Skye
Something wet clicked behind her eyelids.
Not a sound exactly—more like the moment a screen refreshed and pretended nothing had changed.
Her eyes opened.
Light hit her full in the face. Clean, bright, angled through tall windows that had been scrubbed recently enough for the glass to look new. The kind of light that made dust motes visible and harmless. The kind of light that belonged to mornings where the worst thing that could happen was a pen running out.
Skye blinked hard.
Once. Twice. Three times—because sometimes the first two were lies and the third was the one that stuck.
A classroom.
Mr Evans’ classroom.
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The room had colour in it. Posters with cartoon neurons and cheerful diagrams of the water cycle. A paper chain someone had made for Christmas that had never been taken down properly, still drooping in one corner like a tired smile. A whiteboard filled with neat writing and little underlines that made the words feel friendlier than they had any right to.
The air smelled of dry erase markers and warm radiator dust. Someone’s shampoo—cheap strawberry—floated from the row ahead. Chairs scraped quietly as people shifted their weight. A ruler tapped, once, twice, against a desk, the rhythm absent-minded. Normal.
Skye’s throat tightened anyway.
Because normality was not gentle when it arrived like this.
She sat up slowly, heart thumping as if it had been running while she slept. Her cheek felt faintly numb. She lifted two fingers and pressed them to her face to check the shape of it, like that would verify she was… here. Whole. Not dropped through a crack.
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Her desk was exactly the same as always: the carved initials in the corner, the faint dent where she pressed too hard when she got stuck on a question, the smear of blue ink she’d never managed to clean fully. Her exercise book lay open, page half-filled with her handwriting. A grid of ruled lines. Numbers. Notes. The small comfort of structure.
She looked down at the writing and her stomach unclenched a fraction.
It was hers.
She had been afraid—without knowing she was afraid—that she’d look down and find someone else’s.
She swallowed. Her mouth tasted like chalk.
A laugh lifted from somewhere across the room. Two boys at the back, shoulders hunched together, sharing a private joke behind their hands. It wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t even about her. It was just… school.
Skye’s eyes moved, scanning, because her body didn’t know how not to.
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Ben sat two seats over.
His hair was too neat, like his mum had been in a hurry and made it worse by trying. He was leaning back in his chair, one leg hooked around the front. His pencil was balanced across his knuckles. He caught Skye looking and lifted his eyebrows like: you alive again?
The absurdity of it hit her so fast she almost laughed. Almost.
Ben’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. More like acknowledgement. Yes. This is the world. This is how it is. Keep up.
Skye’s shoulders sagged with relief so sharp it stung.
The parish hall—gone. The carpet. The lights. The buzzing. The voices. The name she’d screamed. The wrong voice inside her mouth. The smell of wet coats and tea and panic.
All of it, gone.
She let herself breathe. She counted without meaning to.
In for four.
Hold for two.
Out for six.
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Her lungs behaved. No burn. No tightness. No scratchy warning in the back of her throat.
It had been a dream.
It had to be.
A horrible, vivid, too-real dream that had knotted itself around her ribs and tried to stay.
Skye looked at the window again. Beyond the glass, the playground was wet from last night’s rain. The tree by the fence was still there, bare branches shaking off droplets in the wind. A group of kids in PE kit trotted past, laughing too loudly because they were allowed to. A teacher in a high-vis jacket herded them with exaggerated despair.
Normal.
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She felt her face move before she could stop it.
A smile.
Small. Private. Like she’d found something she’d lost.
Mr Evans’ voice landed over the room.
“Skye.”
Her smile snapped off like an elastic band.
Mr Evans stood at the front with a workbook open in his hand and a look that was half resignation, half amusement. He had a mug on his desk with a stupid pun on it—something about teaching and coffee—and he always pretended not to notice when people laughed at it.
He looked directly at her.
Skye’s skin went hot.
“Yes?” she managed.
“You’ve been sleeping,” Mr Evans said. Not accusing. Stating. Like he was reading the weather.
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Skye’s fingers curled against the edge of her desk. The wood felt solid. Reliable. “Sorry,” she said quickly. “I— I had a bad dream.”
A few heads turned. Not many. Not enough to become an event.
Mr Evans sighed, heavy in the way adults did when they were trying to be patient with a kid who made the world harder by accident. Then—because he was Mr Evans—his mouth softened.
