When she looked back at the mirror, the girl was closer. She was mouthing words. Eliza leaned in, heart hammering. The girl’s lips formed a single, desperate sentence: “He didn’t leave. He went in.”
But it was the framed photograph above the fireplace that drew Eliza in: Lydia, beaming, her arm around a man with a kind face and a military posture. Her great-uncle, Arthur. The one who had died six months before Lydia vanished. The one whose bedroom—a locked room at the end of the upstairs hall—Eliza had never been allowed to enter.
Her aunt, Lydia, had vanished from this very porch. No note. No struggle. Just a dropped watering can and a single, patent leather shoe. 6 alexandra view
The rain over the Derbyshire moors had a way of making the ordinary feel ominous. It fell in steady, silver sheets, blurring the lone figure standing at the gate of “6 Alexandra View.”
Eliza tried to run, but her feet were rooted. The girl in the mirror reached out a cold, small hand. And for the first time, Eliza recognized the child’s face. It was her own—from a photograph taken at age six. The year before she’d developed a sudden, inexplicable fear of mirrors. When she looked back at the mirror, the girl was closer
Tonight, she was going to open it.
To anyone passing, it was a charming Victorian folly—a turreted house with a slate roof and a bay window that caught the last of the twilight. But to Eliza Hart, it was the site of a childhood disappearance that had haunted her for twenty-two years. The girl’s lips formed a single, desperate sentence:
A sound broke the silence—a heavy, dragging footstep from the attic above.