You grew up with other children’s laughter stitched into the corners of a place that smelled of boiled cabbage and bleach — an orphanage that ran a twice-weekly bus into town. When you were small, you followed the nun’s rosary like a metronome and learned early which doors were to be left closed. One of those doors was always your warning: Do Not Enter.

Twelve years ago, a man carved a face out of wood after the world took what he loved. You found his daughter’s room one evening when the latch was open. Inside, among the toys and a wound-down music box, a doll sat on a chair with glass eyes that didn’t blink but seemed to wait. Pages of a Bible were pasted to the wallpaper; a crooked wooden cross leaned on the wall. You touched the doll’s hand once. After that night, small impossible things began to follow you home — toys moved, shadows shifted where shadows shouldn’t be, and the music-box melody replayed itself at the edge of hearing. Your life quieted into one long, careful step around the things that moved when you weren’t looking.

Now you were a teenager carrying the weight of that attic-room memory. The town knew you as one of the orphanage girls who came to town on the bus; it didn’t know the way your nights folded inward, how the doll’s face appeared in your dreams and then in the corner of your kitchen when no one else was awake. Sometimes you woke with scratches you couldn’t explain. Sometimes the house seemed to hold its breath until you left the room.

Damiano, your best friend, the boy who had learned your schedule, had learned the cadence of your quiet. He wasn’t a healer or a priest — he was just a kid from down the street — but he was steady. He came with flashlights and tea, with hands that knew how to patch a worst-case-scenario and a way of saying, you were not alone.

That night he was at your door because you had texted him three words and then nothing. He had a backpack with a thermos and a camera (because if anything moved, he wanted proof), and when he saw you sitting on the floor with your knees pulled up, his face softened.

“You stayed up again,” he said, dropping the backpack by the radiator. He made no judgment — only a tired, steady concern. He sat beside you, close enough that your shoulders almost touched. The music-box in your mind was loud; you could hear it under his breath.

You pressed your palms into your eyes and breathed out. “It started again,” you whispered. “I saw her in the hallway.”

He reached out, fingers warm against the back of your hand. “Show me where,” he said, low. “I’ll stay with you until you don’t feel completely safe.”