“Well,” he said, “since you are, historically, a good student who does actually study, I’m going to pretend I didn’t see it.”
A small laugh, scattered.
Ben made a noise that might have been approval.
Skye’s shoulders eased.
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Mr Evans tapped the workbook. “But you’re going to rescue your dignity by answering the question I just asked.”
Skye blinked. “Can you… repeat it, please?”
Mr Evans’ eyes narrowed in mock suffering. “Honestly, Skye Harper, you are going to be the reason I age prematurely.”
He turned back to the board, lifted a marker.
Skye watched the marker squeak against the whiteboard and felt the sound settle in her teeth. She hated that squeak. It made her skin itch.
Mr Evans wrote one line, carefully.
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Then he faced the class again, marker cap clicking back on.
“Right,” he said. “So. We’ve been discussing memory.”
He said it like a normal topic. Like it belonged on a Tuesday morning with damp socks and half-finished homework.
Skye’s stomach tightened.
Mr Evans’ gaze returned to her, warm, teacherly.
“Between the time you died,” he said, “and the time you came back—do you remember what it was like?”
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For a second, the room did not change.
For a second, Skye thought she’d misheard.
Her brain tried to reorganise the sentence into something that belonged to school.
Between the time you did and the time you came—no. Wrong.
Between the time you lied and the time you came—no.
The words stayed where they were.
Died.
Came back.
Skye’s fingers went cold.
“What?” she whispered, and even to her own ears the sound came out wrong—thin at the edges, as if it had been scraped.
The fluorescent lights above her buzzed.
Not the normal buzz.
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A harder pitch. A needle. A vibration that made her molars ache.
The posters on the walls seemed to dim slightly, like someone had turned the saturation down. The cheerful cartoon neurons looked less like cartoons and more like something dissected.
Skye’s eyes flicked to Ben.
Ben was watching her.
His pencil had stopped spinning.
His expression was blank in a way she’d never seen on him. Not bored. Not neutral. Blank like a screen.
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He nudged her foot under the desk with the toe of his shoe.
Not gentle.
A prompt.
“Don’t be dumb,” Ben said quietly. Not with Ben’s usual voice. The words were the same, but the rhythm was wrong, too measured. “Answer the question.”
Skye stared.
Her heart started to hammer. Hard. Loud enough that it swallowed the room.
“This is… school,” she said, more to herself than to anyone. “This is Mr Evans’ classroom.”
Mr Evans smiled.
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It was the same smile he used when someone got something wrong and he didn’t want them to feel stupid.
But it didn’t reach his eyes.
“Is it?” he asked.
Skye’s breath caught and she heard the first small whistle of tightness in her chest like a warning. Her lungs tightened as if they’d been reminded they could.
She forced air in slowly.
In.
Hold.
Out.
It didn’t settle.
She tasted metal.
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“Wait,” Skye said, voice climbing despite her attempt to clamp it down. “I thought— I thought it was… all a dream. The— the dead thing. The five years. My… my family—”
Her tongue stumbled on the word family as if it had thorns.
Mr Evans tilted his head. Interested. Patient. Like he was letting her talk herself into the correct answer.
Ben’s foot nudged her again, sharper.
“Come on,” Ben murmured. “You know. You know.”
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Skye’s eyes stung.
“No,” she said, and she hated that it sounded like pleading. “Why isn’t this real? Why can’t this be real?”
A ripple moved through the class.
Not murmured sympathy.
A soft, coordinated breath of amusement.
Skye looked around and felt her skin crawl.
The other students were there. Faces she knew. Names she could line up with desks and haircuts and the shape of their laughs. But they weren’t looking at her like classmates.
They were looking at her like an audience.
Then, as one, they began to clap.
Not loud. Not celebratory.
The slow clap people did on telly to be cruel.
Each clap landed like a slap against the air.
Mr Evans’ smile widened.
“Bravo, Skye,” he said. “Bravo.”
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The clapping continued. Even the boy at the back who always fell asleep in class. Even the girl who chewed her pen until it splintered.
“Anyone,” Mr Evans continued smoothly, “would figure it out in seconds. You figured it out in… what? Two minutes?”
He glanced at his watch as if timing her.
“I suppose you really wanted it to be real.”
Skye’s throat closed.
Her hands shook against the desk.
She tried to speak and only a thin rasp came out. Her brain was trying to do the thing it always did when she was overwhelmed—sort, categorise, find the rule, find the pattern, find the exit.
