It was the kind of night that felt folded in layers, each softer than the one above it, and yet inside the folds something small and stubborn would not lie down. Ivy lay awake on her back, the sheet puddled around her knees, and watched the pale shapes the moon made on her ceiling. The shapes slid and settled like slow fish. Her room smelled of clean blankets and the faint woody hush of the dresser. A small glass jar sat at her elbow like a quiet watcher; inside it, her marble waited with its blue spiral. She liked the marble for the way it felt cool and round and sure. Tonight the marble seemed to carry the weight of the whole dark. She picked it up and held it like a small warm secret, and for a moment the pebble-size worry in her chest softened into a question she could not yet name.
The window was cracked a little, the way Ivy left it when the house felt too warm. The curtains breathed soft, and outside, the maple’s branches drew thin silver patterns against the navy sky. A single white star sat pressed between two twigs as if it had been tucked there and forgotten. Ivy climbed from bed and padded across the boards, the house answering her with small friendly creaks. Her feet found the rug, then the sill: the painted wood cool under both palms. She liked to press her cheek to the glass sometimes and count the threads in the curtain, or to listen to the hush that the streetlights made when they spoke to each other. But tonight the hush sounded wrong—less like a folded blanket and more like a blanket missing a corner.
Beneath the sill, a seam winked with a tiny, steady glow. It was not the moon’s washed light nor the yellow from the street; it was warm and close, like a firefly’s heart. Ivy bent down and the breath left her in a small hush. When she ran a fingertip along the painted groove she felt something new: a hinge no bigger than a fingernail, tucked into the wood as if by a careful, very small hand. The paint lifted, and a thin curl of moss peeked out of the crack, smelling of damp leaves and old wool. It smelled like places she had used to imagine—places where pillows grew and rivers moved like soft breath. For a moment the room seemed to hold itself steady, listening.
She wanted to laugh, or call for someone, but her voice felt too loud for that particular quiet. Instead she knelt and felt the tiny knob, which fit her finger as if it had been waiting for her all along. The hinge sighed when she touched it, a noise like a lid closing softly on a box. A sliver of light slipped through and painted a thin lane of gold across the painted floor. The light did not flow out like rain; it pooled and trembled like seed-light, small, patient. From the folded dark beneath came a sound like a soft combing of leaves—an exhale of dirt and wool and the downy stirring of a place that kept night together. It was not a voice, not yet, but it said in the way such sounds say things: something has been misplaced.