The House We Couldn't Leave

At first, Lina thought she was dreaming.

The walls looked like Grinbridge House—same wainscoting, same dusty trim—but the halls were crooked, and everything smelled of iron and rust.

There were no windows. No lights. No sound, except for the slow drip of water somewhere in the dark.

She walked barefoot on cold stone.

Her dress was damp. Her fingers bruised.

And the memory of how she'd gotten here... slipped from her like breath in winter.

She remembered Tara screaming.

She remembered her own name—written on the crib that didn't belong to her.

She remembered the wall opening.

Then nothing.

Then here.

The underhouse stretched in all directions.

At times, it mirrored rooms she knew—her bedroom, the hallway near the stairs, the dining room—but they were wrong. Tilted at strange angles. Smaller than they should be. As if someone had tried to rebuild them from memory and failed.

She passed a door with no handle. A bathtub full of feathers. A painting of herself, aged twenty years, smiling with eyes that were not hers.

Nothing made sense.

And yet—

It all felt familiar.

At the far end of the hallway, she found a room with no walls.

Just blackness.

Inside the blackness stood a girl.

Slender.

Hair tied with a yellow ribbon.

Lina froze.

She knew that ribbon.

She'd worn it her first week at the house.

But she'd lost it.

Hadn't she?

The girl stepped forward.

Same face.

Same eyes.

But different.

Older?

No.

Not older.

Emptier.

Like something had hollowed her out and filled her with mimicry.

"Who are you?" Lina asked.

The other girl tilted her head.

"Lina."

"No. I'm Lina."

"You were. Once."

Lina's heart pounded.

The air felt heavy, thick with silence.

"What is this place?" she whispered.

The other girl smiled. A strange, soft, tragic thing.

"This is where we go when we stop fitting."

"Fitting where?"

"In the story."

Behind her, the room reformed.

The blackness shifted, creating walls, beds, toys. It became a nursery.

But the beds were all cribs.

And each crib had a name tag:

Mira.

Lina.

Sofi.

Lina.

Tina.

Lina.

"Why is my name on all of them?"

The echo answered, "Because they tried to make you over and over again."

"Who?"

But she already knew.

The house.

Or what watched through it.

"They kept failing," the echo continued. "Each time, they changed something. Hair. Voice. Memory. You. Me. All just edits. Versions."

Lina backed away.

"This isn't real."

"It is. And it isn't. You're not the first Lina to vanish."

She stumbled out of the room.

Ran down the wrong hallway.

Fell.

Hands scraped.

Knees bloody.

She sat up, gasping.

And found herself in the dining hall.

But the table was full of girls.

All of them Lina.

Different ages. Different faces. Same eyes.

They all turned to her.

All smiled.

All spoke in her voice:

"We were forgotten. Now you remember."

She screamed.

The room shattered like glass.

She landed on stone.

Cold again.

Alone again.

But now she knew.

She wasn't just a missing girl.

She was a repeated girl.

An experiment.

A recurrence.

A ghost of someone who never got to finish being real.

Somewhere deeper in the house, something laughed.

A door opened.

Not one she could see—but one she could feel.

And carved into the stone beside her, in her own handwriting:

"You were never real. But that doesn't mean you can't be free."

Lina stood.

Her hands shook.

But her knees did not.

And her voice, for once, didn't tremble.

"I don't care who I was," she whispered to the dark. "I'm going to be something else."

Then she walked toward the echo that wore her face—and passed through it.