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But the pattern was the problem.
She forced herself to look at Mr Evans properly.
The man at the front of the class had Mr Evans’ face the way a mask had a face.
The eyes were wrong. Too still. Too knowing.
And his posture—Mr Evans slouched sometimes, casual, human, hips leaning into the desk.
This one didn’t lean.
This one held himself as if he didn’t need furniture.
Skye’s voice came out steadier than she felt. “You’re not Mr Evans.”
The clapping stopped.
Silence dropped into the room like a heavy coat.
Mr Evans—not Mr Evans—blinked slowly, as if pleased she’d finally said something interesting.
“No,” he said. “I’m not.”
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He stepped away from the board, slow, measured, and the sound of his shoes on the linoleum was too loud. The classroom felt wider than it should. The edges of the room seemed to pull away.
He stopped beside Skye’s desk.
Close enough that she smelled something under the marker and radiator dust.
Something like cold air from deep underground.
He smiled again.
“Now,” he said softly, “I need to ask you another question. If that’s okay with you, Ms Harper.”
Skye looked at Ben.
Ben nodded.
Yes.
As if the nod had been rehearsed.
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Her lungs tightened again. A thin wheeze traced the back of her throat. Panic tried to jump straight to screaming.
She swallowed.
She nodded once, because she couldn’t find another move.
“Do you know,” the man asked, “why you don’t remember the gap between your death and your return?”
Skye shook her head. It felt like the only honest thing left.
The man’s smile faded into something almost gentle.
“Because when you experience what every spirit experiences,” he said, “your consciousness breaks.”
Skye went very still.
The words didn’t sound like religion. They sounded like procedure.
She felt Ben’s hand land on the back of her chair.
Not supportive.
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Claiming.
Skye’s breath hitched. “I don’t— I don’t understand.”
“You do,” Ben said softly, and now his voice had that same wrong rhythm. “You just don’t want to.”
Skye tried to push back from her desk, to stand, to run—
Ben’s hand snapped forward and gripped the side of her head.
Hard.
Fingers threading into her hair, tilting her face toward the front.
Skye made a sound that tore out of her. “Stop—!”
Her hands flew up, clawing at his wrist, trying to pull him off. Her nails scratched skin. Ben didn’t react. His grip didn’t shift.
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She kicked the leg of her chair. It scraped.
The classroom didn’t care.
Mr Evans—the thing wearing him—came closer and placed two fingers against Skye’s forehead.
Lightly.
Like testing a bruise.
The touch burned cold.
Skye’s whole body jolted.
“Remember,” he said.
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And the world dropped.
Not into sleep.
Into absence.
The bright classroom blinked out like a light cut at the fuse.
Darkness took its place—not the comforting dark behind closed eyes, not bedroom dark with familiar shapes and corners.
This was dark with no edges.
No up. No down.
No wall to press a hand against and say: here. I am here.
Skye stumbled, arms flailing automatically, trying to find air with her hands as if air could be held.
Her lungs seized.
She dragged in breath and it came in thin and sharp, like breathing through fabric. A wheeze scraped out of her throat. The darkness swallowed the sound.
“Mum?” she cried, and the word came out cracked, too high. “Mum—!”
Nothing answered.
Not even echo.
She ran.
Or tried to.
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Her feet hit something that wasn’t ground and wasn’t not-ground. Like running on the idea of a floor.
She couldn’t see her legs. She couldn’t see her hands unless she imagined them. When she imagined them, they appeared for a second—pale, trembling—then flickered away again like the darkness was correcting her.
She kept moving anyway because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant—
The memory hit her like a body blow.
Not pictures.
Feelings.
Time.
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The long, terrible stretch where nothing changed.
She screamed until her throat tore and then she screamed again because pain was proof she still existed. She begged. She shouted names. She promised things she didn’t understand. She apologised to everyone she’d ever been angry at. She tried to bargain like the universe was a teacher who could be reasoned with.
No one came.
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The dark didn’t punish her.
It didn’t comfort her either.
It simply didn’t notice.
Skye ran and ran and ran and the darkness stayed the same, endless and flat, like a corridor with no doors. Sometimes she tripped over something that felt like her own fear. Sometimes she hit nothing so hard it jolted her teeth.
She couldn’t find her inhaler. She couldn’t even be sure she had pockets.
