The Note Beneath the Pillow
The light comes first—gray and soft, the color of a held breath—before Lia even opens her eyes. It filters through the round attic window in slow, dust-laden ribbons, settling across her quilt like something reluctant to arrive. She lies still for a long moment, listening to the house creak its familiar morning complaints, and tries to place the strange hollow feeling lodged beneath her ribs.
It isn't sadness, exactly. It's closer to the sensation of walking into a room and forgetting why, except the room is her whole life, and the forgetting has followed her out of sleep like a shadow that won't detach from her heel.
Seventeen. She's seventeen today, and somehow that number sits wrong in her mouth when she whispers it to the slanted ceiling, as though she's trying on a coat that belongs to someone else.
Downstairs, she can already hear her mother moving through the kitchen with the particular clatter of someone determined to be festive. Pans clink. The kettle shrieks and is silenced too quickly, cut off mid-whistle. Lia swings her legs out of bed, feet meeting the cold wood floor, and pads toward the narrow staircase, still tugging her sleep shirt straight.
"There's my…