Chapter Nine

The house felt heavier that week, like the walls were slowly leaning inward when I wasn't looking.

Some nights, it woke me up, the sense that something had shifted just enough to scrape against the edge of notice. Not loud. Not violent. Just... wrong.

I blamed the weather. Blamed the house settling. Blamed my own nerves, worn thin after a week of fighting missing paperwork, unanswered voicemails, and suspicions I couldn’t prove. Blamed everything I could think of.

Since Hugh’s death two springs ago, it had been like this.

The late-night silence had grown teeth. Our little house that once felt cozy now breathed against my skin like a living thing, heavy and expectant. Some days, I kept the radio on just to fill up the spaces he used to occupy. Some days, even that wasn’t enough.

Even with the addition of Sam, Hugh’s life insurance still covered the bills. Barely. I kept acting like it was enough, like cutting coupons and shopping at the discount stores could make up for the fact that I hadn’t worked in weeks, that I had no plan, no backup, no idea what I was doing.

Sam’s fund sat untouched. Locked behind paperwork and questions I wasn’t brave enough to ask. I didn’t even know if I was allowed to access it, not without full custody, not without someone noticing. And once someone noticed…

I didn’t want anyone noticing how ill-prepared and stupid I was.

Sam didn’t see any of that. Thank God. She spent her afternoons building a world where everything made sense. Pillow kingdoms and blanket volcanoes. Adventures with Rainbow the Unicorn and Queen Sam of Atlantis, ruler of France and outer space.

And when she wasn’t staging dramatic rescues, she was drawing.

At first, it was just paper taped to the fridge—stick figures, suns with smiley faces, rainbows that arched across three pages. I praised every one like it was a masterpiece. She beamed, and I clung to that glow like it could keep the lights on.

But the drawings didn’t stop at the fridge.

They crept across the walls of her bedroom, clustered in careful rows. Filled the back of her door. Took over the kitchen cabinets, the hallway, even the photo wall up the stairs where I’d hung every picture I had of Hugh.

She narrated each one with bedtime stories: her momma slaying dragons in pink sneakers, outsmarting trolls with glitter glue, digging for moon rocks in the backyard. We made them up together at night, curled under the quilt. She drew them the next day, solemn and focused like she was building a map only she could read.

I didn’t stop her. It felt like hope. Like memory. Like magic used to feel. Harmless and bright.

Then the drawings started to change.

The suns stopped smiling. The colors turned darker. Sometimes her adventurer momma disappeared from the page entirely, replaced by tangled lines or tall figures made of shadow.

I told myself it was grief.

That Sam was just trying to make sense of what happened to Ziya—that the dragons and volcanoes were morphing into monsters because she missed her momma and didn’t know how to say it out loud.

I thought about finding a therapist. Just someone to talk to her. Help her sort it out. But the idea twisted in my stomach. What if it made things worse? What if it brought the kind of attention we couldn’t afford?

Never mind I couldn’t pay for it. The policy had been Hugh’s, and when he died, it disappeared with everything else. I told Bianca I was getting it sorted. I wasn’t. Not really.

Thankfully, Sam was healthy and okay, mostly. She laughed. She played. She ate what I put in front of her. She still asked for cocoa before bed and insisted unicorns had some kind of three-year-old version of diplomatic immunity with the dragons in Paris.

And yet over the week, the drawings kept getting darker.

Wednesday night, while I was scraping together dinner out of whatever was left in the pantry, Sam tugged at my sleeve and held up a piece of paper.

"Look," she said, beaming with the pride only a three-year-old could carry. "It's the magic door."

The drawing was a mess of tangled lines and sharp-edged symbols, none of them anything I recognized—but some part of me recoiled anyway.

Magic door. The words scraped something raw at the back of my mind.

Could Sam see something? Could she… know something?

“Sweetheart,” I said carefully, crouching beside her. “Where did you see this door?”