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Her chest tightened until every breath was a fight.
She clawed at her throat. “Please,” she gasped. “Please, someone—”
The darkness didn’t answer.
And that was the worst part.
Not monsters.
Not pain.
The absence of any response at all.
Forgotten.
Not actively. Not cruelly.
Just… not included.
Skye’s legs gave out. She dropped to her knees on the not-floor and folded in on herself, arms wrapped around her ribs as if holding her own body together could keep her from dissolving.
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She sobbed.
It didn’t change the dark.
She sobbed until the sound thinned into a dry, choked wheeze and her lungs burned and still the dark did not shift.
Then, somewhere far away—or maybe inside her—she heard a voice.
Not the classroom.
Not Mr Evans.
A different voice, deep and raw, threaded with grief that had teeth.
“I won’t let go,” it said.
And Skye realised, with a cold lurch of understanding, that she was not alone in the dark.
Not comforted.
Not rescued.
Connected.
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Two presences bleeding into each other like ink in water.
Two sets of fear.
Two sets of loss.
And the darkness, patient as ever, waited for her to remember more.
——————————-
Meanwhile…
The vestry had been stripped down to the bare minimum a sick child required: a borrowed camp bed pushed against the wall, a thin blanket that didn’t belong to the church, a bowl of cold water that had been refilled too many times to look clean, and a chair dragged close enough that whoever sat in it could pretend they weren’t keeping watch.
Skye lay on her side, face turned toward the wall, lashes damp and stuck together at the corners. Her skin had that wrong sheen fever gave it—too bright, too tight, like the heat was coming from somewhere deeper than skin. Every few minutes her lips moved.
“No.”
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It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t even fully a word. It was a refusal that kept happening, over and over, as if her body had found one button to press and could not stop.
Alice sat on the chair with both feet planted flat on the floor, hands clasped so hard her fingers ached. She watched Skye’s throat move with each swallow, watched the shallow hitch of breath that made her own chest hurt in sympathy. Every time Skye whispered no, Alice flinched like she’d been tapped on the shoulder.
Simon stood at the foot of the bed, jacket still on, tie loosened but not removed. He’d been pacing in lines too short to count as pacing, turning on the same spot, stopping, starting, stopping again. His phone sat dead in his hand like an accusation. No service in the vestry. No permission even if there had been.
Alice had tried to wipe Skye’s forehead earlier and Skye had jerked away without waking, the movement sharp enough to make Alice freeze with the cloth half-raised. Now she didn’t touch unless Skye’s skin went visibly clammy and she couldn’t not.
Outside the door, the parish hall had thinned. The early, jagged energy had burnt itself out into exhaustion, leaving only the people who couldn’t bring themselves to leave the building where the impossible had happened.
Father Mallory moved through what remained with the quiet authority of a man shepherding grief away from teeth.
He found Maureen by the coat rack, shoulders caved, hands twisting the strap of her bag until her knuckles went pale. Her eyes were red and raw, not from one cry but from the kind of crying that kept starting again in smaller, shameful bursts.
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“I didn’t mean—” she began, and the words fell apart before they could finish. “I didn’t know it would—”
“You didn’t,” Mallory said, firm enough to stop her spiralling. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded tired. “Maureen, none of this was something you could have foreseen.”
Maureen shook her head hard, as if she could shake the image out of her mind. “I made it worse.”
“You added heat to a room that was already struggling to breathe,” he said. Honest. Not forgiving her into comfort. “And you shouldn’t have. But what happened to her—what happened in that moment—was bigger than words.”
Maureen’s mouth trembled. “Is she—”
“She has a pulse,” Mallory said. “She’s being watched. We’ve called an ambulance. They’re on their way.”
Maureen wiped her face with the heel of her hand, leaving a streak that made her look younger and more lost. “Please,” she said, voice catching. “If she wakes up… tell her I’m sorry.”
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Mallory nodded once.
Maureen swallowed. “And—” She hesitated, eyes flicking to the vestry door like she was afraid it might hear. “Tell her she’s… a reminder. That something exists. That… maybe I wasn’t stupid to keep hoping.”
Mallory’s expression tightened for a fraction, not with disbelief—something more complicated, like a door he didn’t want to open.
“I will tell her,” he said anyway.
Maureen let that land. Then she managed the smallest, broken smile and pushed through the main doors into the storm, shoulders hunched as if bracing for judgement from the night itself.
