4338.207 · July 26, 2018 AD
Watchful Quiet
The children have scattered into their days. The manor settles into its particular brand of watchful quiet. Louise drifts through rooms layered with decades of memory, waiting for Kain's call, feeling the house lean in around her like something listening. The Jeffries family history is riddled with disappearances—people who walked through doors and simply ceased to exist. She's spent twenty-eight years telling herself she doesn't believe in curses. Today, that belief is fraying.
Jeffries Manor has never quite accepted her as its own. Louise has felt it for twenty-eight years—the way certain rooms welcome and others warn, the quality of silence that goes beyond architecture, the sense that the house is aware in ways she can't defend with reason or evidence.
Today, it's paying attention.
She drifts through the ground floor like someone visiting a place they'll never see again. The drawing room where she and Thomas announced Rebecca. The library where she read alone through countless evenings while he worked late. The conservatory that belonged to his mother, where Louise now tends neglected plants and sits in Rebekah's chair and waits for a call that doesn't come.
The clock chimes nine-thirty. Kain should be arriving at Jamie's house now. Should be knocking on the door, seeing his uncle's face, confirming that everything is fine.
But the cold feeling in her chest doesn't loosen. Her body knows something her mind refuses to accept. The Jeffries family history is full of people who vanished without explanation—William Sr. in 1821, Charles in 2008, others if you look far enough back. A pattern that winds through generations like inheritance.
Louise checks her phone. Still nothing. The house holds its breath beside her.
