The scent of blooming yeast and cold flour is the only thing that makes the four o’clock silence bearable. Wren Holloway works the sourdough with a rhythmic, heavy-palmed grace, her chestnut hair already escaping its knot to graze her temple. The basement kitchen of the Greenwich Village brownstone is a sanctuary of warm yellow light and copper pots, a world she built from the wreckage of a life she used to know. Outside, the streetlamps still cast long, pearly shadows across the sidewalk, but in here, the oven is beginning to hum.
She pauses, hands buried deep in the cool, elastic dough. For four years, the third floor has been a tomb of expensive silence, its rent paid by a distant publisher and its tenant a ghost she only knows through grocery lists. But today, the quiet breaks. High above the humming refrigerators, a floorboard groans under a deliberate weight. It is a slow, heavy sound—the unmistakable drag of a heel against wood. Wren holds her breath, her gaze fixing on the exposed rafters of the ceiling as the movement continues, pacing a narrow, restless line across the floorboards.
Her heart hammers against her ribs, a frantic bird in a flour-dusted cage. This is the man who wrote the stories her husband whispered to her in the dark, the man who hasn't been seen since the world stopped looking. The floorboards creak again, closer now, shifting toward the center of the room. Dust drifts from the ceiling beams directly above her head as the footsteps suddenly stop.
