hard, transparent, letting the world pass through me without leaving a mark.
But glass breaks. And sometimes, you have to cut yourself on the shards to know you’re still bleeding.
I clicked SEND.
The progress bar zipped across the top of the screen. Message Sent.
I let out a breath I felt like I’d been holding since I was twelve.
I closed the laptop.
I stood up and walked to the window. The sun had fully crested the ridge now. The light was pouring into the room, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air.
I looked at my reflection in the glass.
I looked tired. My hair was a mess, my eyes bruised with exhaustion. There was a small cut on my cheek from a branch in the woods.
But the terrified little girl was gone. The woman staring back at me was solid. She was real.
I turned away from the window and looked at the room. It was just a room. Wood. Drywall. Glass.
I walked over to the toy chest. It was closed. I opened it.
Empty.
I closed it again.
I walked to the closet. Empty.
I walked to the hole in the wall.
I peered inside. The crawlspace was dark. The nest of blankets was gone—the police had taken everything into evidence. The candy wrapper, the photos, the timeline of my life. It was all tagged and bagged in a cardboard box somewhere.
It was just a space between studs. Insulation and wires.
“Goodbye, Elias,” I whispered.
There was no answer. No scratch. No hum.
I turned and walked out of the bedroom, leaving the door open.
I went down the floating staircase, my footsteps firm on the treads. I went to the kitchen and poured the rest of the coffee down the sink.
I had one more thing to do.
I pulled my phone from my pocket. It buzzed immediately.
MACK (EDITOR): Did you just send me an op-ed? Vance, what the hell is this? Where’s the body count?
I typed a reply.
ME: It’s the truth. Run it or I quit.
I hit send and turned off the phone.
I walked to the front door, opened it, and stepped out onto the porch. The air was crisp, smelling of damp earth and drying pine needles. The Shroud had lifted, retreating back to the river, leaving the sky a piercing, impossible blue.
I sat on the steps, resting my elbows on my knees.
Julian would be here soon. He had been released pending an internal review, thanks to the journal I had turned over. We had to talk. We had to figure out what came next.
But for now, I just wanted to sit in the sun.
I closed my eyes and tilted my face toward the light. I felt the warmth seep into my skin, chasing away the chill of the root cellar, the damp of the woods, the cold of the morgue.
I was still here.
The game was over. The pieces were back in the box.
And for the first time in twenty years, I wasn’t waiting for the other shoe to drop.