Chapter one hundred and fifteen

Chapter one hundred and fifteen
Vivienne & Emeline

The house has grown smaller, though the walls haven’t moved.

Perhaps it’s the way Emeline lingers now—no longer a shadow flitting through corridors, but a presence. She sits across from me at the kitchen table in the mornings, her hands cupped around a glass of water she never seems to drink. She follows me to the garden, her silence hanging like a second atmosphere.

At first, it unnerved me—the way she watched me, as if weighing the measure of my grief, as if studying it for cracks. But then I realized: it was not grief she watched. It was me.

“You don’t sleep,” she said tonight, her voice low, almost tender. “I hear you moving through the rooms.”

I wanted to deny it, but her gaze pinned me.

“And you?” I asked.

She tilted her head, hair falling across her cheek. “I dream. But I don’t think they’re mine.”

The admission lodged itself inside me, heavy and unyielding. I thought of Edward’s sketches, the hidden rooms, the museum swelling with secrets. I thought of Marlowe’s questions, his suspicion. And I wondered: if Emeline’s dreams are borrowed, then from whom?

We sat in the lamplight, two women bound by absence—of sleep, of clarity, of truth. And yet there was a tether between us, almost maternal, though not entirely. She leaned closer, her shoulder brushing mine, a quiet contact that felt deliberate.

I let it linger.

Because in that moment, it seemed better to share the silence with her than to return to my own.