Smoke Stained

Rumor round here’s that by the time you start seeing ghosts, you’re well on your way to becoming one. But considering the vast majority of those living out in the soggy backwaters of Nanm Pédi, Louisiana both see ghosts regularly and haven’t the constitution for dying prematurely, I’d long ago let that warning drip from my skin into the very full bucket of baseless premonitions I’ve received over the years doing what I do, where I do it.

’Course, rumors—wild, wicked, or wafer thin—got a funny way of crawling back up the body and packing tight around the brain when standing smack dab in the middle of a deceased serial killer’s murder shack. Especially when a hazy, white fog starts pulsating up through the floorboards and swirling about your toes.

Whipping my phone from my pocket, I start filming.

“Daphne LeBlanc. Kill Joe’s place. Wednesday, October 15th, 2025. Quinn case.”

I crouch lower than my hip-hugging holster’d prefer, trying to peer through the askew slats of this dilapidated shed-on-stilts. It looks like smoke. ’Course that doesn’t make a lick-a’ sense. Kill Joe’s teeters on a particularly mucky bend of the bank. These parts really ain’t dry enough to catch fire. But it’s too damn thick to be river fog.

Bringing my lens closer to the divide, I inadvertently brush the floor with my knuckles and startle back. Both the wood and the mist are fiercely cold and…sharp.

With my mind itching to play tricks, I decidedly crouch lower. But there’s only empty space between the flooring and the fetid green of the Bayou below. Really—I drive a thumb nail into a prickly, cold board—it’s like the mist is seeping right out of the wood.

Rocking to a stand, I lean back in hopes of getting a better angle, but have to stop myself again as the smoke…takes shape? Two large crescents of wintery white mist lay facing one another like parentheses on either side of the single room, boxing me in.

“Vince!” I call out, but there’s no response from my partner. A moment ago, I could hear him outside surveying the bank. Now? Nothing.

The arcs drift closer to one another, cooling the air around me and sucking down the day’s humidity in a single gulp. I have half a mind to run, when they fold into a perfect heart around my feet. That bastard probably set this up to screw with me—liquid nitrogen or…or, I don’t know, chem was never my strong suit.

“Vin—”

My voice dissolves on my tongue as the wispy heart slowly solidifies, not like ice but like an idea, making more and more sense the longer I look at it. I scrunch my brow, tilt my head, then gasp as the left curve and swoop become the bend of a spine and the hook of stacked knees. The rise of hips and a fan of jet-black hair…I don’t have to guess, I know. Who she is, how she smells, how she sleeps with one hand cradled inside the other.

My tongue’s in my throat. My heart’s in the bowl of my pelvis. But my brain knows: not real, not real, not real.

Her lips part and turn a faint ruby red. Crimson Crush—her shade.

You’ll be late for psych, she whispers, or I remember, fuck, I can’t—

I don’t care, the opposing arc replies, reaching through my ankles—my jeans, my boots, and my bones!—and taking hold of the woman’s cupped hands. I don't want to leave you. I don’t…

Please go. I need you to go.

Before I can shift my focus away from the first shadow-figure’s closed, sorrowful face, the two heart halves drift apart and sink back into the floorboards.

“You called?” Vince, a man of above-average muscle mass and top-of-the-field solve rates, stomps inside not minding the way the smoke-stained floorboards buckle beneath his weight.

I blink rapidly, then stop filming. “Yeah…yeah, some sorta, uh, smoke or something was wafting up through the flooring.” I scroll through the video recording for a freeze frame showcasing the…smoke, but from start to finish there’s nothing but wooden slats and a couple awkward shots of my hands and knees. I drop the cursor right in the middle and let the video silently play. There’s nothing. No smoke. No solidifying. No…memory. Not real.

“Helloooo? Earth to Daph.”

I tuck my phone away, and swallow back what feels like a tangle of barbed wire before meeting his gaze.