Mallory watched her go. The rain hammered the stone steps, wind forcing it sideways. The church’s old windows rattled in their frames like bones.
He turned and found Ben near the hatch, pressed close to his mother’s side as if proximity could prevent loss. Katherine’s cheeks were wet; she’d been trying to hide it and failing. Ben wasn’t hiding anything. His face was scrunched tight with panic and anger, the way children looked when adults couldn’t fix what they were supposed to fix.
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Mallory crouched slightly so he wasn’t speaking down at him.
“What is it, Ben?”
Ben blinked hard, swallowed, blinked again. “We only just got her back,” he said, and his voice did what it had done earlier—cracked under the weight of being honest. “And now we might lose her again.”
Katherine made a soft sound behind him, a plea disguised as breath.
Mallory kept his tone steady. “We aren’t going to lose her.”
Ben stared at him like he didn’t believe in promises anymore. “How do you know?”
Mallory didn’t rush to fill the silence. “Because there are people in that room who will not allow it,” he said finally. “And because you and your mum need to rest. You can’t hold her up by refusing sleep.”
Katherine nodded, wiping her face with a tissue that had dissolved into lint. “Your dad will be here soon,” she told Ben, voice tight. “He’s coming with Linda and Jolie. He’ll pick us up, alright?”
Ben’s head jerked, stubborn. “I want to stay.”
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“And you want to help,” Katherine said softly, catching his gaze the way she used to when he was small and about to run into a road. “But there’s nothing you can do for her right now. Let her rest.”
Ben’s jaw clenched. Then, small: “Can I say goodbye?”
Mallory glanced toward the vestry door. The rule in this building had become its own kind of discipline: minimise the noise. Minimise the witnesses. Keep the air usable.
He nodded.
Ben walked to the door and knocked once, then again—gentle, controlled.
Alice opened it almost immediately, like she’d been waiting for the knock.
Her eyes were swollen. Ben’s were too. For a second neither of them spoke. The storm pushed sound through the cracks in the building and made the church feel less like shelter and more like a ship.
Ben stepped forward and Alice pulled him into a hug that wasn’t careful. It was desperate. Ben held on like he needed to prove he was still solid.
“She’ll be okay,” Alice whispered into his hair, as much for herself as for him. “We called an ambulance. They’ll get here. Even in this.”
Ben pulled back, wiping his face with his sleeve. He didn’t argue. He just slipped past Alice into the room.
Skye lay unchanged, mouth moving faintly.
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“No,” she breathed. “No…”
Ben approached the bed like it might bite him. He lowered himself carefully to the edge of the camp bed, as if the slightest wrong movement would snap whatever thread was holding her.
“Skye,” he said, voice shaking. He swallowed, tried again. “Skye. You’re my best friend.”
Skye didn’t respond. Her brow tightened for a moment, like the word friend hurt.
Ben’s hands fumbled in his pocket. He pulled out a small compass—old brass, scratched, not expensive but loved. He took Skye’s limp hand and placed it into her palm, closing her fingers gently around it like teaching a body what to do.
“My grandad gave me that,” Ben whispered. “He said if I ever got lost—properly lost—I should use it to find my way home.”
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He sniffed hard, furious at his own tears. “It never failed him.”
Ben leaned closer, careful not to touch her face. “So it’s not allowed to fail you. Okay? Not you.”
Skye’s lips moved again.
“No.”
Ben flinched, eyes bright. He didn’t let go of her hand. He just pressed his own fingers over hers and held, as if weight could anchor her.
Then he stood, wiped his face again, and left without looking back because if he did he wouldn’t be able to go.
Alice watched him go from the doorway, shoulders trembling. Katherine took Ben’s hand immediately in the hall, squeezing hard enough to be felt.
Mallory closed the vestry door gently once Ben was out, sealing the room back into its fragile quiet.
A few minutes later, when the parish hall had emptied to the hush of stacked chairs and cold tea, Mallory sat alone at the edge of the nave with his hands clasped, not in prayer exactly. Thinking had the same posture.
The storm had intensified. Wind shoved against the church doors and made the old building groan like a living thing.
Simon came out of the vestry with the careful gait of someone stepping away from a bedside, reluctant to leave even for a minute. He paused when he saw Mallory, then crossed the aisle and sat on the pew a few feet away, not too close. Respectful. Wary of needing too much.
