Chapter 3: The Clearing

Or maybe it had always been this way — just wide enough for one car to pass, with tree limbs so heavy they nearly met overhead, like the forest itself was trying to close in behind her.

The air here was thicker than she remembered. Maybe it was the silence. The kind that presses in around your ears until even your own breathing feels like an intrusion.

She parked at the end of the gravel drive, the tires crackling over loose stone. The house came into view slowly, like it was deciding whether or not to reveal itself. Same peeling paint. Same warped porch swing, tilted like a crooked smile. Someone — maybe the sheriff’s office — had nailed a board over the front door. She ignored it and went around the side.

The key was still under the broken terra-cotta pot. That felt like a betrayal, somehow.

Inside, everything smelled like old paper and pine. Dust motes drifted in the angled light like tiny ghosts. Lark’s coat still hung on the hook near the door, sun-bleached and hollow. Maeve didn’t touch it.

Instead, she walked through the rooms as if in a museum of her own childhood: the bookshelf she built with her father before he left, the kitchen window with the spiderweb cracks that made the light bend strangely, the hallway where Lark once taped up constellations drawn in crayon and labeled not real, but could be.

Maeve stopped in front of their mother’s bedroom door. The handle was cold. She didn’t open it.

Out back, the clearing was just as she remembered — wide and soft with wild grass, ringed by pines that hummed when the wind moved through them. And there, above it all, the birds.

Hundreds of them, maybe more. Starlings, moving in a shape that wasn’t quite a shape, forming and unforming, like breath. A murmuration. Their wings made a sound like whispers layered on top of each other, so faint it might’ve just been imagined.

Maeve stood still. The sky turned bruised-purple above her. She felt something sharp and unspoken rise in her chest. The last time she and Lark stood here together, there had been shouting. Accusations, not all untrue. And then Lark had walked into the trees and hadn’t come back for a very long time.

Later, Maeve had told herself it wasn’t her fault.

Now, she wasn’t so sure.

She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the letter. Official and impersonal. Items recovered after the investigation. Please retrieve by September 10th. No apology. No explanation. Just a deadline for her sister’s disappearance.

The birds wheeled again, casting long shadows on the grass.

Maeve didn’t know what she had come back looking for. Closure, maybe. Answers. But standing there, in that charged hush between day and night, she realized something simpler, more haunting:

She wanted to know who her sister had become in the silence between them.

And whether she could still be found in the echoes.