The cursor blinked on the white screen, a rhythmic, demanding heartbeat that mirrored my own.
I was sitting at Richard’s desk—my desk now—in the loft of the Glass House. The view behind the monitor was no longer a terrifying wall of gray fog and hidden eyes. It was just trees. Wet, dripping, indifferent Douglas firs emerging from the mist as the sun tried to burn through the Oakhaven Shroud.
The house was quiet. Not the held-breath silence of a predator waiting to strike, but the empty, hollow silence of a vacuum. The ghosts had been evicted. Elias was gone. Mrs. Gable was in a holding cell in the county lockup, ranting about ink and blood.
All that was left was the story.
My phone buzzed on the glass surface of the desk, vibrating against the wood grain. It was Mack. Again.
I picked it up, sliding my thumb across the screen.
“I hope you’re calling to tell me the wire transfer went through,” I said, my voice raspy from smoke inhalation and exhaustion.
“I’m calling to tell you that legal is having a coronary,” Mack’s voice boomed, tinny and loud. “Elara, I just read the draft you sent over an hour ago. What the hell is this?”
“It’s the truth, Mack.”
“It’s a manifesto,” he countered. “Where’s the hook? Where’s the ‘Sandman’? You have a serial killer who lived in the walls of your childhood home, for Christ’s sake. That’s the headline. ‘ The Monster in the Bedroom.’ ‘The Girl Who Slept with Death.’ Instead, you gave me three thousand words on… what is this? Small-town negligence and a librarian with a god complex?”
I leaned back in the ergonomic chair, looking out at the ravine. “Elias wasn’t a monster, Mack. He was a weapon. You don’t blame the gun for the shooting; you blame the person who pulled the trigger.”
“Readers don’t want sociology, Vance. They want the boogeyman. They want to be scared.”
“They should be scared,” I said, my grip tightening on the phone. “They should be terrified. But not of a feral boy living in the dirt. They should be scared of the nice old lady stamping their books. They should be scared of the neighbors who saw a child starving in a shed and closed their blinds.”
“Elara, listen to me. You’re too close to this. You’re the victim here.”
“I am not the victim,” I snapped, the anger flaring hot and bright. “I am the witness. And if you want the story, you print it my way. Word for word. Or I take it to the Times.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line, filled only by the sound of Mack aggressively chewing nicotine gum.
“You have the exclusive,” he grumbled finally. “The photos of the journal? The shrine?”
“I have everything. The journal scans. The police reports from 1999 proving the town knew he existed. The statement from Julian Thorne corroborating the timeline.”
“And the librarian? Gable?”
“I have her on record,” I said. “She didn’t shut up once the cuffs were on. She was proud of it, Mack. She thought she was raising a prince.”
Mack sighed, a long, heavy exhale of defeat. “Fine. But we’re changing the headline. ‘The Boy Who Died Twice’ is too soft.”
“Touch the headline, and I walk.”
“You’re a pain in my ass, Vance.”
“I know. That’s why you pay me.”
I hung up the phone and tossed it onto the desk.
I looked back at the screen. The document was open. The Boy Who Died Twice.
I hadn’t written it for Mack. I hadn’t written it for the clicks or the accolades. I had written it for the twelve-year-old boy who gave me a Snickers bar through a vent because he thought I was the one who needed saving.
I reached out and touched the keyboard, my fingers hovering over the delete key, then moving away. It was done.
I scrolled down to the section about Mrs. Gable. It was the hardest part to write, the part that required me to look into the abyss of human manipulation.
The monsters of Oakhaven were not born in the dark, I read. They were curated. Mrs. Gable did not just catalogue books; she catalogued resentments. When a traumatized, abandoned boy sought refuge in the archives of her library, she didn’t call social services. She didn’t offer him a warm meal or a safe bed. She offered him a narrative.
She fed him stories of knights and dragons, twisting his reality until he could no longer distinguish between a fairy tale and a felony. She validated his delusions, nurtured his obsession, and directed his rage. She saw a boy who was invisible to the world and realized that an invisible boy is the perfect weapon for a woman who feels forgotten by it.
I paused, remembering the look in her eyes as the archives burned. The madness wasn’t frantic; it was structured. It was a library of hate, organized by the Dewey Decimal System.
I scrolled further, to the section about the town.
Oakhaven prides itself on its history. It holds festivals to burn effigies of the past. But while the town was burning straw dolls, it was burying its real sins. Elias Thorne did not disappear into the river because of a flood. He disappeared because it was convenient. He was the ‘Thorne Bastard,’ a stain on a prominent family’s reputation, and when nature offered an eraser, the town took it.
They let a child dissolve into the woods because acknowledging him meant acknowledging their own cruelty. They created the vacuum in which the Sandman could grow.
I took a sip of coffee. It was cold, but the caffeine hit my system like a jolt of clarity.
I had spared no one. Not Julian’s father. Not my stepfather, Richard. Not even myself.
I had written about the games. The Sleeping Princess. The Tea Party. I had admitted that the scripts for the murders came from my own head, from the coping mechanisms of a terrified girl.
That was the part Mack hated. He wanted me to be the innocent damsel. He didn’t like the idea that the protagonist was the architect of the villain’s methodology.