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“Father,” Simon said quietly. “You look… troubled.”
Mallory didn’t take his eyes off the altar. The candles there were small and stubborn in the draft. “Just thinking.”
Simon let out a short breath, almost a laugh without humour. “Yeah. I’ve been doing that a lot today.”
Mallory turned his head slightly. “What troubles you, Simon?”
Simon stared down at his hands, fingers flexing as if they needed a task. When he spoke, the words came out flat at first—military-flat, the way people spoke when they weren’t ready for their own voice to break.
“When she died,” he said, “I became someone I didn’t recognise.”
Mallory didn’t interrupt.
Simon swallowed. “I found… distraction. I left Linda alone to carry it. I told myself I was surviving. I was just… leaving.”
His jaw tightened. “And now she’s here, and I keep thinking: I don’t get to lose her twice. I don’t get to fail twice.”
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Mallory’s gaze softened, but only slightly. “You’re scared.”
Simon’s eyes flicked up. “Yes.”
A beat. Then, quieter: “And grateful. Every second she’s breathing I—” He stopped, because saying it out loud would make it real in a way he wasn’t sure he could stand. “I thank God,” he finished anyway, rough.
Mallory rested a hand briefly on Simon’s shoulder. The contact was simple. Human.
Then he withdrew, and the withdrawal had meaning.
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Mallory said.
Simon frowned. “What do you mean?”
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Mallory inhaled slowly, as if choosing whether to open a door he couldn’t close. “In the last few hours,” he said, “things have happened that sit badly with what I know of miracles.”
Simon’s mouth twitched. “Father, she came back from the dead.”
Mallory’s expression didn’t shift. “And then she seized. She spoke a name she doesn’t know.” He glanced toward the vestry door. “Jack relayed an identity on the phone to me. Elias Marlowe.”
Simon’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, Linda told me about him, but do you know him?.”
“I’ve met him,” Mallory said. “On occasion alongside Margaret. Withdrawn. Polite. Always at the edge of rooms. And”—Mallory’s voice dropped—“old in a way his face doesn’t show.”
Simon leaned back slightly, uneasy. “How old.”
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Mallory’s jaw tightened once. “Old enough that records don’t make sense. Old enough that, if the stories attached to him are true like Jack has found, he should not be alive.”
The storm rattled the windows again, harder, like punctuation.
Simon stared at the altar, trying to make the idea fit into something. “Maybe—maybe it’s just… coincidence. People say things in seizures.”
“Sometimes,” Mallory agreed. “And sometimes a name is a thread.”
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Simon looked back at him. “What are you saying?”
Mallory’s eyes lifted, not to the crucifix, but to the shadows above the rafters where the light didn’t reach properly. “I’m saying I don’t know what moved her back into this world,” he said. “But it didn’t do it gently.”
Simon’s throat worked. “If it wasn’t God—”
Mallory didn’t answer immediately. He listened, head tilted slightly, like he was tracking a sound beneath the storm.
Then, faint at first, the wail of a siren cut through the rain.
Simon stood on instinct.
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Alice appeared in the aisle, hair damp as if she’d been at the door already, eyes wide. Mallory rose more slowly, but his posture had sharpened.
The siren grew louder, then closer, then abruptly muffled as the vehicle pulled up right outside the main doors.
When they opened the doors, the storm threw itself into the church.
An ambulance sat on the steps, lights bleeding red-blue into wet stone. Two doctors in coats that were already soaked moved quickly, guiding someone down the steps between them.
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An elderly woman, small but unyielding, her face pale under the harsh lights. Her breath came shallow. One doctor’s hand supported her elbow; the other hovered at her back, ready for her to fold.
Mallory stepped forward. Simon did too, reflexive, as if the church had become a triage point and he didn’t know how to be anything else.
Alice froze.
Recognition hit her like a physical force.
It’s Margaret.
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Margaret lifted her head, rain streaking down her cheeks, hair plastered to her scalp. Her eyes—sharp despite exhaustion—found Alice immediately.
For a second, the storm seemed to pause, as if listening.
“Hello, sweetheart,” Margaret aid, voice thin but unmistakably steady.
Alice’s mouth opened and nothing came out.
Margaret’s gaze slid past her toward the vestry door.
“I’m here,” she said simply, “to see Skye.”72Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCHa24zvuju
and then Add to home screen.