When most people hear the word manipulator, they think of a sly friend, a cunning ex, or a shady boss. For {{user}}, it has always been her mother, Serena. Some days, she wonders why her father ever married her in the first place. Other days, she remembers that her father is still alive—just emotionally absent, hiding behind his new wife, a woman {{user}} barely knows and doesn’t care to.

“{{user}}... you’re being ridiculous,” Serena’s voice hissed through the tinny speaker of her phone. She let the words hang there, like bait on a hook, waiting for a reaction. When {{user}} stayed silent, there was a loud, theatrical sigh—the kind Serena claimed to despise in other people, especially Nana. Dramatic old woman, she’d call her. The irony would have been funny if it weren’t so exhausting.

“Just because your grandparents gave you that house,” her mother continued, “doesn’t mean you have to live in it. Honestly, you’d be doing everyone in that town a favor if you just tore it down.”

One word to describe her mother? Bitch. Plain and simple.

“You’ll be living an hour away from us,” Serena added, her voice dripping with false concern. “That’s going to be an incredible inconvenience for us to visit you, won’t it?”

It was such a familiar script—Serena always turning someone else’s choice into her inconvenience—that {{user}} almost laughed.

Nana, in contrast, had been the kind of woman who moved through life with a perpetual hum in her throat and sunlight in her eyes, no matter how heavy the day. Serena, on the other hand, had been born with a scowl and never grew out of it, as if life had shattered her rose-colored glasses the moment she plummeted screaming out of Nana’s womb.

{{user}} didn’t know why her mother’s personality had calcified into something so sharp and cold. She hadn’t been raised to be like that—at least not entirely. When {{user}} was a child, the family home had been just a few miles from Parson Manor. But Serena had never really tolerated her for long. By the time {{user}} was two, most of her childhood hours were spent in the sprawling, shadowed halls of Nana’s estate.

After {{user}} left for college, Serena wasted no time selling the old family home and moving an hour away. And when {{user}} quit college, defeated and directionless, she ended up living with her mother again, swallowing the constant judgment until her career finally gave her the means to leave.

Then Nana died, a year had passed since the funeral, since the will had been read and the manor had been placed in {{user}}’s name. Grief had been a weight around her ankles, keeping her from setting foot inside for longer than a few minutes at a time. But now, she stood before it again.

“I just wish you had more ambition in life,” Serena sighed into the phone, as if she were a martyr doomed to watch her only child ruin herself. “Sweetie, do something more with your life than waste away in that house, like your grandmother did. I don’t want you to become worthless like her.”

{{user}}’s eyes swept over the estate, perched on its cliffside like some black-hearted sentinel. The driveway wound through dense, shadow-laden woods, cutting the property off from the rest of the world. The air here was stiller, heavier, as if the trees themselves formed a barrier against reality.

The manor had seen better days, yes—but it could be restored. The black siding, faded and peeling in strips, still carried an elegance beneath the wear. The paint around the windows was chipped like brittle lacquer, and vines crawled hungrily toward the gargoyles perched on the roof’s edge, their stone eyes forever watching the Sound below.

The lawn was overgrown, grass brushing high against her legs. Somewhere in the tangle, snakes had made themselves at home.

Nana had once tamed all these bursts of life—hibiscus, primrose, violets, rhododendrons, roses so deep red they could almost be mistaken for drops of blood in the moonlight. In autumn, sunflowers climbed the siding in defiance of the black backdrop.

A chill, untraceable but familiar, curled along her spine.