Chapter one hundred and twenty

Chapter one hundred and twenty
Marlowe

The file is gone.

I know it was here—my handwriting, my notes, the photographs that never made sense—but the drawer is empty, the cabinet yawns like a mouth that has already swallowed its secret.

I sit in the half-light of my office, the clock ticking far louder than it should. Each tick drives a nail deeper into the silence.

Maybe I misplaced it.

Maybe I imagined it.

Maybe there was never a file at all.

But then why does my hand still ache as if it has been clutching a pen for hours? Why do my fingertips smell faintly of old paper and dust, as though I’ve been rifling through something that no longer exists?

I push back from the desk. The walls feel too close, the ceiling too low, the air too thin—just as it did when I first stood in the Langford museum. That place. That building that was more a cage than a gallery.

I close my eyes and see her. Vivienne. Pale, haunted, words catching on her lips as though they had barbs. Always almost telling me something, always turning back at the last second. And Emeline, quiet as glass, her eyes steady, unblinking. Together they looked less like family and more like mirrors—two halves of something I could never parse.

I try to remember how it ended.

Did I leave them there?

Did I even go back?

The memory is slippery, like oil on water. I see corridors tightening around me, hear footsteps that never belonged to me, feel the breath of the walls themselves. I recall Vivienne’s voice saying you don’t understand, though I can’t tell if she was speaking to me or to someone else unseen.

My throat burns. I reach for the phone, for a cigarette, for anything to anchor me—but the desk is bare. My office, bare. My life, bare.

Perhaps there was never a case. Perhaps I only wandered into someone else’s grief and called it evidence.

Yet in the silence, I hear it: the faintest hum, the kind I once mistook for faulty wiring in the museum. It thrums low through the floorboards, patient, steady, alive.

I freeze.

The sound grows, almost a heartbeat. Not mine. Not the city’s. Something older, something waiting.

I whisper their names, though my lips barely form them. Vivienne. Emeline.

No answer. Only the hum.

I press my palm against the wall beside me. For a moment, impossibly, I think I feel it breathe.

And then—

Nothing.

The silence folds over me, complete.