For a spell, there was nothin’ but the quiet.
The kind of quiet that’s not an absence of sound but the presence of it, a hum under the skin, a whisper in the bones. The kind that makes a man feel like he’s standin’ at the edge of something holy or terrible and can’t tell which.

I didn’t move.
Couldn’t.

The outline in the doorway shimmered faint, like heat off a ploughed field, a wavering shape of womanly grace and long sorrow. Lily Pearl had always been slight, but she’d carried herself tall, proud as any preacher. This… this was her and not her. Both.

“Tommy Wayne,” she said, and though her lips didn’t move, the words came clear as prayer in my head.

It was her voice. That same blend of chastisement and love, the way she used to call me in from the yard when I’d been up to mischief. Only softer now, as though it came from a far place where sound loses its weight.

“You shouldn’t have come back.”

My throat worked, but the words wouldn’t come.
Finally, I managed, “I had to, Aunt Lily. I couldn’t keep runnin’ from what I done.”

The shape seemed to tremble, as if the light itself shuddered around her. “You think you know what you did,” she said. “But you don’t. You only remember the hurt. Not the reason.”

The air grew colder then, enough to make my breath bloom white.

“I told the truth,” I said, though it sounded smaller out loud than it did in my mind. “That’s all I did. They said it was a sin to speak, but I told it anyway.”

Her eyes, or where her eyes would’ve been, fixed on me.
“The truth don’t always free, child. Sometimes it binds tighter than the lie.”

Something behind her moved, a flicker of shadow deeper than night. A figure maybe, or a shape of memory taking form. My heart quickened.

“There’s things,” she whispered, “that were buried in this house long before you was ever born. And now you’ve stirred them.”

I took a step back. “What things?”

Her voice turned faint, like a candle wick dying. “The kind that remembers what folks forget. The kind that don’t take kindly to diggin’.”

Then came a sound from the parlor, a slow, deliberate creak, as though someone else had stepped onto the floorboards.

I turned, pulse hammering, but when I looked back… she was gone.

Only the faint scent of rosewater lingered, and the locket still lay at my feet.

From the parlor came another creak, closer this time, followed by the soft scrape of a chair leg.

And then, a voice that was not hers, deeper, rasping, too close to be from the living.

“You shouldn’t have come back, boy.”

*****

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.