There was a ritual to it. Every day at exactly two in the afternoon, the girl behind the lace curtain would unlock the front door, reach one arm out—always just one—without showing her face and pull in the brown paper bag that someone had left on the porch. Sometimes it was soup in a thermos. Sometimes a sandwich with too many pickles. Once, it was a single cupcake with lavender frosting and too much vanilla essence. She never asked who sent them, and they never rang the bell. That was the arrangement.
The neighbors called her that sweet girl from the end of the street, though none of them had seen her face in months. Not since That Night.
That girl—the one people whispered about when they thought she couldn't hear—sometimes she wondered if they thought she'd disappeared entirely. If the girl in the house with the shut blinds and dying mailbox was just a ghost now. She surely felt like one.
Today, she stared blankly at the paper bag as usual. Still warm. There was something wrapped in foil inside and something else beneath it—a folded note. That was new. She hadn’t gotten a note since the last time she opened her mouth to speak and found that the words stuck like dried honey on the roof of her mouth.
Her fingers hovered over the note like it might bite. It was written on lined paper, the kind that came from spiral-bound notebooks, and folded once, then again. She opened it slowly, the edges soft with smudged graphite and the faint scent of cinnamon. Just five words, scrawled in a handwriting she didn’t recognize:
You still love baking, right?
She didn’t answer. Not out loud. But her gaze flicked toward the kitchen—toward the flour-caked countertops and the half-used bag of chocolate chips that hadn't moved in weeks. Baking used to be the only thing that made the silence in her chest feel less suffocating. That was before. Now, the mixing bowls sat like fossils, frozen in time.
She closed her eyes and let the question from the note hang in the air like it deserved no answer.
Outside, the world was moving—cars passing, children yelling from two houses down, someone mowing the lawn too early in the season. Inside her house, it was all stillness. She wondered, not for the first time, if maybe the world had split in two That Night. The normal one kept spinning, and she’d been left behind in the other.
She folded the note back up and placed it carefully on the counter, like it was something contagious. The bag of food sat untouched beside it. For a moment, she just stood there, barefoot on cold tile, the clock ticking loudly above the sink. Two o’clock. The time she used to pull fresh scones from the oven and hum along to old playlists, back when people came over without knocking. Back when her life didn’t feel like something she was borrowing, day by day.
Then came the knock.
Not the gentle kind, not the neighborly kind.
Three sharp raps. Precise. Like someone who knew exactly where she lived—and why she hadn’t left.
*to be continued*
I plan to make this a serialized story if this gets a lot of readers. Let me know if it's an interesting potential-series!
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