And it’s red. Just like the one in her dream.
She runs her thumb over the gilded G, hardly worn, imagines her mother being given not one, but two. A set. She holds her breath as she peels back the cover, the air rushing out when she sees the words, the handwriting soft and full of curls, the way it was in the first pages of her journal, before the hand lost its steady grip, before the entries grew strange and broken and blotted out.
Olivia spent years poring over the riddle of her mother’s book, scrutinizing every line for clues. Now she turns through page after page, marveling at the wealth of new words.
Arthur is in such a mood today.
She flips past, finds Hannah’s name.
Hannah said that if I ruin one more dress, she’ll make me wear trousers. I told her that would be fine, so long as I could have a pair of boots to match.
Several pages later, she finds Edgar.
Something let the bird out of its cage, and now I cannot find it. Arthur says it’s lost now, and Edgar says it’s for the best, that birds like sky more than windowsills. I left the window open, hoping it would come back, and Father nearly had my head.
How strange, to see the doors flung open onto another life.
There is no mysterious “you” in these entries, no mention of moving shadows or bones with stories like marrow or voices in the dark. There are drawings, here and there, sketches of a birdcage, a rose, a pair of hands, but they are small and precise, folded in along the margins of the words, so unlike the wild, amorphous inks in the other book.
Olivia skims a dozen mundane entries—musings on how Arthur is driving Grace mad, on her mother’s absence, her father’s worsening cough. On Hannah and Edgar and the fact no one seems to notice they’re falling in love—before she snags on one.
Last night I went beyond the wall.
Olivia’s breath catches in her throat, her eyes already rushing on.
I wanted to see it for myself. I wanted to know if it was real, or if I’m expected to grow and wither here for nothing more than superstition. Wouldn’t that be funny? If it were just a story, passed from one Prior to the next until all of us forgot that it was fiction? All of us, given to the same mad delusion?
That big wide world, and us just sitting here, staring at a wall.
Father calls it a prison, and we the keepers, but that is a lie. We are as much prisoners here. Bound to these grounds, this house, that garden.
Olivia stops, Matthew’s voice echoing through her head. We came to Gallant once, and now we cannot leave. We are bound here. She pushes him out of her thoughts and reads on.
Arthur says that death waits beyond the wall. But the truth is, death is everywhere. Death comes for the roses and the apples, it comes for the mice and the birds. It comes for us all. Why should death stop us from living?
So, I did it.
I went beyond the wall.
I shouldn’t have. I thought—but it doesn’t matter what I thought. Of course I’m not the first. Of course the stories are not fictions. I am not sorry. I’m not—But I understand now.
I will never go back.
Olivia’s heart quickens as she turns the page.
No one ever needs to know.
I should not even write it here, but some part of me knows that if I don’t, I’ll begin to doubt myself. I’ll think it was a dream. But you can’t dream words onto paper. So here. Last night, I went beyond the wall.
And I met Death.
The words scrawl like weeds across the page. Olivia traces her fingers over them, half expecting them to twitch beneath her touch. Ink has dripped onto the paper, as if the writer’s pen hovered, uncertain, before taking up again.
Not met, but saw, and that was close enough. With his four shadows and his dozen shades, all silent in the bones of the ruined house. It sounds like madness written down. It felt like madness when I witnessed it. A mad world, a fever dream.
Arthur caught me after, in the garden, shook me hard and asked if I’d been seen, and I said no.
I did not tell my brother how the tallest shadow found me in the hall, peeled away from his master like a long summer day. I did not tell my brother how he looked straight at me with those near-black eyes and pointed to the closest door, to the garden and the wall, head cocked. I did not tell my brother that the shadow let me go.
The entry ends. Olivia’s hands are already turning the page. The next entry begins: I wrote to him last night.
I went back, expected to find it gone, stolen like everything else that falls through the cracks, but it was still there, tucked between the iron and the stone, and I could tell by the angle it had been moved, and when I checked, I found that he had written back.