The voice had the sound of a memory you couldn't place but felt in your bones. For a second the room held its breath, and then Rowan moved clean, precise, like a man skimming a match across a wick.
"Who was that?" I demanded the words brittle and too loud in the small kitchen.
Rowan's jaw worked. "Someone who knows how to get attention."
"Why would someone call my name like that?" I asked. My fingers found the edge of the table and dug in as if the wood could tether me to the present.
He went to the window and peered through the thin curtain. "They want you to look out."
I pictured a person leaning on the sill, face half-hidden. "What do they hope to see? Me blinking like a deer?"
He didn't answer that with words. He walked to the hall and opened a closet, took out a small flashlight and a compact recorder. "We need to be smarter than whoever's playing with ghosts."
"You're treating this like a spy movie," I said, trying to force a smile that did not reach my eyes.
"If someone wants to intimidate you, the polite thing is to believe them," he said. "Then be better."
We moved through the house in a rhythm. He checked the doors, I watched the staircase. The woman who had offered us shelter moved quietly, folding a blanket and placing it on the armchair as if staging calm.
"Do you trust her?" I whispered, nodding toward the woman who hummed and pretended not to listen.
Rowan didn't turn. "I trust her hands. I don't trust the quiet here."
"That isn't comforting."
He looked at me like he wanted to say more and didn't. "We should leave."
"Leave where?" I snapped. "Out into the rain to be chased by people who know my voice?"
He met my eyes hard. "We leave to make space to plan. To not be reactionary."
The woman in the kitchen returned with tea. She set a cup in front of me without asking. "Drink," she said. Her voice was soft. "Warmth steadies the head. The night is loud; don't be louder than it needs to be."
I sipped because a sip is an action that keeps you honest. "Why are we worth the trouble?"
Rowan watched me. "Because you heard."
"Because of a corrupted file." My breath rasped. The recorder clicked on in his hand, a small, modern metronome for truth. "Why does Amelia's name still live in machines?"
He exhaled, a low sound. "Because memory isn't tidy. We tried to make it tidy."
"By experimenting on people?" My voice rose. Guilt, anger, and fear braided tight inside me.
He flinched. "We weren't monsters. We thought we could help. It went wrong."
"That's not an answer."
He put the recorder down and folded his hands like he was praying with his fingers. "Ruth, she's loyal to Amelia's image. She called. She left a rose; she wanted you warned. But others think we hid more."
"Others?" The room seemed to lean in. "Who?"
He met my eyes and for a heartbeat his face was open and exhausted. "Family. Friends. People who lost her and then needed a story to blame. People who decided the lab had names to account for."
"Account for what?" I pushed. "If you want to protect people, why keep files accessible?"
His gaze didn't flinch. "We sealed the library. Some copies remained. Backups happen. People kept things in drawers."
I wanted to ask more, wanted the neat line that would let me breathe, but the house exhaled in another noise a slow creak from the hall, not the wind. The woman glanced up and went still.
"Someone's in the back room," she said without movement. She looked at Rowan like a person whose job was measuring threats. "They shouldn't be."
Rowan moved before she finished. We followed the hush down the corridor where the wallpaper's pattern felt like eyes. The backroom door stood slightly ajar. A lamp burned on a small desk inside. Papers were scattered. A scatter most recent, not old.
"Someone rifled through here," Rowan said. He crouched and touched the papers like a man checking a pulse.
I peered in and felt the boots of a stranger on my chest. On the desk, under a half-open folder, lay another photograph closer than the first Polaroid. In it, Amelia's smile was bright and written across the white margin in shaky ink was a single word: *remember*.
My fingers went cold.
"There's also a recorder," the woman said. She held up a device like a talisman and extended it. Rowan took it with hands that steadied as soon as they held something official. He played the file.
Static first. Then a voice, familiar yet distant, breathed, "Find her."
The hair on my arms lifted. "Find me?" I said, because the absurdity of the sentence sounded like a trap and the truth entwined. "Find me?"
The recorder spit back another phrase. A second voice mail, low said, "She hears what shouldn't be heard."
Rowan's hand closed around the device until the plastic creaked. "They want someone to do the hunting for them," he said slowly. "Or to watch us panic."
"Who would do that?" I asked.
He swallowed. "People who mourn and people who want to be right. People who want to point at a person and say, 'There is the fault.'"
The woman in the corner, Ruth? knelt and picked up a small card from the table. On it, in neat handwriting, was an address and a name I recognized: the hospital from the receipt. Under it, someone had scrawled: *Look closer. *
I felt the house tilt. "Is this a message or an invitation?" I asked.
Rowan didn't answer with words. He stood and began to stack the papers, making them less like evidence and more like boundaries. "We need to find who put this here," he said. "Before they decide you are the answer."
I wanted to tell him I was done being an answer for anyone. I wanted to tell him I would walk into the noise and ask for the truth and burn down whatever curtains hid the past. Instead, I folded my hands in my lap and let the cold silence teach me patience.
The recorder on the desk clicked off. For a moment there was only the hum of the house and the thought that somewhere close, someone was listening to us listen.
A sound came from the attic soft at first, like a person tugging something. Not a footfall, not the creak of old wood, but a deliberate, careful movement.
Rowan went to the attic door and put his ear to it. His face changed; the color left it in a slow wave. He whispered one word that hung like wet laundry in the air.
"Amelia."
I thought the name would explain everything. It didn't. It made the room stretch and thin and left us like people holding a map on a coast that no longer existed.
We turned as one to the window and there pressed to the glass, looking at us with an expression that made my gut knot a face. Not full, not clear, but someone who knew how to stand where they could be seen and remain unapproachable.
They lifted a finger, slow and theatrical, and pointed straight at me. Their lips moved, forming a single syllable that landed in the room like a promise and a blade.
"Soon."