The steam had long given up its ghost, leaving the air heavy and cool. She layed in the tub, a pale form against the porcelain, her head turned just so, facing the chipped tiles. Her eyes were open, wide and staring, but the space behind them felt vast and empty. Distant. I stood by the bathroom door, a shadow woven from dust and silence, my form barely holding against the encroaching stillness.

My voice, a dry whisper that seemed to scratch against the silence, began, "I found one of your marbles yesterday."

I paused. "In the floor vent beneath your old bed. Blue glass, chipped at the edge. You must’ve lost it when you were small."

I remembered the way she’d scuffed her knees on the floorboards in that room, the small indentations her slippers left on the worn rug. My presence, then, was little more than a whisper in a draft, a chill in the shadows. But I saw it all. I remembered the heavy weight of her small coat pockets, bulging with the treasures she collected.

A silence stretched, thick and warm as old dust motes dancing in a sunbeam. I felt a strange tremor in my chest, a tightness that wasn't breath but absence. I had kept them. The small, forgotten things she’d left behind. The marbles, the drawings, the whisperings into vents. "I kept some of them... The marbles. The ones you stopped looking for."

She used to play a game here, in this very tub. The water would be warm, fragrant with soap, and she would sit very still, dropping the marbles one by one into the shimmering surface. I never understood the game. Why lose something you loved to the depths? But I watched. Always, I watched.

"You’d drop them here, in the water," my voice was softer now, like wind through an empty corridor. "One by one, like prayers. I never understood the game. But I watched. You’d wait for the last one to sink before you breathed again."

Perhaps it was a test. A way to feel control in a world that spun too fast. Now, her breathing was always shallow, a constant struggle. The water in the tub was still. So was she. I shifted, my knees, not truly physical, drawing closer to my non-existent chest, a faint creak echoing from somewhere deep within the house's bones, or perhaps my own.

I remembered the feel of a chipped marble between my spectral fingers, the cold, smooth glass. The ones I’d found years after she'd forgotten them. "Some of them cracked," I admitted, the words barely audible now, a confession whispered to the silence. "Little fractures inside the glass, like frost. I never told you. I thought maybe… maybe if you didn’t see the breaks, they could still be whole."

It was a foolish thought, even then. What good was an unseen wholeness when the core was shattered? And what good was it now? She was fractured too. Not just the physical breaks – the labored breath, the trembling hands, the slow, agonizing surrender of her body – but something deeper, inside. The light that had once burned like a fire in the heart of this house, in her, was dimming.

"You’re quieter lately," I continued, my voice now a mournful sigh, barely stronger than a breath. "Slipping… like they did. Little by little."

I was bound to this house. Bound to these walls, to these memories. My purpose, my very shape, was tied to her presence, to the house that she inhabited. If she slipped away completely, if she sank to the bottom like the marbles she never found again, what would become of me? Would I shrink, dissolve, become nothing but forgotten grief once more?

My voice, thin as a thread, was a desperate plea now. "I can’t keep you the way I kept them. Say something… so I know you’re not just resting at the bottom like the ones you never found again.”