But that was the truth. Elias and I were co-authors of this tragedy. He supplied the violence; I supplied the plot.
I scrolled to the end. The eulogy.
Elias Thorne died in 1999. The boy who survived in the walls of the Vance Estate was something else—a ghost made of hunger and memory. He committed unspeakable acts. He took three innocent lives. There is no forgiveness for that. But let the record show that before he was a monster, he was a boy who just wanted to be found.
And we didn’t look for him.
I sat there for a long moment, watching the cursor blink.
It felt like letting go of a heavy stone I’d been carrying in my pocket for twenty years. The weight of the secret—the boy in the shed, the boy in the wall, the boy who saved me from the dog—was finally on the page. It wasn’t inside me anymore. It couldn’t rot me from the inside out if it was out in the light.
I clicked Send.
The progress bar zipped across the screen. Sent.
It was gone. In ten minutes, it would be on the homepage. In an hour, it would be everywhere.
I closed the laptop. The snap of the lid echoed in the loft.
I stood up and walked to the railing, looking down into the living room. The sun was fully up now, piercing through the glass walls. The dust motes danced in the light, no longer looking like spirits, just dust.
The house felt… empty.
Not the heavy, watchful emptiness of before. Just empty. It was wood and steel and glass. It was architecture. It wasn’t a character in my life anymore.
“It’s done,” I said aloud.
My voice didn’t tremble.
I walked down the floating staircase, my hand gliding along the rail where Richard had fallen. I didn’t feel the phantom grease. I didn’t feel the fear of slipping.
I went to the kitchen and poured the rest of the coffee down the sink. I washed the cup. I dried it. I put it away.
Normal things.
I heard a car crunching on the gravel of the driveway.
I didn’t jump. I didn’t reach for the gun that was no longer in my pocket. I walked to the front door and opened it.
Julian was leaning against his truck. He looked better. The cast on his leg was still fresh and white, but the haunted, gray look in his eyes had receded. He was wearing a clean shirt. He looked like the boy I used to meet at the diner, before the world broke us both.
He held up a copy of the Chronicle. The early edition.
“You work fast,” he said, limping toward the porch.
“I had a deadline,” I said, leaning against the doorframe.
“I read it,” he said, stopping at the bottom of the steps. He tapped the paper against his leg. “You didn’t pull any punches.”
“Was I wrong?”
“No,” he said softly. “You were right. About all of it. Especially the part about my father.”
He looked up at the house, scanning the windows where his brother had lived like a rat for decades.
“Does it help?” he asked. “Writing it down?”
“I don’t know yet,” I admitted. “But it feels lighter. Like I exorcised the house.”
“The town is going to hate you,” he warned, a small, sad smile playing on his lips. “You dragged Oakhaven through the mud.”
“The town hated me anyway, Julian. At least now they know why.”
He nodded. “Miller is stepping down. The state police are taking over the department until the investigation into the archives fire is done. They found… things. In Mrs. Gable’s office.”
“What kind of things?”
“Letters. From Elias. He wrote to her. Reports on his ‘progress.’ It confirms everything you wrote. She was pulling his strings.”
I felt a cold chill, but it passed quickly. Mrs. Gable couldn’t hurt us anymore. She was just a story now. A villain in a column.
“And Elias?” I asked. “Have they…?”
“They recovered the body from the mill pit this morning,” Julian said. His voice hitched, just for a second. “It’s over, Elara. He’s really gone this time.”
“I know.”
We stood there in the silence, the only sound the wind in the fir trees and the distant rush of the river. It wasn’t an awkward silence. It was the quiet of two soldiers who had survived the war and were just realizing they were still alive.
“I’m selling the house,” I said.
Julian didn’t look surprised. “I figured.”
“I can’t stay here. Too many echoes.”
“Where will you go? Back to Seattle?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe somewhere new. Somewhere without fog.”
He looked at me, his green eyes searching my face. “You could stay. For a little while. The town will hate you, but… I won’t.”
It was an offer. A fragile, tentative olive branch extended over a chasm of trauma.
I looked at him. I saw the history we shared. The love. The pain.
“I can’t, Julian,” I said gently. “Not yet. I need to be someone else for a while. Someone who isn’t the Girl Who Buried Her Shadow.”
He nodded, accepting it. He understood.
“But,” I added, “I’m not disappearing this time. I won’t change my number. And I won’t ignore the past.”
“That’s a start,” he said.
He turned to go back to his truck.
“Julian?”
He stopped.
“Thank you,” I said. “For believing me. Eventually.”
He smiled, a real smile this time. “See you around, Elara.”
I watched him drive away.
I went back inside and walked to the kitchen island where my laptop sat. The screen was dark.
I didn’t open it. I didn’t need to check the comments or the shares. I knew what I had written.
I walked to the big glass wall in the living room. I looked out at the garden. At the spot where the rhododendrons grew. Where I had buried Annabel. Where the dog had died. Where Elias had watched me.
It was just dirt. Just plants.
I pressed my hand against the glass.
“Goodbye, Elias,” I whispered.
And for the first time in twenty years, the house didn’t whisper back.