Ten Minutes Later..

  Dad came through the side door like the church had spat him back out.

  Mud streaked his jeans to the knee. Water ran off his sleeves in slow drips that made dark commas on the stone floor. His hair was plastered down on one side, as if he’d shoved a hand through it and forgotten to stop. He smelled of wet earth and something older underneath—metal, rot, the sharp tang of a grave that had been opened and didn’t want to be.

  For a second Skye didn’t recognise him as Dad. He was just a man in a too-bright corridor, breathing like he’d been chasing something that refused to be caught.

  Alice was already moving. She got to him first, hand hovering the way his had hovered at Skye’s elbow earlier—touching without touching.

  “Dad—?”

  He looked at Alice and then his eyes slid past her, straight to Skye, like a compass needle finding north whether he wanted it to or not.

  He tried to speak.

  Nothing came.

  Father Mallory closed the vestry door behind him with his foot, too quick. His palm stayed on it as if he could hold the whole building still.

  Dad swallowed. His throat worked hard, the way it did when people were trying not to cry or not to vomit and hadn’t decided which would be less humiliating.

  “It was—” he started, then stopped again, jaw trembling with the effort of keeping the sound inside his mouth. “The ground...”

  Skye’s arm itched under the cotton and tape like a warning light. Her fingers twitched toward it and stopped. She pressed her knuckles into her thigh instead, anchoring herself to something that still belonged to her.

  Alice’s voice came sharp with fear. “Did someone see you?”

  “Yes.”

  Alice flinched. Skye felt her own stomach drop, slow and heavy, like a lift cable snapping.

  Dad dragged a breath in. “Mr Clarke.”

  The name hit the room like a dropped plate. Skye saw it in Father Mallory’s face first—a brief closing of the eyes, the priest part of him already calculating damage control, the human part of him just... tired.

  Dad shook his head once, as if he could shake the sight out of his skull. “He saw. He saw the coffin.”

  Skye waited for the word body. It didn’t come.

  Dad looked down at his hands as if he couldn’t believe they belonged to him. Mud sat in the lines of his palms. Under his nails. Proof that he’d done it. Proof that doing it had proved nothing.

  “There’s no—” His voice broke on the edge of it. He clamped his teeth, breathed again through his nose like he was trying to keep control by force. “It’s empty.”

  Skye heard Alice exhale like she’d been punched.

  Father Mallory made a small involuntary sound—barely more than breath. “Empty,” he repeated, like the word didn’t fit a coffin.

  Dad nodded. Too fast. Too hard. “Water, yeah. That’s normal. It’s— it fills up. But her dress was there. The cardigan. Your mother’s badge.” His eyes flicked up at Skye and then away again, as if looking at her too long might make her vanish. “Everything except...”

  Skye’s ribs pulled, dull pain reminding her she had a body even when the room was talking about not having one. She tasted metal at the back of her throat from holding her breath without noticing.

  “How,” Alice whispered. She sounded young for the first time since Skye had come home. “How can it be untouched?”

  Dad gave a short laugh that wasn’t humour. “Exactly.” He rubbed his face with both hands, smearing mud across his cheekbone like war paint. “The turf. No disturbance. No... no sign. It was like—” He stopped, because whatever he was about to say was either too religious or too mad, and he couldn’t afford either.

  Skye looked at him properly then. Not the father she remembered from before—before her death, before the five years, before his shoulders changed shape under grief. This man was made of questions with nowhere to go.

  He stared at her as if she was the only answer left in the room, and that terrified him.

  Skye wanted to tell him something clever. Something neat. Something that made the universe make sense.

  What came out instead was small.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Dad’s eyes flashed with something raw—anger, not at her, but at the fact that the sentence existed. That his child could stand there and say I don’t know and it was true.

  Skye’s throat tightened. Her itch pulsed. She pressed her thumb into her palm hard enough to hurt.

  She tried again, slower, because she could feel herself slipping into the old habit of editing herself for people. Choosing what was relevant. Cutting out the parts that made them uncomfortable.

  “I... I wish I did,” she said. It sounded stupid. It sounded like nothing. She forced herself to keep going anyway. “When you look at me, I can feel you... looking through me. Like you’re trying to find the seam.”

