The letter arrived without a stamp.
It was folded into the shape of a bird and perched on the narrow ledge outside Mira Ansel's apartment window, tapping the glass with a papery beak.
Mira noticed it only because she hadn't slept.
At 3:17 a.m., the city was a smudge of sodium-orange light and distant sirens. Her laptop screen glowed on the kitchen table, a blank document accusing her in soft white. She had been staring at it for an hour, trying to begin her resignation email to the museum board.
Instead, the bird tapped.
Once. Twice.
She frowned and slid the window up an inch. Cold air spilled inside. The paper bird tipped forward and landed on the sill. It was made from thick cream stationery, the kind used for formal invitations. Her name was written across one wing in dark ink.
Mira.
No address. No explanation.
Her chest tightened
She lived on the seventh floor.
Carefully, she picked it up. The folds were precise, almost surgical. When she unfolded it, the paper seemed warmer than it should have been, as though it had been resting in sunlight.
Inside, in the same dark ink, were seven words:
You forgot, but the house remembers.
Mira read the sentence twice. Then a third time.
The air in the kitchen felt thinner.
She told herself it was a prank. The museum interns were fond of elaborate gestures, and she had, admittedly, made a minor enemy last month when she rejected a proposal for a modern installation in the East Wing. Still—none of them knew about the house.
She hadn't told anyone about the house.
Her phone buzzed on the table, making her flinch so hard she nearly dropped the paper. A text from her sister.
Did you get it?
Mira stared at the screen.
Her thumbs hovered before she typed back.
Get what?
The reply came immediately.
Don't pretend. The bird. It was on my balcony.
A slow, creeping sensation began at the base of Mira's spine. Her sister lived three hundred miles away, in a different city, in a building without balconies.
Mira called her.
Elena answered on the first ring. "Tell me you're holding it," she said, her voice tight.
"I'm holding it," Mira replied. "What is this?"
There was a pause. Mira could hear traffic on Elena's end, the faint echo of a space too large to be an apartment.
"It's the same paper," Elena whispered. "From the summer."
Mira closed her eyes.
The summer.
Heat pressing against their backs. The smell of lake water and something metallic beneath it. Their mother's voice, sharp and afraid. The locked door at the end of the upstairs hallway.
"We agreed," Mira said carefully, "that we wouldn't—"
Another sound interrupted her.
A soft, deliberate knock.
Not at the apartment door.
Behind her.
From the hallway that led to her bedroom.
Mira's apartment had no hallway door. Just a short stretch of wall with framed prints and a closet.
She turned slowly.
The knock came again.
Three measured taps.
Elena was still speaking, her words tumbling over each other now. "It said the same thing, Mira. Exactly the same. You forgot, but the house remembers. We were kids, but we weren't that young. We know what we saw."
The third knock was louder.
And this time, something on the other side of the wall knocked back.