Jessa Garcia's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

Jessa kneels in front of the wardrobe at three in the morning, the book open on her lap. She reads the passage again, the one where Lucy pushes through the coats and feels snow under her feet. Her voice cracks on the last line. The air stays exactly the same. She's halfway through the next reading when something white slides under the storage room door. A folded piece of paper. Jessa stops mid-sentence and stares at it. No one knows she comes here. The paper sits there like proof that she's wrong. She picks it up with shaking hands and unfolds it. The handwriting is small and careful: "You read the same passage seventeen times on Monday. Fourteen times on Wednesday. Tonight makes six. You're doing it wrong." Below the words, there's a rough sketch of the old house at the end of the street, the one with broken shutters and a sagging porch that everyone says has been empty for years. An arrow points to the second-floor window. Jessa turns the paper over. Nothing else. She looks at the door, then back at the note. Someone has been watching her fail. Someone knows what she's trying to do. And whoever it is thinks they know how to do it right. Jessa stands at the storage room door for ten minutes before she opens it. The yard outside is dark and still. She looks toward where the old house should be, but can't see it from here. She could ignore the note. She could keep trying alone. But the person who wrote it counted her attempts. They watched through seventeen failures and didn't laugh or call her crazy. They said she was doing it wrong, which means they think there's a right way. She folds the note and puts it in her pocket next to the crystal-covered journal. Tomorrow night she'll go to the house. Not because she trusts whoever's watching. But because for the first time since she was nine years old, someone else believes the door might actually open. She walks back to the wardrobe and places the book on the shelf inside. Her fingers trace the edge of the doorframe. For years she's carried this alone, the weight of believing in something no one else could see. The note in her pocket changes that. It means she wasn't wrong about the doors existing. She was only wrong about how to find them. She closes the wardrobe and locks the storage room behind her. The house with the darkened windows waits somewhere in the night. She doesn't know who's inside or what they want. But they've been watching from that second-floor window, patient as a sentry in a moss-covered shelter, counting her failures like they matter. And now she has a choice she didn't have an hour ago. She can stay alone with her mother's false hope and her own failed methods. Or she can walk into that creaking house and learn from someone who might actually know the way through.