  Dad’s mouth twitched, almost a flinch.

  Skye swallowed. The room smelled of damp fabric and old hymnbooks and the faint sourness of fear. “I want the seam too,” she said, and her voice shook on the last word. “But if you— if you keep pulling at it, I—” She stopped, because her brain had the image of fabric tearing and couldn’t unsee it.

  Alice shifted closer to her, shoulder brushing Skye’s arm. Warm. Human.

  Skye glanced at the little high window. The slit of glass that looked into the church interior. She couldn’t see faces from here, but she could hear them—paper shuffling, someone laughing too loudly, the low thrum of a meeting pretending the world was still made of beige curtains.

  Skye breathed in through her nose. Damp stone. Dust. Coffee gone cold somewhere.

  “When I lose something,” she said, and hated how young it made her sound, “like scissors or my notebook, and I look and look... it doesn’t show up. It’s like it knows.”

  Dad stared at her, confused, the way adults got when a child’s logic was blunt but somehow true.

  Skye’s cheeks heated. She hated attention. She hated making speeches. This wasn’t a speech. It was a rope she was handing him because he was drowning.

  “And then,” she said, voice quieter, “it shows up when I stop... when I stop grabbing for it. When I do something else. When I just—” She shrugged, helpless, because the word she wanted was exist and it felt too dramatic. “When I’m me.”

  Dad’s eyes softened by a fraction and then hardened again, because softness didn’t stop coffins being empty.

  Skye forced herself to look at him. “I need you,” she said. “Not— not answers. You.”

  The sentence landed wrong and right at the same time. She felt stupid the moment she said it, and then felt it sting behind her eyes because it was true.

  Dad’s face did something like collapse, just for a second. Like the man who’d been holding himself upright on facts had run out of facts and had to choose muscle memory.

  He stepped forward, and for a beat his hands hovered near her shoulders, the way they had all day—afraid to touch her like she might crack.

  Then he touched her.

  His palms were cold and muddy and real. He pulled her in, careful at first, then not careful at all, because he couldn’t afford careful anymore. His arms tightened like he was trying to learn her shape again.

  Skye’s ribs protested. She hissed involuntarily and he loosened at once, panicked.

  “Sorry—”

  “It’s fine,” she lied, because she was already crying and didn’t want to add pain to the list of things that made him look like he might fall apart.

  She tucked her face into his jacket anyway. It smelled like rain and soil and the faint trace of his aftershave from a life that had ended five years ago. She cried hard, silent, shaking—because the grief in him was a tide and she could feel herself caught in it.

  Above her, Dad’s breath shuddered. He didn’t cry loudly. It was worse than loud—his chest just kept doing that broken thing like his body didn’t know how to let go without breaking.

  Father Mallory stood very still, one hand still braced against the door, eyes bright. He looked like a man watching a miracle and hating that it hurt.

  “This,” he said softly, and the word came out wrong, too full. He cleared his throat, too loud in the small room. “Sorry.” He blinked hard, trying to get his voice back into a shape that belonged to him. “This is why—” He stopped again, and for the first time Skye saw him falter. Priest-script reached for meaning. Human-script caught on the rawness of being wrong in front of a child.

  He tried again, quieter. “Whatever you call it,” he said, “chance or God or something we don’t have words for... it brought you back into this.” He didn’t say family. He didn’t say town. He just nodded at the messy, soaked, shaking reality of them. “Not into an answer.”

  Dad pulled back enough to look at Skye’s face. His eyes were red-rimmed. Mud streaked his cheek like he’d been in a fight and lost.

  “I shouldn’t have—” he started, then stopped, jaw clenching around guilt that had nowhere to go. “I just needed something solid.”

  Skye wiped her nose on her sleeve without thinking and then felt gross about it and didn’t care. “I’m solid,” she said, half fierce, half pleading.

  Dad huffed out another short laugh, this one closer to a sob. “You are,” he said, and then—because he was him—he couldn’t let it sit clean. “And I still...” His gaze flicked toward the floor, toward the idea of an empty coffin, toward a world that had stolen five years and then tossed her back like a mistake. “I still need to understand. Not because I don’t believe you. Because I don’t believe anything anymore.”

