The three a.m. strike tolled from the grandfather clock, its empty ring resonating through Sarah's bones like a knell of death. She leaned against the bedroom window, the moon sucking the color from the garden, bleaching everything into a phantom imitation. The locket burned into her collarbone, the heat pulsating in harmony with the frantic rhythm of her heart.

What if none of this is real?

The thought seeped into her mind, unwanted but persistent. What if the visions, the recollections, the miraculous coincidences—what if they were merely the fevered imaginings of an isolated heart? She pressed her forehead into the cold glass, exhaling mist onto the windowpane. Lucas slept downstairs, his body curled on the couch, his hand still stained with fingers of color from the portrait he couldn't remember finishing.

A flash of movement.

Behind the hawthorn, a shape stood wrapped in fog—a woman in blue, her red hair loose and unkempt. Emily. Her mouth shaped words Sarah couldn't see, but the diary on the nightstand opened with a jerk, the pages fluttering wildly before settling on a page Sarah had never read:

"Watch out for the price, my love. The dead do not give up their history easily."

The words spilled off the page, the ink pooling like blood before reforming into a new menace:

"He will forget."

Sarah's own breath faltered. She whirled around the window again, but Emily had vanished. Only the hawthorn remained, its branches creaking in the wind, its roots twisting just beneath the ground as though something struggled to get free.

Below, a floorboard groaned.

Sarah crept to the door, her own bare feet making no sound on the groaning wood. The house hung in suspense around her. At the bottom of the stairs, Lucas stood silhouetted by moonlight, his back to her, his shoulders rigid.

"Lucas?" Her whisper was barely audible.

He turned, and her blood stopped.

His eyes—storm-gray eyes she knew better than she knew herself—were vacant. Blank. As if the soul that had looked out from behind them had been scooped clean out.

"Sarah," he said, and the voice wasn't his. It was deeper, coarser, with an accent that hadn't been heard in two hundred years.

The locket scorched her skin.

He will not remember.

And then, just as suddenly as it came, the strangeness faded away. Lucas blinked, his normal scowl creased into his forehead. "Why are you awake?"

Sarah's mouth went dry. The warning from the diary screamed in her brain.

Some loves were better left in the ground.