Theirs was a friendship built on the unspoken, shared understanding that you can love the home you’ve made with the whole of your heart and still know the land it’s built on will never claim you.

Theirs was a friendship that did not talk about the things that cut deepest, but it understood that those things were there, and respected them, and gave them space.

So Malik didn’t ask Sera what was bothering her that afternoon, and even if he had, Sera couldn’t have told him because she wasn’t sure she even knew.

So they drove and talked about nothing in particular.

Until it was dark, and dinnertime would soon be upon them, and they had to go home and get shit done.

The first thing Sera saw when Malik dropped her off at the inn was Posy, collecting pebbles outside the front door, and a knot in Sera’s chest loosened. She hadn’t realised until that moment just how afraid she’d been that she’d come home and Posy, sweet, headstrong, joyful Posy, would be gone.

“Oh, Posy,” she said. “You’re still here.”

Posy smiled up at her. “Sera’s house. Posy’s house.”

Sera smiled back. “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

They went inside together. Sera, still feeling a bit shaky and exposed, didn’t ask any questions about what had happened when Luke’s mother had been here.

She helped Jasmine and Nicholas make dinner, but skipped eating it and went upstairs instead.

She put her oldest and softest pyjamas on, got into bed, and fell asleep at once.

Predictably, forgoing dinner and going to bed at half past six meant she woke just after midnight with a peckishness that wouldn’t be ignored.

As the chocolate stash in her bedroom was woefully depleted and she probably ought to eat something that wasn’t pure sugar anyway, she made her way down the creaking stairs and down the dark hallway.

She froze.

There was a ghost in the kitchen.

It was ridiculous, really, to feel like she’d been betrayed by a house , but betrayal was exactly what she felt. She’d thought she and the inn had an understanding that she would put up with all the other ghosts as long as it never showed her this one.

Yet there she was, glimmering faintly at the edges, ever so slightly translucent. Not a child, or a girl, but Sera from just a few years ago. Deeply sad, savagely angry, and more than a little wild.

Sera tried not to think about those months when things felt like they were at their worst, before medication, before she’d asked for help.

She hated that version of her. Hated the fights she’d have with Jasmine, the speed with which she’d lose her temper, the long days of not being able to get out of bed, the dark and terrifying things she’d think about doing.

Hated, more than anything, the way it felt like she simply had no control over anything, not even herself.

It was one of the sharpest, most crooked things on her memory lane, and she tried not to get too close to it.

And still, there she stood, that other Sera, in the middle of the kitchen, perfectly framed by the open doorway.

Trembling, wrists pressed to her ears, mouth open in a silent scream of impotent rage and grief, until keeping all that bottled up simply didn’t work anymore and, bang , she kicked the nearest thing.

Hard enough to dent the cabinet door. Hard enough to break two of her toes.

Sera watched, rooted to the spot, as the ghost staggered back, first shocked, then crumpling in pain. She slid to the floor, back against the wall, and started to cry, head buried in her arms, arms clutched around her knees, the foot with the broken toes sticking out and away.

That moment was what had finally convinced her that she needed help, but it had come later.

Right then, watching herself, Sera wasn’t thinking of the later.

All she was thinking about was how much she’d hated herself in that moment, hated what she’d become, hated Jasmine for dying, hated Clemmie for the resurrection spell, hated the Guild for abandoning her, hated the country for rejecting her, and hated herself all over again for hating all those other things.

She’d felt nothing but rage and desolation and ugliness.

Her heart raced, panicked, fluttery, taking her right back to that moment—

And then—

Footsteps. Quiet. Careful. Not Sera, frozen in the dark hallway. Not the ghost, breaking into pieces on the floor. Someone else.

Luke stepped into the frame. Had he been in the kitchen the whole time? Had he seen —?

He had. He had seen the whole ugly spectacle.

So why—

Instead of recoiling, instead of walking away, Luke stepped closer.

The other Sera didn’t react. Of course she didn’t.

She didn’t know he was there. She wasn’t real, not anymore.

He knew that too. He had seen enough of these strange, translucent fragments of memories to know that they were just echoes, pieces of history that the house kept safe, unaffected by the present.

So why was Luke still there?

He didn’t say a word. He just sat down on the floor, shoulder to shoulder with a ghost, keeping her company.

In the hallway, Sera knew it didn’t, couldn’t , change the memory, because that night had already happened and Luke hadn’t been there, but what it could do, what it did do, was a simple magical act of transmutation.

She saw the memory through his eyes. And what she saw, for the first time, was not ugliness at all but pain so enormous and consuming that it had felt like dying.

I’m sorry, she said silently to her past self. I’m sorry I hated you. I’m sorry I wasn’t kinder. All the shame that had been tangled up in the memory was annihilated, leaving only compassion and regret in its place.

Her hand lifted to the opposite shoulder, to the exact spot where the ghost’s shoulder touched Luke’s.

She shouldn’t have been able to feel anything, of course, yet she could swear she did.

As if that touch, that moment, had crossed the boundaries of time and space, travelled miles of night sky and stardust, and become infinite.