  Skye nodded. She could live with that. It was messy. It was real. It didn’t make her feel like she had to perform.

  Outside the room, faintly, a chair scraped. Voices rose. Someone laughed again. The sound pressed against the walls like it wanted in.

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  Then—suddenly—noise.

  Not muffled meeting-noise. A bang of the main double doors opening too hard. Footsteps on stone, quick, uneven. A voice carrying down the corridor, cracked with panic.

  “Father Mallory!”

  The words made Alice’s spine go rigid. Skye felt it like electricity in her own bones—danger, not abstract, not in a text message, but moving through space.

  Father Mallory swore under his breath—quiet, shocked at himself—and pushed off the vestry door.

  Another voice, closer now, overlapping with the first. “Simon Harper! Someone needs to—”

  Skye’s stomach dropped. Simon. Her father’s name, said like an accusation.

  Alice grabbed Skye’s wrist. Not gentle.

  “Wardrobe,” Alice hissed.

  Skye’s whole body revolted. Her skin crawled. The itch on her arm flared as if it agreed.

  “No,” Skye whispered automatically, not brave yet—just sick of being manoeuvred like furniture.

  Alice’s eyes flashed, wet and furious. “Skye—please.”

  Skye heard herself breathing too fast. The room felt smaller. The door felt too thin.

  Father Mallory moved to the crack of the door and glanced out, then flinched back like he’d been seen.

  “Mr Clarke,” he said, voice low.

  Dad’s head snapped up. Something in him tightened, the way it had when Alan had stepped out with his folders. Strategy built itself in his shoulders without permission.

  “What’s he doing?” Alice whispered.

  Before anyone could answer, the corridor erupted.

  Mr Clarke’s voice came through the wooden door now, too loud to contain, the sound of a man whose brain had cracked and was trying to patch itself with shouting.

  “I saw him! I saw Simon Harper in the graveyard—digging—digging up his own daughter’s grave!”

  A ripple of voices behind him, loud enough to hear even through stone: shocked gasps, half-laughs of disbelief, someone saying Oh my God, someone else saying Call the police, sharp and immediate.

  Skye’s mouth went dry.

  Alice’s fingers tightened like a vice. “Someone’s going to ring Mum,” she whispered, and her voice shook with something close to terror. “Someone’s going to ring the police.”

  As if to answer her, a woman’s voice—Maureen, unmistakable even without seeing her—cut in, brisk and offended by chaos.

  “This is sick,” she snapped. “This is—Someone give me the number. I’m calling Linda, she needs to know what he’s—”

  Skye’s heart slammed so hard it hurt.

  Father Mallory opened the door wider before it could become a battering ram. He stepped out into the corridor like a man walking onto a stage he hadn’t rehearsed, and Skye heard the crowd behind Mr Clarke surge closer—curiosity pulling them like a tide.

  “Everyone,” Father Mallory said, voice firm, and then it cracked on the second syllable because he was, after all, just a man with a collar. He steadied himself. “Everyone, please—lower your voices.”

  Mr Clarke’s voice came sharp, frantic. “Don’t tell me to lower—Father, he was in the grave. He—” His words stumbled over themselves, then found the one that mattered. “The coffin was open.”

  A collective intake of breath behind him.

  Dad moved, one step toward the door before he could stop himself. Skye saw the reflex in him: protect the secret, control the narrative, stand in front of the thing that could be harmed.

  Alice dragged Skye back on instinct—toward the wardrobe.

  Skye hit the edge of it and stopped dead. The smell of mothballs rose, instantly nauseating, and something in her snapped tight and sharp. She could not do it again. She could not be shoved into the dark to make other people comfortable.

  In the corridor, someone said, louder now, “He’s gone mad.”

  Maureen: “This is what happens when people won’t accept—”

  Another voice, male, uncertain: “Empty coffin? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Mr Clarke, breaking: “It was empty! I saw it—there was water and the dress and—there was no body. No body!”