“Now, I don’t see any smoke,” he says, cocking a brow and holding his gloved hands out wide. “But I did find this.” Between index and middle finger he wiggles a bobby pin—generic, rusted, something that could’ve been mine back in college when my curls were longer than the grown-out buzz I’ve adopted in recent years. ’Cept it’s blonde. So definitely not mine. And probably not Ginny Quinn’s with her long auburn locks.

I pluck a sample bag from the crossbody kit Vin so lovingly dubbed my “Functional Fanny” the day he stopped being my mentor and I stopped putting up with his overt advances.

“Good find,” I grumble, and he smiles wide. A bit of a prick, one hell of a flirt, but at the end of the day, a decent guy and a damn good P.I. I tuck the evidence away and let my head drop back. “Fuck,” I breathe, then inhale to elaborate but end up just saying “fuck” again.

“Nuh-uh.” Vince nudges me. “Spill.”

“It’s been four weeks, Vin.” I throw my hands up. “And what do I got to show for it? A bobby pin that could belong to anyone and…” I gesture at years, decades worth of broken beer bottle bits and goopy-gross cigarette butts collected in the corners of the room. “And nothing. I’ve got nothing. It’s like she’s actually vanished.”

“S’how it goes.”

“Yeah.” I catch my face in my palms and breathe. I can’t tell if it’s the case, my lack of sleep, or being back in this godforsaken town that’s causing me to spiral, but something’s got its claws in my psyche and it won’t let go. The memories, I’ve always had ’em, but seeing her, here, like that, so real, so…alive…I shake my head and look up before Vin thinks I’ve lost it.

But he’s already making that face, that You’re-Breaking-Rule-Numero-Uno face—don’t get attached. Not to the victims, not to the clientele, not to no one. “Why’d we come here?” he asks, voice low, tone teetering between curious and accusatory. “Quinn’s friends and family never mentioned her coming out this way and Kill Joe’s been dead a good fifty years.”

“A hunch.” I shrug. “Felt like a stone unturned and I didn’t want to leave it that way.”

He nods narrow-eyed and cautious-like. “You ain’t gettin’ wiggy on me now, are ya?” The left side of his mouth hitches. “’Cause when I walked in here after you screamed my name—”

“I did not scream your—”

“You looked pretty wigged.” His smile falls. “Like you’d, uh…seen a ghost.”

“Vince.” I scowl at him. “I had a hunch, I followed it, and it was a dead end. That’s it. Don’t push that mumbo jumbo shit on me just ’cause I had the great displeasure of growing up in this swamp town.”

His gloved hands flick up in mock defense as he pushes past me to the front door. “Say whatchu will, you looked spooked.”

“Well, I’d rather look spooked than literally not be able to fit through doorways,” I quip, following him back out to my beat-up XTerra.

Vince flexes his lats, then hooks his gaze to wink at me. “Don’t act like you don’t like it. Ain’t that why you called me out of retirement?”

“No,” I say flatly, swinging the driver’s side door open. “I called you out of mentorship, not retirement seeing as you’re thirty-fucking-five, because I’m worried the young woman who went missing is not only dead”—I stick up a finger—“but the most recent in a long line of disappeared girls.” I hop in the truck, start the engine, and stare down the shack, wondering why the hell my memory of one Serena Liu, my late high-school-into-college girlfriend, keeps urging me to come back here.

#

After taking the pin and a few beer cans Vin collected from around the shack to a not-so-local lab (’cause Nanm Pédi ain’t got shit), and going back to Ginny Q’s ma’s house to re-paw through her personal belongings for blonde pins despite her hair being red, I call it quits. Vin’s quiet on the drive back to our motel, quieter still when he walks me to my room.

“Enough with the pity silence,” I groan, tapping my key card to the door.

