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I head for the door, ready to get some fresh air and explore the woods around the cottage, and stop.

The closet door is open.

I know I closed it. I remember doing it, the small, ordinary satisfaction of the latch catching after I hung the last of my clothes.

I cross the room and shut it again, firmer this time. Old houses settle. Doors swing on their own. Nothing about this house has felt like it means me any harm. If anything, it feels like it’s making room.

Whatever it is can wait. There’s a whole afternoon of daylight left, and I’d rather spend it outside than standing in a bedroom questioning a door.

I grab my jacket and head out through the front, the screen door swinging shut behind me with a bang.

Outside, the cool air smells like pine and wet earth. Spring is still deciding whether it wants to arrive yet. Right beyond the tree line, I see a creek, the water catching the last of the afternoon light where it curves past the edge of the property. Something about it, the steady and constant rhythm of the water, makes this place feel even more like somewhere I could actually belong.

As I stand there, I find myself humming, some tune I don’t recognize, and can’t for the life of me figure out where I picked it up. It fits the sound of the creek too well, like the two of them were written for each other and brush that off too, the same easy, settled peace still sitting in my chest.

Whatever this feeling is, wherever it’s coming from, I’ve decided I don’t want to interrupt it by asking too many questions.

I start toward the water without really deciding to, drawn by nothing more than curiosity and the pull of the moving water on a quiet afternoon. I make it halfway there before something makes me stop.

I couldn’t tell you what, exactly. No sound, no warning, nothing I could point to and call a reason. Just a sudden, certain feeling that I’ve gone far enough, that whatever’s past this point isn’t mine to walk into today.

Standing there a while longer, I listen to the creek before turning and walking back into the cottage.

Everything from my old life is gone. All of it.

Yet I don’t feel homesick.

I only feel peace.

Raven

I feel her before I understand what I’m feeling. Something shifts the day she moves in. It’s as if a door opens somewhere in whatever’s left of me that’s been closed since the day I died. One moment I’m tethered in this space and the next, I can feel the cottage again.

Really feel it.

My favorite blanket is folded on the back of the couch, the one Samuel wrapped me in when he carried me to the creek. My books on the windowsill. The floorboard just inside the door that squeaked every time I stepped on it. The one Samuel never got around to fixing because I told him I liked the sound of it.

And there’s her.

A woman, moving through my rooms, careful and quiet in a way that surprises me. She’s careful and quiet in a way that surprises me. When she steps on the creaky floorboard, she smiles with appreciation. I don’t know how to feel about it. I expected fury, maybe or grief. Instead, there’s something softer, kinder, almost like relief.

She keeps everything exactly where she finds it. Our mismatched mugs. The half-used spices, my books on the windowsill, all handled with a delicate reverence, like she accepts the order and doesn’t want to be the one to undo it.

I follow her into the bedroom, some instinct pulling me there the same way her own feet pull her.

That’s when she finds it.

She sinks onto the edge of the bed and picks it up. Something in me goes very still.

The book.

The one Samuel was reading to me in the last few weeks. The one he read a chapter of every night while I was too tired to hold it myself. The one he never finished because there was no reason left to finish the story if I wasn’t there anymore to hear the end.

She turns it over in her hand, and I feel a pull toward this stranger who’s holding an unfinished piece of a life I didn’t get to finish either.

The pages fall open on their own, right to the spot Samuel left off.

That was me.