  Silence punched through the corridor so hard Skye could almost hear ears ringing.

  Skye’s knees went weak.

  Ben’s voice rose somewhere behind the adults—higher, sharper, disbelief turning to fear. “Empty?”

  Someone shushed him. Someone else said, “This is a child’s grave.”

  And then—too fast, too real—a phone buzzed. A second buzz. Someone whispering urgently, “I’m calling—” and another person saying, “Don’t. Wait. But—” and someone else, triumphant, “Yes, call. This needs proper authorities.”

  Skye’s chest tightened until breathing felt like trying to drink through a straw.

  Father Mallory said something—calm words, pastoral words—but they were being swallowed by the crowd’s noise. He wasn’t controlling anything now. He was just trying to keep the hallway from turning into a stampede.

  Dad turned back into the vestry, eyes wild, and Skye saw in them the thing he’d been refusing all day: the moment control failed.

  “They’ll come in,” Alice whispered. “Dad, they’ll come in and they’ll see—”

  Skye looked at the wardrobe door. Then at the little window slit that looked into the hall, where a line of moving shapes had begun to shift, restless. Then at Alice—older now, taller, holding on too hard because letting go felt like dying again.

  Skye opened her mouth and nothing came out.

  Her throat worked. She tried again.

  “I can’t,” she managed, and her voice was thin and broken and not like a brave speech. “I can’t—be in there.”

  Alice’s face crumpled. “Skye—”

  Skye shook her head once, small, terrified. The itch on her arm surged; she pressed her hand flat over the tape without scratching, just holding it, as if she could hold herself together by force.

  “I did it,” she whispered. “I did it before. I hid. I... I made myself smaller so other people didn’t have to look at what they didn’t want to see.” Her breath hitched. “And it didn’t make me safer. It just made me disappear.”

  Alice blinked hard, tears spilling despite her trying not to let them. For a second she looked like she might argue. Like she might take the decision away because that was how she coped—by acting.

  Then she swallowed, throat working like Dad had earlier, and her voice came out raw.

  “Okay,” she said. It wasn’t surrender. It was love with no armour. “Okay, Nightskye.”

  Skye flinched at the nickname like it was a hand on an old bruise—then it steadied her, because it was hers. Not Lindsey. Not a secret. Not a cousin. Her.

  Alice wiped her face with the heel of her hand, furious at the tears. “You’re—” She stopped because the sentence was too big. She tried again, quieter. “You don’t have to do it alone.”

  Skye nodded once. Her vision blurred. She blinked hard and the room swam, edges softening with panic. She kept her eyes on Alice’s face because it was the only thing that stayed still.

  Dad looked between them like he wanted to forbid it and couldn’t find the authority. His mouth opened.

  Skye said, gently, “Dad.”

  That was all. Not an argument. A request. A hand offered.

  Dad shut his eyes for half a second. When he opened them, something in him shifted—not acceptance, not peace, but a different kind of choice. He stepped to Skye’s side, shoulder almost touching hers, like a shield that couldn’t stop bullets but could stand anyway.

  In the corridor, Mr Clarke’s voice rose again, ragged. “I’m not lying! I know what I saw! And I saw that girl—Alice was with her in Ipswich, and they said it was a cousin—”

  Maureen, sharp: “Yes, Lindsey. Exactly.”

  Mr Clarke: “No! It wasn’t—” His voice cracked. “It was Skye.”

  A sound—small and desperate—came from somewhere in the crowd. Ben again. “I told you,” he said, voice breaking with relief and horror braided together. “I told you I saw her.”

  His mum’s voice, strained, too fast: “Ben, stop. You’re overtired. You’re making—”

  Ben, louder now, shaking with it: “Mum, I saw her. At work. She looked at me like she was scared.”

  The crowd murmured, like wind moving through dead leaves.

  Skye’s legs wanted to fold.

  Father Mallory’s voice cut through, suddenly louder, not because he wanted attention but because he had finally realised gentleness wouldn’t hold the corridor together.

  “Enough,” he said. The single word cracked like a whip. Silence wavered, startled into being.

  Skye heard his breath after it, unsteady. He’d surprised himself too.