She blinked at me, still smiling. “I made it up. It's for Momma. She can come home when she’s done fighting the bad guy.”

I nodded slowly, swallowing. She didn’t have any idea what I was really asking. How could she?

I laughed it off, too loudly. Ruffled her hair. Tacked it to the fridge next to the others, even though my hand shook just a little.

She didn't need me being weird about it. She needed me to be safe.

By Friday, Sam started talking about her dreams. Strange ones. Men made of smoke. Stars that moved when she wasn’t looking. A woman with too many arms standing at the end of her bed, whispering.

Nightmares. Just nightmares. That’s what I said out loud, anyway.

Inside, something colder stirred. Something I had promised myself—and Hugh—I would never listen to again.

If I called my feelings real, I didn’t know what came next.

Saturday morning, I decided to tackle the laundry before the piles swallowed the whole house.

Stacey had called to remind me about Relay for Life that weekend. I didn’t answer or call her back. How could I? I didn’t want her to even get a glimmer that something was wrong with me, or the situation.

The rain hadn't let up. It drummed steadily and low against the roof, a sound that usually comforted me, but today just made the walls feel closer. Sam was curled up inside her pillow fort, whispering to Bun Bun about a daring voyage to the center of the moon. I let her be.

I turned the radio up low, found an oldies station, and started folding to Bing Crosby crooning.                                                 

Shirts, socks, Sam’s favorite unicorn pajamas. There was something soothing about it—about setting things right, one neat square at a time. As if I could rebuild order out of the loose threads and chaos.

The house smelled like wet leaves and leftover mac and cheese.

Halfway through the third basket, I reached for Sam's pink coat, crumpled at the bottom. It felt heavier than it should. Weighted.

Frowning, I shook it out. Something thudded against the floorboards.

I crouched automatically, fingers brushing over the toy-strewn floor until they closed around something smooth and warm.

A stone.

At first, that's all it looked like. A small polished stone, no bigger than a walnut. Deep green with smoky black veins threading through it, like trapped mist. It glinted faintly in the kitchen light, and for one stupid second, I almost smiled. Sam loved pretty rocks. She picked them up everywhere we went. Pockets full of gravel and wonder.

But when I turned it over, everything shifted.

Faint carvings wound across the surface. Spirals, jagged lines, tiny etched symbols that caught the light and seemed to crawl when I wasn't looking straight at them. The stone hummed against my skin—not sound, but sensation. A low, insistent vibration that crawled through my bones and settled behind my teeth.

Magic.

I swallowed hard. Tried to backtrack, to think.

When had Sam picked this up? Where?

I hadn't seen her find it.

But a slow, sour certainty twisted in my gut.

Someone had given it to her. Who? Where? We’d barely left the house all week.

Naveen. It had to be.

There was no one else. No other explanation.

I tightened my grip around the stone, and for one wild moment I thought about opened the window and throwing it out into the street and pretending none of this was happening.

Behind me, Sam’s voice floated out from her pillow fort.

"That's my lucky rock," she said happily. "It keeps me safe. So I don’t get lost."

I turned, slow and careful.

Sam peered at me over the arm of the couch, Bun Bun clutched to her chest. Her face was open, trusting, utterly certain that the world was still good and kind.

“It’s beautiful, sweetheart,” I said, my voice scraping the back of my throat. "Why don’t put it up in your room so it doesn’t get lost?”

“Okay. It’s magic.”

“You stay in your fort a little longer, alright? I'll make us some cocoa."

She grinned, ducking back into her fortress of cushions.

I wanted to ask her where she found it. But I didn’t. She looked so proud. So sure. And I couldn’t afford to make the world feel dangerous.

I leaned both hands on the counter, the stone between them, and let the truth settle heavy in my chest.

He had seen her. Touched her. Gotten close enough to hand her the stone. Maybe at the grocery store, while my back was turned to grab packages of ramen from the bottom shelf. The playground? Here, in the house, when I’d stepped outside to get the mail?

