The House We Couldn't Leave

Aria had always trusted numbers.

They made sense. They didn't twist or lie. Even when people did.

She used to count everything. Steps. Syllables. Raindrops against the windows. When she was six, she'd memorized the Fibonacci sequence just to distract herself during thunderstorms.

Here, in Grinbridge House, the numbers had stopped behaving.

It began with the clock above the stairwell.

She noticed it on her third morning.

It was 7:15 when she went down to check if the dining room had been set. The hall was empty, the silver domes on the serving trays untouched. She counted the tines on each fork. All correct. Normal.

But when she passed the stairwell again—the same clock read 6:52

Not backwards.

Just… wrong.

She tried to brush it off. Old clocks, after all, could run slow.

But it happened again. And again. Once, she even watched it tick back one minute. The clock hand jerked slightly, as though correcting itself.

That was the morning Tara didn't come down at all.

Reya was silent at breakfast. Sofi picked at her eggs. Mina paced by the windows, biting her nails—a new habit.

No one spoke of Lina.

Aria quietly moved her boiled egg six inches to the right, just to see if anyone would notice.

They didn't.

Later, she tried a test.

She found three clocks in the house.

One in the stairwell.

One in the east drawing room.

One in the locked pantry beside the kitchen, which she'd slipped into when Tara left it ajar.

She synchronized all three as best she could.

Then she walked the entire house once. One full circuit.

By the time she returned, the stairwell clock had gained 3 minutes.

The drawing room clock had lost 1.

The pantry clock… had stopped entirely.

That evening, she told Reya.

"I think time is folding in here," Aria said.

Reya blinked. "Like… looping?"

"No. Like it's being twisted. Bent. One part of the house moves faster. Another slower. One might even be frozen."

She looked out the window.

The moon was higher than it had been an hour ago. Then again, was it the same moon?

Reya opened her sketchbook. "Could be why we keep forgetting. If time's not linear…"

"Then memories wouldn't be either."

Later that night, Aria sat at the end of her bed with three candles lit in a row.

She let them burn for exactly thirty minutes—using her pocketwatch to count.

The first melted normally.

The second, in the middle, burned twice as fast.

The third hadn't even lost a sliver of wax.

Same room. Same temperature. Same hour.

Three completely different results.

Aria swallowed hard.

"This place is broken," she whispered.

She began tracking everything.

In chalk, along the inside of her closet door:

* How many hours she remembered being awake

* What she wore each day

* Which girl she saw first each morning

* What the stairwell clock said at breakfast

It looked like nonsense. But it helped.

Until the chalk marks started changing.

On Thursday, there were twelve tally marks.

On Friday, only eight.

By Saturday, it said "1."

In her own handwriting.

She didn't tell anyone that part.

Not yet.

The next night, Reya called her to the attic again.

Tara was already there, crutch propped beside her, arms folded tightly. Sofi held a worn blanket in her lap and refused to let go. Mina paced again.

"I found this," Reya said, handing Aria a page torn from her sketchbook.

It wasn't a drawing.

It was a list.

Girls at Grinbridge

* Mina

* Reya

* Tara

* Aria

* Sofi

* Lina

And then, below it:

Girls who were here before us

* Mina

* Reya

* Tara

* Aria

* Sofi

* Lina

The exact same list. Written twice. As if copied.

No dates. No context. Just repetition.

"I don't remember writing this," Reya said. "But the graphite matches my other sketches. Same pencil."

Mina snatched it. "What if we're not the first us?"

Tara stiffened.

"No," Aria said. "That's not possible."

Sofi whispered, "What if it is?"

They stared at each other in silence.

Until Reya muttered, "What if the seventh girl isn't missing? What if she's just one of us—before we forgot she existed?"

That night, Aria returned to her closet and erased the chalk.

All of it.

Then she wrote a message in its place.

If this is still here tomorrow, I haven't lost myself.

The next morning, the message was still there.

But the handwriting wasn't hers.