“It’s not—”

“It is.” I give him one final look—not cutting, not cool, maybe pitiful—before slipping inside and dropping my bag to the floor. I kick off my boots, shower, hate myself for being an ass, and when there’s nothing left to do but face my dozens of dead ends, I pluck a photo of Serena Liu from my wallet. One of those perfect shots, taken at the perfect time, when the sunlight’s just right and the joy’s so genuine it crackles off the glossy finish.

We left this nothing town and all its dangerous little rumors as soon as we could. Grew up fast, went to university, and only came crawling on back for holidays our families wouldn’t let us celebrate together. My ma would kill me if she knew I was here now, resurrect and kill me all over again if she found out I was monetizing a neighbor’s sob story. But I’d rather be here, doing this, than play-acting someone else in a house that never felt like home.

I tack Serena’s photo to the wall (motel policies be damned) alongside a series of newspaper clippings: Tira Jacobs, 17, reported missing 3-18-18, Ayana Crosby, 21, reported missing 6-12-20, Mel Richards, 15, reported missing 7-21-23, Ginny Quinn, 19, reported missing 4-9-25. Chewing my lip, I pop open a Sharpie and write Serena Liu, 20, reported missing 4-12-2017. She’d have been twenty-eight this year, same as me.

Ignoring the web I built all around them—last-known locations, transactions, conversations—I drop my gaze to the not-wall-worthy printouts I’d gathered long before coming back here. Kill Joe’s place. From the front, from the river, from high up above as a little red pin on the edge of the Bayou.

It’d taken me weeks to figure it out. I kept seeing the damn thing in my dreams, glimpses of a house I recognized but couldn’t trace back to an origin. Then Serena showed up, lookin’ like she did when we were kids—chucks, black jeans, black hoodie, like we were spies.

Didn’t think much of it…Then I saw her every night, at every age and every stage, for damn near a month. Childhood friends, then maybe more, then maybe everything, then…nothing. A ghost. A memory.

In truth, I used the Quinn case as an excuse to make the trek from my comfortable life in NOLA to this overly Lysol-ed room in Nanm Pédi, thinking it was gonna be an easy-peezy runaway story, but when it turned out to be the latest installment in a missing persons collection, I quickly put off my pilgrimage to the shack and got to work.

Kill Joe’s didn’t seem to be connected. I had no reason to go there.

’Cept like a sliver beneath my skin, I kept feeling like I did. Kill Joe was a killer after all, and according to all the town mamas who’d raised me, a lady killer at that (wink-wink). But no bodies were ever found, no accusations were ever made, and like so often in this town, another line of hearsay became history.

But any P.I. worth their salt’ll remind you, hearsay sounds like her-say for a reason…

The news never discussed what Serena’s English prof might’a done, I found out via whispers in the library. And none of my clippings mention a single motive for running, but Tira’s old bestie described her ex-boyfriend as “freaky,” and Ayana had tried to melt down and discard a pregnancy test, while little Mel had journaled about a boy who kept following her home…

But are rumors and a shared hometown really enough to go on? And what about Ginny? Right now her life was still being painted as perfect.

“Not at the shack,” I hear Serena say behind me.

But she’s not really there. And I won’t let my stupid nightmare-memories have their way with me again. Only, when I close my eyes, just to blink, I see her, and the shack, and the smoke—

“No!” I hiss, forcing my eyes open so I can stare at Ginny. Much as I’d love to figure out what happened to Serena—at the shack, or not at the shack—all those years ago, I’ve got Ginny to worry about. And there’s no evidence she ever stepped foot in that hellhole. She could be alive and well, or dissolving in someone’s bathtub right now. Whatever it is, it’s my job to figure it out.

My phone buzzes and I jump.

Vince: “No ghost stories before bed, LeBlanc. Sleep well.”

I send back a bunch of ghost emojis then follow with a single black heart before hitting the light and crawling into bed. Lying on my side, spine curved, knees stacked, I picture Serena, opposite me, and wait for sleep.

#

You’ll be late for psych.

I don’t care. I take her cupped hands. I don't want to leave you. I don’t…

Please go. I need you to go.

