The floorboard above Dana's head groaned.
She froze, soup spoon halfway to her mouth. The sound came from the dining room—a space she'd sealed off three winters ago when heating the whole farmhouse became a luxury she couldn't afford. Nothing lived in that room now except dust and the kind of silence that accumulated like snowdrift.
Another creak. Deliberate. Careful.
Someone was walking where no one should be walking.
Dana set down her spoon and reached for the rifle propped against her chair. The metal felt cold enough to burn her palm. She moved toward the kitchen doorway, bare feet silent on the worn linoleum.
The dining room door hung open.
She'd locked it herself two days ago. Triple-checked the deadbolt before descending to the cellar with the boy's first meal. Locks didn't open themselves. Not in her world.
Dana pressed her back to the doorframe and listened. The sounds that filtered through were wrong—not the random settling of old wood, but the purposeful movement of someone trying not to be heard.
She slipped into the corridor that connected her kitchen to the sealed-off rooms. Ice crystals had formed along the baseboards where her heat couldn't reach. The air tasted like metal and abandonment.
The dining room door stood six inches ajar.
Dana pushed it open with the rifle barrel and stepped into a space that felt like stepping backward through time.
The boy stood in front of the mantelpiece, a photograph clutched in his bandaged hands.
"Put it down."
He didn't turn. Didn't even flinch. Just kept staring at the image as if it contained answers to questions he'd never learned how to ask.
"I said put it down."
"This your place?"
His voice carried no shame. No apology for breaking into her locked room. No acknowledgment that he'd violated the only rule that mattered—stay where you're put.
Dana stepped closer, rifle trained on the center of his back. The dining room felt smaller than she remembered. Colder. The furniture hulked under dust sheets like sleeping animals.
"Was."
The boy turned then, holding the photograph up so she could see it too. His eyes moved between her face and the image, searching for connections that time had tried to erase.
"How long ago?"
"Before."
"Before what?"
"Before everything."
Dana stared at the photograph over the rifle's barrel. She'd taken it herself, fifteen years ago, with a camera that had belonged to her sister. Late spring, when the apple trees were drunk on their own blossoms and the grass grew so thick you could lose yourself in it.
The orchard in the picture blazed with life. Rows of trees heavy with fruit. Paths that curved between them like veins in a green heart. A red barn in the background, paint fresh and bright as blood. Sky so blue it looked artificial.
Nothing in that photograph existed anymore.
"You lived here? Before?"
"No." Dana's finger found the trigger. "Just dreamed about it."
The boy studied her face, then looked back at the photograph. His thumb traced the image's edge, following the line where earth met sky.
"Looks perfect."
"It was a lie."
"What do you mean?"
"Perfect things don't last. They break the first time someone touches them."
Dana watched him absorb this. Watched his face change as he understood what she was telling him. That the orchard in the photograph had been someone else's dream. Someone else's hope. Someone else's failure.
"How'd you end up here?"
"Walked."
"From where?"
"Away."
The boy set the photograph back on the mantelpiece, his movements careful as a priest handling sacred relics. The frame made a soft click against the wood.
"You gonna shoot me?"
"Haven't decided."
"For looking at a picture?"
"For breaking into my locked room. For touching things that don't belong to you. For making me wonder what else you've been into while I was sleeping."
The boy lifted his hands, palms out. Empty. Harmless. But Dana had learned not to trust empty hands. They could fill faster than thought.
"Just wanted to see."
"See what?"
"What you were protecting."
Dana's grip tightened on the rifle. The words hit closer to truth than she'd expected. She had been protecting this room. Not from thieves or scavengers, but from herself. From the weight of looking at what had been taken away.
"Get out."
"It's beautiful."
"It's gone."
"But it was real. Once."
Dana stepped aside, gesturing toward the door with the rifle barrel. The boy moved past her, limping slightly from his wounded leg. He paused in the doorway.
"Why'd you keep the picture?"
The question hung in the frozen air like breath made visible. Dana stared at the photograph, at the orchard that had never been hers but had become her inheritance anyway. A place built by other hands, abandoned by other hearts, left for her to defend against the slow violence of time.
"To remember what I lost."
"You said you never lived here."
"Doesn't matter. I lost it anyway."
The boy studied her face one more time, then disappeared into the corridor. Dana heard his uneven footsteps fade toward the kitchen, toward the trapdoor that led to his cellar cage.
She locked the dining room door and pocketed the key.
But the image stayed with her—not the photograph on the mantelpiece, but the look in the boy's eyes as he'd held it. Recognition. Understanding. The expression of someone who'd also lost things he'd never owned.
Dana returned to her soup, but it had gone cold. She ate it anyway, spoonful by spoonful, while the wind rattled the windows and the house settled into its nightly argument with the cold.
Outside, snow continued to fall. Inside, silence pressed against the walls like accumulated weight.
At some point during the night, Dana found herself standing in front of the locked dining room door. Her hand rested on the key in her pocket, but she didn't turn it. Some rooms were meant to stay sealed. Some photographs were meant to gather dust.
Some dreams were too dangerous to touch twice.
She went to bed with the rifle beside her and tried not to think about the boy's hands on her photograph. About the reverence in his voice when he'd called it beautiful. About the way he'd understood, without being told, that she was guarding something more valuable than food or ammunition.
She was guarding the memory of hope.
And memory, like everything else worth saving, required locks.