She turned and dipped her fingers in, tsking at the temperature before turning the faucet handle, coaxing hot water back into the tub. I jumped at the metallic screech, my teeth sharp against one another.
Roland’s words, however preposterous, had set me on edge.
“Whenever something’s troubling you, you always turn to the water.” She ruffled the back of my neck and wet strands of hair clung to her wrist.
My dark curls against her crepe-paper skin unreasonably cheered me. A ghost couldn’t do that. A ghost couldn’t do any of the things she’d done.
“Hanna…，” I started, then stopped. For one strange, horrible moment, she flickered in front of me, like a candle on the verge of sputtering out. Had I blinked, I would have missed it.
“Yes?”
She flickered again.
I scrunched my eyes closed and sank into the bath, letting it muffle the sounds of her chatter. I was struck by the sudden and horrifying notion that when I emerged, she’d be gone.
She’d be gone because Hanna Whitten has been dead and gone these last twelve years.
Roland’s words rang louder now, amplified by the water surrounding me. I stayed under as long as I could, my lungs burning and screaming at me to just come up and breathe. Breathe!
“—don’t you think?” She blinked at me, waiting for my response to a question I’d not heard.
“What?” I managed.
“I said I think the lavender best for tonight, don’t you? Help ease your mind. Help sleep claim you.”
“How…” Words failed me.
This was absurd.
Hanna was here before me now.
Hanna was—
Hanna Whitten has been dead and gone these last twelve years.
No!
She was opening doors, carrying trays. Touching me with tangible heft.
She was not a ghost.
“Did…did you happen to overhear the argument?” I asked instead.
She shook her head, squeezing out a generous handful of the oil. After pouring a pitcher of water through my hair, she set to work, scrubbing my scalp and combing through the long locks.
Lavender shimmered in the air between us. Her fingers were an insistent pressure on my head.
“Hanna?” I looked up at her and grabbed her wrist, trying to still her movements.
My fingers passed straight through her arm.
She looked down in surprise. Her following sigh was stained with disappointment. “They finally told you.”
“Told me what?” I asked, sick. I needed to hear her say it.
“Told you…” She trailed off, turning toward the door as if weighing out a possible retreat.
I tried again to grab her and as my hand inhabited the same space as her wrist, a cold charge crept up my arm, like hoarfrost consuming a field. It wasn’t a simple chill, a flurry of shivers due to the water, due to my nakedness. It was an utter absence of warmth, an absence of anything resembling life.
Death.
Gasping, I pushed myself away, fleeing from her until I struck the back wall of the tub. There was nowhere for me to go, but still I sought to escape, crawling up against the slippery side, willing myself to disappear into its mosaic patterns. Water splashed everywhere, flying from the bathtub and soaking the tiled floor. The spray went through Hanna and she flickered again, absolutely dry.
Despite the horror of the moment, Hanna smiled wistfully, the curve of her cheeks rounding further. The soft light of the gas lamps played across her skin, highlighting the fine lines around her eyes.
This wasn’t right.
There was no special glow around her, no floating aura casting an otherworldly tint. She looked as she always did.
Like she always had.
“You’ve never aged, have you?” I asked, sinking back into the tub, quivering and spent. My voice sounded so small, so far away from here and now where Hanna Whitten was but wasn’t because she was gone, dead and gone these last twelve years. “All my life, you’ve looked exactly as you do now.”
Her smile weakened, listing bittersweet. “A small blessing, I suppose.” She touched her soft white hair.
“No.” My mind refused it. It was not possible. It was not—
“Yes,” she murmured sadly, as if it pained her to refute me.
I drew my knees to my chest, suddenly anxious to be laid so bare before her, before this…spirit? Specter. Thing.
She sat back on her heels as if sensing my need for space. A little sigh escaped her. “I don’t suppose…perhaps we could just forget all about this?” She held up one flickering hand, staring at it with regretful contemplation.
“Hanna. You’re dead,” I whispered.
“I am,” she admitted.
“How do you…How am I to…” The look on her face made me want to cry. “How did it happen?” The words tumbled free without me thinking through them, but they were the right ones. The ones that would help us both.
She rubbed the side of her neck. “The night of the fire…that awful, awful, terrible night…”
“You were caught in it?” I asked, struggling to remember what had happened. Sometimes Cook would let me and the children help her when she made holiday sweets. It felt like that now, wrestling against a length of taffy, sticky and straining.
Hanna shook her head. “No. Not that night, but…but just after. I heard…I heard a terrible thing. A shocking thing. It was too big for me to handle. Too horrific for my heart to take. But when it came time to go…after, you know…I couldn’t bring myself to leave this place. I couldn’t leave you, or your sisters. You all looked so small against the snow, small and soot-stained and I just…couldn’t go.”
She let out a deep breath—Why was she breathing? Surely she didn’t need to—and stood up. She traced her fingertips along the edge of the sink.
“I told myself it was better to remain here, to watch over you all, even if you didn’t know I was there. It was a comfort to me. More comforting than an afterlife full of unknowns. I could feel the Brine beckoning me. I knew I was meant to go there, to join the Salt, to go to my husband, to go find my…son. I felt so torn. But then…you wandered over to me as Highmoor burned to the ground. You wandered over and grabbed my hand. You grabbed hold of me and did not let go. And so…I stayed.”
I uncurled a little, jostling the water around me into swaying waves as I brought my hands up, flexing them experimentally. They did not look different from other hands. They did not seem capable of touching a departed soul and bending it to my will and yet…
Hanna watched me carefully from her perch.
“Is it my fault you’re still here?”
“Oh no, darling,” she said in a warm rush. “Not at all. I had the choice. I chose to stay.”
My eyes filled with a sudden swell of unshed tears. How different would my life be if she hadn’t? Without her gentle affection, her practical advice, her warm shoulder to cry on…
“Thank you—” I broke off before the tears could fall. It sounded too short, too small a phrase to impart my gratitude, but it was all I could manage.
She bobbed her head and I hoped she understood everything those two words meant.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” I shivered against the chill of the water but made no motion to leave it.