The shack forms all around us but this time we’re solid and it’s smoky gray. I peer down through the slats and see nothing, but when I return my gaze to Serena, she’s no longer lying opposite me, she’s sitting in the corner with her back against the wall.

Serena, what are you doing?

She doesn’t answer, but she’s shaking, not with chills, but with anger, so much she might combust. Sweat dews her hairline as she brings something shiny to the hem of her wrist.

Serena…?

She’s ten again and in a pink cotton dress, she’s fourteen and mad at me because I told her I liked her, she’s seventeen and pulling me into a back room at a party, she’s black and white and stone still—the same photograph on every telephone pole from NOLA to Nanm Pédi.

She drags the metal down the length of her forearm.

Serena, no!

Please go. I need you to go. The words don’t come from her lips, but rather echo all around—they live in the wood, they live in the river.

She doesn’t bleed, she’s not real, but she, from head, to heart, to heels, sinks into the floorboards, and becomes one with the house. I need you to go.

Go where? Go where!

The shack.

I’m already—I spin around and around, making myself dizzy—I’m already here.

There’s a loud bang and I snap to attention.

It’s dark. And it smells like Lysol. And sulfur. Steam and new growth alongside every phase of decomposition. It smells like home.

I hit the light, spring to my feet, and my stomach plummets. Long spiderwebs frame a bullet-sized hole in the window beside the door, letting sticky-hot air into my AC-ed room.

I look for the bullet, or more likely a rock, but find a little black tube instead. Gloving my hands, I pick it up. It’s lipstick—I turn it over—in the shade Crimson Crush.

“What the fuck?” I drop the tube, stumble back, hit the bed, and nearly fall on my ass. I’ve only ever known one person who wore the shade Crimson Crush.

I look at Serena on the wall and all the liquid in my body trickles downward, leaving behind trails of tingly-cool sinew and sharply contracted blood vessels.

Her photograph, along with Tira’s, Ayana’s, Mel’s, and Ginny’s now hangs upside down and all eight of their pretty, glittery eyes have been smeared out with hateful red x’s. Reluctantly, I reach out a single gloved finger.

Buttery, soft globs of Crimson Crush.

My almost-decided-to-be-a-cop brain finally clicks on. I grab my gun, my phone, and check my surroundings. There’s no one in the bathroom, or under the bed, and the only way in and out is locked, safety chain intact. I check the windows for signs of forced entry but nothing seems to have come in or gone out…save for the lipstick.

#

“Shit, Daph.” Vin circles my room for what’s gotta be the sixth time since sunrise. “I’m three rooms over, you should’ve—”

“I couldn’t.” Even now I’m finding it hard to move. After the window broke around three, I’d had just enough umph to crawl onto the bed, huddle with my back flush against the headboard, and gape at my marred wall.

“You could’ve called,” he says.

I nod, rubbing my weary eyes and forcing myself to a stand. “Should’ve.”

Vince lands an unexpectedly gentle hand on my shoulder. “Hey, you okay?”

“Yeah.” I shake the lour from my face. “Fine.”

Vince waits to see if that’s true, then eyes the lipstick. “On the bright side,” he says, “you’ve got your lead.”

It takes everything in me not to glance at Serena. The shade doesn’t belong solely to her, but—“Ginny didn’t wear make-up,” I say, opening her file on my phone. Notes and receipts, Instagram photos and snaps I’d taken of the polaroids she’d hung around her bathroom mirror. Just a small-town girl living her small-town life. Picnics with friends, her parents on a park bench, two silhouetted fisher-folk casting lines into a hot-pink horizon.

“Her mom?” Vin offers. “A coworker?”

I shake my head, then stop scrolling on a shot of Ginny and her friend Sara. “Holy shit.”

“What?” Vin tilts my screen. “You think the friend did this?” He adds air quotes to friend because that’s what Ginny’s ma had done when I’d asked her about Sara weeks ago.

