When Addison fled the room, notebook half-shut, heart hammering like an errant clock, he left the door ajar behind him. Morning light pushed through the crack, thin and yellow, laying its timid hand across the warped floorboards.
And then, as if cued by breath itself, the house exhaled.
The curtains in Lily Pearl’s room stirred, though no wind touched them. The mirror, cracked like a spiderweb, shimmered faintly. It had held too many faces to stay still for long; Lily Pearl brushing her hair; Tommy Wayne at sixteen, all elbows and indignation; and later, just the slow settling of dust, the face of no one at all.
But mirrors remember better than people.
In the reflection now, something began to take shape, faint outlines, water-colored and shifting. A woman’s hand, light as mist, smoothing the quilt. Then another form, taller, the shape of a man standing beside her, uncertain where to rest his hands.
They didn’t look at each other. They looked outward, as if still waiting to be seen.
“You came back too late,” she said.
The voice wasn’t sound so much as feeling; the hush before tears, the ache of words unsaid.
He answered without moving his lips. “I never left.”
And perhaps he hadn’t. For the air around them rippled like creek water under moonlight. Beneath the floorboards came the faint, familiar creak of rocking chairs on the porch, as if memory itself had taken a seat to listen.
The two figures shifted closer, their edges flickering like candlelight. Her dress still bore the faint rust-colored stain she’d never quite washed out. His hands trembled, one clutching a folded letter, the other tracing the outline of the photo that Addison had stared at not an hour before.
“I told them what I shouldn’t,” he whispered. “I was a damned fool of a boy.”
“They would’ve found out,” she replied. “Truth always finds a crack to slip through.”
He turned toward her then, but where her face should’ve been, only light remained. The soft, golden kind that came through the kitchen window at breakfast in summers long gone. It fell across his chest, the letter in his hand, the words blurred from years of holding too tight.
Downstairs, the kettle whistled once, a low, mournful sound though no one had lit the fire.
And just like that, the figures wavered and faded, the house once again only wood and air and silence.
But the mirror still quivered.
In its broken surface, if one looked closely, two shapes lingered, faint as sighs, patient as forgiveness. Waiting, perhaps, for someone to ask the right question at last.
*****
New Yesterdays can be found at: Books-A-Million, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon, as well as your favorite bookshops. The Audiobook is available from Libro.fm, as well as Amazon.
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