And I hadn't even seen him do it.

I didn’t think. I just moved.

The stone went into my pocket, heavy as a fist against my thigh. I kept my face neutral as I passed the living room, careful not to look at Sam, careful not to let anything bleed through.

The old work boots by the door still had a dusting of dried mud from the last time I’d convinced myself a walk would fix everything. I shoved my feet into them without bothering with socks, grabbed my jacket, and stepped into the kitchen.

I hesitated for a second, scanning the cluttered counter.

There, hanging off the oven handle, was a faded dishtowel. Pale blue, printed with tiny yellow daisies. A wedding gift, if I remembered right. One of the few things I hadn't been able to throw out after Hugh died. It still smelled faintly of lavender detergent and stubborn hope.

I pulled it down and laid it flat on the counter.

The stone sat in the center like a wound.

Careful, like it might bite, I wrapped the cloth around it. Tied it tight, the way you’d bundle something fragile. Then I rummaged under the sink until I found an old coffee can, still dusted with paint flecks from the last time Hugh and I had tried to repaint the porch.

The can was dented. Ugly. Perfect.

I tucked the stone inside, sealed the plastic lid, and pressed my hands against the top for a long moment.

There. Contained.

I shoved the can under my jacket and headed outside.

The air hit me like a slap—cold and damp after the cozy warmth of the house.

The sky hung low and soft, that gray-bright haze that meant April in Bellingham. Everything smelled like new life—earth and petals and something just shy of rot.

The backyard loomed, wilder than I remembered. Weeds were already clawing through the mulch in tight green spirals. A few stubborn crocuses had forced their way up through the dead leaves, bright and uninvited. Things Hugh and I had planted—things I thought were gone—had come back anyway.

I stepped off the porch. The mud sucked at my boots, thick and eager.

Once, it had been beautiful. Hugh and I had built it together from scratch, carving rows into the dirt with blistered hands and cheap tools, arguing about tomatoes and sunflowers, laughing until our sides hurt.

It had been the envy of the neighborhood—thick with snap peas and basil, fat pumpkins curling under vines, sunflowers taller than the fence line.

After he got sick, I tried to keep it up. I told myself I could. I told the neighbors I didn’t need help when they offered, faces politely turned away from the creeping weeds, from the rot they didn’t want to name.

"I'll get to it," I said.

But I never did.

I hadn’t set foot in the backyard since his funeral.

Now, the garden was a mess of dead stalks and weeds clawing through the thawed mud. The paths were gone, swallowed by time and rain. The fence sagged under the weight of a climbing vine I didn't remember planting.

I waded through it all, mud sucking at my boots, pulling me deeper with every step.

At the farthest corner, where Hugh and I once planned a vegetable bed that never got planted, I dropped to my knees.

I dug with my bare hands, clawing at the wet earth. The mud was cold and thick, clogging under my nails, caking my arms and knees. It didn't matter.

When the hole was deep enough, I pulled the coffee can from under my jacket.

I placed it into the ground carefully, the blue cloth and yellow daisies peeking through the crack in the lid. Letting go of the dish towel felt like letting go of Hugh—one more thread cut, one more piece of him returned to the earth. But if anything could neutralize whatever magic the stone carried, it was that: the quiet, steady love we’d built together.

Silly. But I needed to believe in something pure.

I paused, hands hovering over the dirt. My throat burned.

I whispered a prayer. Not the kind I said in church, but the desperate kind. The kind you say when no one but God to hear you.

Please, God. Keep her safe. I’ll do anything. Give anything. Just keep her safe.

Then I pushed the dirt back over it, fast and clumsy.

Buried it deep.

When it was done, I sat back on my heels, breathing hard.

The rain dripped from the hood of my jacket. The ruined garden stretched around me, silent and watchful.

I wiped my hands on my sweatpants and forced myself to stand.