  He spoke again, quieter, and this time his voice sounded like a man, not a role. “Whatever you think you know, whatever you think you’re about to do—phones, police, rumours—stop.” A beat. “Just stop for ten seconds and remember we are in a church, and you are talking about a child.”

  Someone scoffed under their breath. Not everyone softened. Skye could feel that, even without seeing faces—like cold pockets in a warm crowd.

  Maureen snapped, “A child who is dead.”

  Skye’s stomach flipped.

  Father Mallory’s voice went very still. “Or not.”

  The hallway shivered with that sentence. It wasn’t sermon. It wasn’t spectacle. It was a door opening.

  Dad’s head turned sharply toward Mallory, warning in his eyes: Don’t.

  Mallory hesitated—a fraction too long. Skye saw it. The moment a priest decided whether truth belonged to God or to people.

  Then he swallowed and nodded once, as if to himself.

  “Simon,” he called, voice steadying. “If you are going to speak, speak now.”

  Dad didn’t.

  His mouth opened and closed. His eyes flicked to Skye, then to the wardrobe, then back to Skye again. He looked like a man standing between two cliffs: secrecy and exposure, both drop-offs.

  Skye felt Alice’s hand slide into hers. Hot, shaking.

  The corridor waited. Not kindly. Not cruelly. Just waiting the way the world waited for your worst moment to become public.

  Skye’s heart thudded so hard she thought she might faint. She planted her feet harder. Stone under trainers. Breath in. Breath out.

  She looked at her father. He looked back.

  He didn’t nod. He didn’t give permission. He couldn’t. He just... stayed beside her. That was what he had.

  Skye stepped forward.

  The door swung wider and cold corridor air hit her face like a slap.

  For a second all she could see were shapes—coats, scarves, paper folders, mouths half-open. The parish council, paused mid-beige argument, rearranged into something older: a crowd around a miracle, or a crime scene, or both.

  Mr Clarke stood at the front like someone who’d run too far and couldn’t stop. His eyes were glassy, wild. His shopping bag hung limp at his side, forgotten.

  Ben was behind him, taller than Skye remembered, his face pale and fierce with it. He saw her the moment she appeared and his breath caught so hard it sounded like pain.

  Maureen’s eyes snapped onto Skye’s face and went sharp, disbelieving. She made a small sound—almost a laugh—and then didn’t, because something in her couldn’t find the right kind of rude for this.

  Someone’s phone slipped in their hand. Skye heard the faint tap of a screen being locked. Not everyone stopped. Somewhere further back, a different screen glowed briefly, hidden behind a sleeve.

  Skye’s body trembled. She couldn’t stop it. She shut her eyes for half a second, not to disappear, just to keep herself from splintering.

  When she opened them again, she met the corridor head-on.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  It was all she had. It was enough.

  Mr Clarke staggered like the floor had dropped. “Oh—” he breathed, and the sound broke into a whisper. “Oh my God.”

  A woman near the wall clapped a hand over her mouth and started crying immediately, messy and unembarrassed. Another man took a step back as if Skye had become a ghost that could touch him.

  Maureen found her voice at last, brittle. “This is—” she started, then stopped because there was no sentence that didn’t make her sound monstrous.

  Ben moved without thinking.

  He pushed past Mr Clarke, past adults’ elbows and shock, and crossed the distance in three strides. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t ask permission, didn’t stop to be polite about the fact he was nearly eighteen and she was—she was still Skye.

  He wrapped his arms around her like he’d been holding his breath for five years and was finally allowed to breathe out.

  Skye made a small, broken sound. Her hands fisted in his jacket because she didn’t know where else to put them.

  Ben’s voice came into her hair, shaking. “You’re real.”

  Skye’s throat burned. “I’m real,” she whispered back, and then the weight of it hit her—how ridiculous it was that she had to say it at all.

  Behind her,Dad went utterly still, as if any movement might make this fall apart. His hand hovered near Skye’s shoulder, not quite touching, not because he didn’t want to, but because he was watching the crowd for the first sign of harm.

  Father Mallory stood in the doorway, eyes wet, face set with the grim focus of a man holding a line.

