The house had grown quieter since Amara's fall, quieter, and heavier. The kind of silence that didn't rest but lingered, like dust in corners no one dared to clean. Mrs. Harding felt it each time her heels clicked against the marble floors. She moved with precision, not out of habit, but necessity. The Whitmore estate demanded order even when everything inside it was quietly unraveling.
She stopped at Amara's door, listening. Nothing. Just the faint buzz of life beneath still skin.
Inside, Amara remained motionless, eyes open, but vacant. Mrs. Harding approached with the same grace she had carried through decades of service, though her eyes softened more in this room than in any other. She no longer checked vitals. She watched for subtler things now—the flick of a finger, a shift in breath, a twitch at the corner of the mouth.
Signs of return.
But today, there was none. Only that hollow stare.
....
Caden stood a few feet away, frozen in the doorway like a boy locked out of his own home.
The smell of antiseptic and the faintest trace of lavender clung to the room, soft and sterile. He didn't dare step farther. The air inside felt sacred somehow, like walking into a chapel built from grief and guilt.
He hadn't dared touch her again. After that first moment—when her eyes had fluttered open and met his, only to close just as quickly—it was as though a door had creaked open in the distance and slammed shut just as fast. He had seen something in those eyes: recognition, maybe. Pain. But also, the unmistakable message that she wasn't ready.
Maybe she never would be.
Still, he came every day. With nothing to offer but the weight of his regret and the throb of unspoken apologies. His voice was raw from all the things he couldn't say aloud, from repeating "I'm sorry" in his mind until it lost all meaning. And each day, when he turned away from her door and walked the hall alone, he left a little smaller. A little more broken.
But he kept coming.
He had stopped sleeping. Every time he tried, her image came back: crumpled on the bathroom floor, skin pale and damp, lips barely moving, breath shallow. Her name had choked in his throat that night, and it hadn't left since. It played on repeat—Amara, Amara, please—a prayer, a punishment.
He hadn't hurt her with fists or fury. But with silence. With the cracks in his attention. With the blind assumption that she was okay simply because she smiled when spoken to, or stood when called.
And he couldn't take it back.
His eyes shifted toward Mrs. Harding, who stood quietly at Amara's bedside. Her back was to him, shoulders square, movements practiced. She smoothed the edge of the blanket with the same gentle firmness she used for everything—tucking in linens, reprimanding unruly staff, pouring tea. But there was something in her posture today—tighter, more cautious. As if even she wasn't sure what came next.
Caden wanted to ask her the question that had nested in his chest for days. Do you think she hates me?
But he didn't.
He wasn't sure he could survive the answer. The not knowing was torture, yes—but it still allowed for hope. Hope was painful, but certainty might be worse.
"She won't talk to me," he murmured, his voice rough from sleepless nights and guilt that wouldn't let up.
Mrs. Harding paused, then glanced over her shoulder, her eyes unreadable. "She isn't talking to anyone."
Caden's shoulders slumped, the last bit of air in him deflating. "Do you think she ever will?"
"I think," she said, her voice calm but laced with something gentler than usual, "she is still deciding whether she wants to return to us."
He furrowed his brow. "Return?"
"She's caught in a place between," the housekeeper continued. "Between presence and absence. Between staying and leaving. And we can't pull her out. She has to choose to come back."
Caden's gaze dropped to the floor, where sunlight stretched across the wood like the bars of a quiet cage. He couldn't bring himself to look at Amara—not with the ghost of her weight still in his arms, not with the shadow of her silence haunting every word he spoke.
"And if she doesn't?" he asked, almost too softly.
Mrs. Harding didn't answer right away. Instead, she dipped the cloth into the cool basin, wrung it out with clinical grace, and pressed it to Amara's forehead—more gesture than necessity now, but still full of care.
"She looks like someone who's already left," Caden whispered, barely able to speak the words.
Mrs. Harding's hand paused mid-motion. For a moment, the air between them held something heavy—shared, unspeakable.
Then she sighed. A slow, tired exhale that came from a place deeper than breath.
"Maybe," she admitted. "But there's one thing I know after all these years…"
She straightened, looked toward the door, and then down at Amara's motionless frame.
"Grief makes ghosts out of the living," she said quietly. "But even ghosts can remember who they were."
...….
Inside Amara, it was neither light nor dark.
It was just empty.
There was no ground, no ceiling, no edges to the silence. Just the weightless sensation of floating in a hollow too vast to comprehend. Days passed like shadows behind closed eyes—quiet, uncounted. She was aware in the way the sea is aware of the moon: distant, detached, moved by forces it no longer questions.
She heard things.
The whisper of her name, trailing off like smoke. The soft click of the doorknob turning, again and again, like a ritual. The uneven breath Caden tried to steady each time he stood by her bedside—filled with guilt and things too late to fix. The gentle scrape of Mrs. Harding's chair legs against the floor, the creak of wood as she sat beside her, hour after hour.
But she didn't feel them.
The sounds reached her ears like echoes through glass, muffled by layers of stillness she could no longer peel back. Her body had become something separate from herself—a shell, light and airless, limbs lying where they were placed. Her heart beat because it had to. Not because it wanted to. Not because she cared if it did.
There were no dreams. No images when she closed her eyes, only blankness. She did not want to remember. What was there to revisit? The past was a locked room in a house she had burned down. Every corner held a version of herself she no longer recognized.
They called her Amara.
The name lingered in the room like perfume—soft, familiar, meaningless. She heard it spoken gently, sometimes pleadingly. But it bounced off her like rain on glass. It belonged to someone else.
Amara
That was who she had been.
The girl who laughed too loudly in the wrong moments, who left hand-written notes under pillows, who believed that people—broken or not—could always find their way back to love. That girl had danced barefoot under moonlight, spilled secrets over shared desserts, cried when books ended, and believed in second chances with the desperate, hopeful intensity only fools possess.
That girl had died.
Somewhere between the betrayal and the fever, somewhere in the hours no one noticed her slipping, that girl had unraveled. The warmth had leaked out of her body, and what was left behind wasn't a person anymore. It was a whisper, a residue, a breath left hanging in an empty room.
The shell that remained felt nothing.
Not anger.
Not sorrow.
Not fear.
Nothing.
And yet… every so often—when Caden's voice cracked like glass at the edge of an apology, or when Mrs. Harding gently turned her face toward the sunlight spilling through the window—something flickered.
Not emotion. No. That was far too heavy, far too human.
But memory.
Faint, like a breeze stirring dust in a forgotten attic. A flash of color. The scent of rain. The way Caden once said her name like it was a promise. The sound of her own laugh, high and unguarded, echoing from a world she no longer believed in.
And that—
That was almost worse than the numbness.
Because memory meant there had once been something worth feeling.
Something she had lost.
Something she might never find again.
And for the first time in the stillness, that almost made her ache.
...….
Mr. Whitmore sat in his study, listening as the rain tapped steadily against the windows. He didn't visit her that day. He had said his piece, and perhaps he'd said it too soon. The housekeeper had told him gently that Amara was not a soldier to be commanded back to the battlefield. She was a child who'd been broken. And even the strongest china, once cracked, didn't ring the same when struck again.
...…
That evening, Caden didn't enter her room.
He sat outside the door on the floor, back against the wall, knees to his chest. Mrs. Harding passed him without a word, only a look. The boy was unraveling. And yet, he stayed.
Inside, Amara blinked once. Slowly. Her eyes, empty and dull, flicked toward the closed door.
And though her lips did not move, her breath did.
Just once.
A deeper inhale. A single, small sigh.
It was nothing.
And yet, to Mrs. Harding—who stood quietly by the lamp watching her—it was everything.