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I stepped inside, and something on the shelf caught my eye. A small figurine, tucked between two books like it was trying to hide. A woman with wings, arms outstretched, a baby cradled in one arm and a sword in the other. I didn’t recognize her. But something about the figurine made my skin prickle.

I picked it up. Turned it over. On the base, a single word was carved into the stone.

Lilith.

I set it down fast, like it had burned me.

For a long moment, I just stood there, staring at the little statue. My mother had never been religious. Never went to church. Never talked about gods or goddesses or anything beyond the shallow surface of her perfect, curated life. So why would she have a figurine of a death goddess?

I turned away from the shelf and crossed to the window. I remembered sneaking out of this window a dozen times until my dad nailed it shut. I remembered never being allowed to have friends over, though I hadn’t understood why until now.

Compared to my parents’ room, and even Ivan’s room, this space was little more than a closet.

Now it was renovated. Bookshelves lined the walls. A window seat with a padded bench. Two high-back armchairs arranged near the far shelves. It should have looked inviting—cozy, even. Instead, it felt sterile. Tiny. Like someone had tried to dress up a cage and call it a library.

There was no room here for anyone to thrive. There never had been.

I couldn’t recall what Ivan’s room had been. A guestroom, maybe? But any sign of me had long since been erased. Replaced.

The books were decoration. Props. A showroom designed to look intellectual, not a room meant to be lived in.

The house itself wasn’t small. Far from it. Even now, still and dark as it stood, everything had its place. Like a magazine shoot frozen in time. Not a mansion, but not the average home either. Not with the two-acre lot stretching behind the house into the trees, the massive designer kitchen, and room after room of decorator perfection.

Maybe that’s what had finally broken my mother. The need to fit into a role she’d never wanted. The constant performance of being someone she wasn’t.

Not that I’d ever really known her.

She wasn’t the type to bake cookies or read bedtime stories or even take me to the park. Honestly, I couldn’t recall more than a handful of moments in my life where she’d even acknowledged my existence. She’d been a fixture in the house, more like a piece of furniture than a person. Present, but not really there.

I remembered prying the nails out of the window sill with a paint scraper I’d found in the garage. The whole sill had been replaced and painted white, hiding the imperfection.

The scar was the only thing that seemed real in this showplace.

A jagged line of faded purple, sliced between the bookshelves and the window seat. Not a tear, at least not anymore. A wound that had healed wrong, or been hastily stitched.

With the strange faded glow casting shadows across the room, I wondered if my memory had shifted. If something else had been taken, like the changeling had reached into my head and scooped out whatever should have been there.

I stared at the scar, waiting for the ache to come. The grief. The anger. Something. But all I felt was a quiet hollow where a feeling should have been.

Nothing.

The house, this room, everything might as well have been a stranger’s home. Every corner should be full of ghosts. Not the dead kind, the memory kind. The echoes of a childhood I’d lived.

I recalled a handful of times with my grandparents. The changeling had restored the nightmare about their haunted upstairs bedroom. But my childhood home was empty. A void where memories should have been.

I tiptoed toward the scar, and my gut churned with unease. And something else. Recognition. Not of the place, but of the absence. The familiar shape of a missing piece.

Something had been taken from me.

Maybe a lot of somethings.

I crouched in front of the scar, studying the way the purple light pulsed, slow, uneven, like a heartbeat that had never quite found its rhythm. The edges were jagged, frayed, sealed with the kind of clumsy magic that came from instinct rather than skill. The kind of magic a scared kid might have used without even knowing what they were doing.

This repair would eventually unravel. The scar had been poorly restitched, a patch job at best, the kind of quick fix that might hold for a while but never truly heal.

I traced the edges with my fingertips, finding the pattern oddly familiar. The clumsy weave, the rushed knots, the way the threads had been pushed together instead of properly aligned. It was the same sloppy technique I’d used outside the Bowman apartment.

Wait. Had I done this?