  And the corridor—half church, half courtroom—held its breath around them.

  Somewhere down the hall, a muted ringtone began to buzz, once, then again, swallowed quickly by a palm.

  Skye felt it like a shadow moving across the sun.

  Ben pulled back just enough to look at her face. Tears sat on his lashes. He tried to smile and it didn’t work properly. “I knew,” he whispered, like confessing a sin. “I knew I wasn’t crazy.”

  Skye blinked hard. “You’re not,” she managed. It came out hoarse. Her voice didn’t want to work.

  A man—one Skye only half-recognised from school assemblies—stared at her with narrowed eyes, not angry, just defensive. “Why her?” he said suddenly, the question sharp with grief that had nowhere else to go. “Why does she come back?”

  A murmur stirred. Agreement, confusion, resentment.

  Skye’s vision blurred again. Her knees threatened to fold.

  She looked at the man and felt the unfairness of it rise in her like bile. Not because the question was cruel, but because it was impossible. Because it was the world doing what it always did—trying to turn her into an explanation.

  Her mouth opened.

  Nothing came out.

  Alice stepped forward, shoulder to shoulder with her, trembling but there. She didn’t speak yet. She just existed beside Skye like a promise.

  Father Mallory’s gaze flicked to Skye’s face, asking without words: Do you want me to stop them? Or do you want to answer?

  Skye swallowed hard. Her arm itched, vicious, demanding she pick at the tape, make herself smaller through pain. She didn’t. She kept her hand flat against her thigh and breathed.

  “I don’t know,” she said again, louder this time, and her voice cracked cleanly on the word. It wasn’t a speech. It wasn’t inspiring. It was the only honest thing she had. “I don’t— I don’t know why.”

  The corridor stayed silent, unsettled by the absence of a satisfying narrative.

  Skye’s eyes stung. She fought it and lost anyway. “I didn’t... decide,” she said, and the sentence fell apart halfway through. She tried to gather it back. “I woke up. That’s all. I woke up by the road and—” Her breath hitched. She pressed a hand to her ribs on reflex. Pain grounded her. “And everyone was older.”

  A woman made a sound like she’d been struck.

  The man who’d asked the question looked away, ashamed or angry or both.

  Skye’s throat tightened until she could barely breathe. “I didn’t get... five years,” she said, voice small again. “I didn’t get to... be here.”

  Her face crumpled. She didn’t want it to. She hated crying in front of people. She hated being looked at like a story.

  Ben’s hand found her shoulder, steady. “Hey,” he whispered, fierce and gentle at once. “Hey, it’s okay.”

  Skye shook her head, tears spilling. “It’s not,” she managed, and that was the truest thing she’d said all day.

  Behind her,Dad’s hand finally landed on her shoulder—muddy, cold, firm. Not permission. Not control. Just Dad.

  Father Mallory stepped forward one pace into the corridor, placing his body between Skye and the crowd without making it look like a barrier. His voice came low, carrying.

  “You are looking at a child who has been through something none of you can name,” he said. “If your first instinct is to turn her into a question mark, swallow it.”

  Maureen’s lips parted as if to object.

  Mallory’s gaze met hers—steady, not unkind. “If your first instinct is to ring someone and make this worse—don’t.”

  The corridor held in a fragile balance: awe, fear, love, resentment, disbelief—human mess.

  Skye felt herself wobble in the middle of it.

  And somewhere, just beyond the church walls, the world kept moving—cars on wet road, distant sirens that might be nothing, the thin electric hum of a town about to talk.

  Skye looked at the faces in front of her—some soft, some hard, some not yet decided—and realised, with a sudden sick clarity, that hiding hadn’t been stopping the consequences.

  It had only been delaying the moment they arrived.

  She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, smearing tears across her skin. “I’m sorry,” she blurted, and hated herself for it.

  Dad’s hand tightened on her shoulder. “No,” he said, rough. “No. Don’t.”

  Skye breathed in. Breathed out.

  She stayed where she was.

  And the corridor—caught between God and gossip—stared back, deciding what kind of town it was going to be now that the dead girl had stopped hiding.