“No,” I say. “The girlfriend didn’t do this. But look.” I zoom in on Sara’s multicolored hair then drag her bleached bangs to the center of my screen. A row of blonde bobby pins holds them neatly in place. “Shit, I gotta go.”

Knowing full well I look like a deranged raccoon, I grab my crossbody kit and tug on my boots. Finally, finally I’ve got something.

Vince smirks, reaching for the door, but doesn’t open it.

“What?” I say, stopping short.

“Eh, nothing. I’ll come with.”

“Vin, c’mon, I can handle a home visit.” To cover coming out this way (a.k.a., to save my ass), Vince took on a couple cases of his own. Low-stakes stuff—a missing watch at the local nursing home and something to do with a cheating spouse. Even so, unsolved in this industry means unpaid.

“You sure?” He raises a surly brow, but his eyes, honey-brown and somehow just as richly sweet, are loaded down with pity and…concern.

“Vince.” I all but push him aside so I can open the door myself. “I’m fine.”

“Gun loaded, taser ready. At all times.” He tips his head toward the window. “Someone’s not happy you’re sniffing down their trail, LeBlanc.”

“Good, means I’m on the right trail.” I pat his chiseled cheek and slip out the door.

#

After a glass of sweet tea and confirmation that Sara and Ginny were wayyy more than friends, I work Kill Joe’s into the conversation.

“Nah, not since we were middle schoolers pretending to be witches in the woods,” she says, gaze drifting toward a memory I could have sworn belonged exclusively to me and Serena.

“Right, sure,” I say, rolling the odd feeling from my shoulders. “So, she ever borrow your stuff? Your makeup? Your hairbrush? Anything like that?”

Brow pinching, Sara nods. “Yeah, I mean, what’s mine is…hers. Hoodies, Chapstick…” Tears bloom in her eyes, fall and meet her taut lips.

“Bobby pins?” I point to the ones she’s wearing now.

“Always,” she huffs, rubbing her nose.

And there it is: reason to believe Ginny might’ve been at that goddam shack after all.

I wrap things up quick with Sara, offer her tissues, promise her I’m doing everything I can, then hit the road. It’s a quarter past two when I decide to text Vin that I’m headed back to the shack. Thirteen seconds later (moments before I’ve had a chance to lose service), he calls. 

“Yep,” I say, putting the call on speaker and taking Exit 14.

“Don’t yep me, LeBlanc. Why the fuck are you going back? We searched that shithole for five hours yester—”

“I told you, the bobby pin—”

“Everyone and their mom wears bobby pins!”

“Not blonde bobby pins.”

“My ex-wife wore blonde bobby pins. You think she was at that shack too?” I scoff, but before I can whip up some snarky remark, Vin says what he hadn’t had the guts to say earlier. “I saw the pic of your girl, Daph.”

I want to accuse him of being a nosey prick, but my throat’s so dry I’m afraid if I open my mouth nothing but dust will spill out.

“C’mon, I know she’s why you quit school a month before graduating, why you became a P.I. And I know she’s why you’re back in Nanm—”

“Stop it,” I croak. “This isn’t about her.”

“Like hell it ain’t.”

“It was getting late; we did a rush job—”

“You might’ve!” Vin snaps. “But I sure didn’t. Daph, there’s nothing there.”

“I’m about to lose service,” I say calmly. “Be back before dark.” Hanging up, I floor it. Ginny Q. was there, I can feel it.

#

Sunlight spills through the many openings of the shack, illuminating dust mites and turning every sodden surface kelly green. But it’s not a witch’s hut or a labyrinth for spies, it’s where all my scattered threads converge. The dreams, the pin, the rumors.

I do the rounds, half-expecting every creaky floorboard to unleash visions of Serena and every gust to carry her words over my ears. But the creaks are just creaks, and the gusts aren’t meant for me.

