There was a voice in the house.
Not a ghost. Not a hallucination. But a whisper Violet kept hearing when the air went still—usually when she passed the second-floor landing near the narrow window where the ivy vines reached in like curious fingers.
It wasn't speaking to her. It was remembering her.
"Violet," it would murmur. Soft. Familiar. Like breath caught in curtains.
At first, she thought it was the wind. Then she thought she was just tired.
But when she paused beside that window and whispered, "Yes?"—something warm prickled in her spine, like the house had exhaled.
She didn't tell Adam immediately. He would listen, of course. He always did. But she wasn't sure this was a thing that needed explaining.
Instead, she made tea. She sat on the window seat and stared at the garden until it blurred, and she remembered being a little girl, standing beside her grandmother, watching the same vines climb the glass.
"I used to think the house spoke to you," she had said once.
Her grandmother had just smiled. "It does. But only if you speak first."
Now, Violet wondered what she had said back then that made it remember her name even now.
---
The weekend brought guests—three writers from a small poetry collective in the city. They came with notebooks full of verses and unresolved heartbreaks, and Violet gave them the back room with the sunroof.
One of them, Elise, had a tattoo on her wrist that read, here, still. She said she got it after her sister died, to remind herself that showing up was its own kind of victory.
Violet liked that. She made a mental note to write it on the mirror in dry-erase marker.
Saturday evening, Adam hosted a small outdoor dinner beneath the twinkling fairy lights strung across the old willow trees. Theo made his famous lemon pasta, and Maya brought a blueberry tart she insisted was "almost edible."
The table was full of laughter, overlapping stories, and wine-stained napkins.
At one point, Violet looked across the table and saw Adam mid-laugh, his head tipped back, sunlight tracing the line of his jaw. And she felt it again—that echo of her name in the breeze. Not spoken aloud. But present. Reverberating.
She reached across the table and took his hand.
"What?" he asked, smiling.
"Nothing," she said. "Just glad you stayed."
---
On Sunday, Violet finally went up to the attic.
It had always been the one part of the house she avoided. Not out of fear, but because it felt like someone else's memory. The dust was thicker. The air tighter. As if the space had learned how to hold its breath.
Adam offered to come with her, but she shook her head. "I need to do this alone."
The stairs creaked like they hadn't been used in years. She pushed open the wooden door and stepped into the attic's hush.
It smelled like old paper, cedar, and time.
Stacks of boxes were arranged neatly, most labeled in her grandmother's tidy cursive. Letters. Quilts. Photos. Winter scarves. One box simply read: Violet.
She froze.
She hadn't seen that one before.
Kneeling slowly, she opened it.
Inside were fragments of her childhood—a pressed daisy from her eighth birthday, a finger-painted card, the broken clasp from a music box she thought she'd lost.
At the very bottom, wrapped in blue linen, was a small notebook.
On the cover, a single word: Stay.
Her breath caught.
She opened it carefully.
Page one: A record of the days she might want to remember. For Violet. When she's ready to come home.
Every page was a memory her grandmother had written down—not in a journalistic way, but in small poems, one-liners, unfinished sentences.
"She built forts out of bedsheets and always let the light in."
"When she left, she cried in the taxi. She thought no one saw."
"She loves fiercely, but sometimes forgets she's allowed to stay when things get hard."
Violet sat there for nearly an hour, reading every page, tears wetting the corners of her mouth.
The notebook ended with a line that folded itself into her bones.
"If you're reading this, then the house still remembers. And so do I."
---
That night, Violet finally told Adam about the voice.
"Do you think it's real?" she asked, her head on his chest as they lay in bed, the window cracked open to the sound of soft rain.
"I think this house holds more than plaster and wood," he murmured. "It holds you."
She smiled. "It says my name sometimes."
"I would too, if I were the house."
She chuckled. "Why?"
"Because you brought everyone back."
She looked up at him. "I didn't do that alone."
"No," he said. "But you were the first to stop running."
---
Monday morning brought an unexpected visitor.
A woman in her late seventies, wearing a floral dress and a wide-brimmed hat. She knocked gently and waited, hands folded.
Violet opened the door, curious.
"May I help you?" she asked.
"I used to live here," the woman said.
Violet blinked. "Before my grandmother?"
"Oh no," the woman laughed softly. "After. I was a tenant, in the '90s. Just for a summer. But it was one of the best summers of my life."
Violet stepped aside. "Come in."
The woman wandered slowly through the house, touching walls gently, like one might greet old friends. She paused at the kitchen archway, smiling.
"There was a night," she said, eyes bright, "when we danced here. Six of us, no music. Just laughter."
She turned to Violet. "Is it still like that?"
"Sometimes," Violet said. "We try."
The woman nodded. "Good. Don't let it forget."
Before she left, she handed Violet a folded letter.
"I wrote this to the house when I left. But I never mailed it. Thought maybe it should be here now."
Violet took it carefully, holding the fragile paper to her chest.
---
That night, Violet sat on the front steps with Adam, a blanket over their knees and the stars winking above.
"Do you think places have souls?" she asked.
"I think places are made of people. And the echoes they leave."
She leaned her head on his shoulder. "Then maybe this house isn't haunted. Maybe it's full."
He smiled. "Of you."
---