Once I cover what I covered yesterday, I walk what portion of the perimeter I can, checking for drag marks in the soil and the straight lines of man-made items hidden amongst the gnarled roots of banked cypress trees. Carefully, I peer into the water, knowing if anything lurks more than an inch below the surface, I’m neither equipped to find it nor fight it. I return to the shack and stand exactly where I stood yesterday.

Nothing. For an hour, for two, three, four, there’s nothing. And as the sun begins to tip, I can’t help but feel like an idiot. Vin was right, I shouldn’t have come back.

So why did I?

I imagine a heart-shaped shadow hovering around my feet.

Because I know something’s wrong. Because all those years ago, I knew something was wrong and I failed…to protect her, to fix her, to save her.

To uncover her story.

Tears warm my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, and it’s like a chip of the weight I’ve been carrying on my back for the better part of a decade falls to the floor. “I shouldn’t have let you go, and I’m so sorry that I did.”

My blurred vision clears momentarily as tears pour down my face. I drop my head and knuckle my eyes, pissed that I’m cracking, pissed that Vin was right, pissed that I’d cost Ginny yet another day chasing someone I lost long ago.

No matter how hard I drive my fists into my face, new tears spring up and splash down, but as they soak into the floorboards, I feel…freer, lighter. I drop to my knees and sob, catch myself on my hands and wail.

More moments, more memories slip through the floorboards and sink to the bottom of the swamp. I go with them, limbs tangling into the weave of submerged river stumps. I blink, and I’m bloated, staring blindly into the underbelly of the Bayou. Blink again, and I’m slitting my wrists in the corner. Close my eyes for good, and I’m leaving this body behind…

Serena, the memory, the ghost—why not?—says the same thing she always says: Please go. I need you to go. Please go. I need you to go.

But I don’t want to go. I want to stay. I want to stay and I want to keep unloading bits of myself until I’m lighter than air.

She takes my wrists and my eyes flutter open. She kneels opposite me and we stare at each other endlessly. Her grip is warm, her scent intoxicating. I could lean forward and—

Her eyes glint like knives, and her lips redden: Crimson Crush.

“Get. Out.” Her body flickers into and out of existence, but her bared teeth and her bloody—not painted—lips remain. With her other trembling, here-and-gone hand, she reaches into my chest and jolts me to life. My pulse surges, and I shoot to my feet, rocking and swaying, as Serena sinks back into the floorboards. My head’s spinning, my eyes are foggy, I knock into the wall. What the hell was that?

Haphazardly, I wheel around and open the door. Beside my XTerra is Vin’s douche-y convertible. Weak-kneed, I stagger forward, but with every step I take away from the house, my strength and my wherewithal return.

“Vin!” He steps out of his car and starts toward me. His expression toggles between confused and angry, but his arms are open wide, like he’s waiting to catch me and pull me into a hug I don’t deserve. Even so, I want it, I need it. And when my body slams into his, I nearly break into tears all over again.

But Vin’s hug shifts from comforting to constricting in an instant. He lifts me up and carries me backward, back toward the house.

“Vin?” I struggle against him, but he’s got me locked in a bind made of biceps and pecs. “Vin!” I scream, thrashing and kicking. His boots thump against the hollow boards of the front stoop. “Vince, what are you—?”

I swivel and squirm enough to see his face. He looks at me, smile so wide it could tear his cheeks, and for a moment, his honey eyes flash crimson.

I buck, and twist, and slam my head into his chest. “Vin!” I scream, over and over, as he lowers me to the ground and climbs on top of me. “Vin, stop!”

He chuckles, but the sound is all wrong.

As he shifts his grip to my elbows, I sit up and bite his forearm hard enough to draw blood. Growling, he swings his arm back. Blood sprays across my face as I struggle to slide out from under him. But Vin’s quick, quicker than he ought to be. One moment I’m grunting and shimmying, the next his beefy hands are wrapped around my neck. I’m not getting any air. And in no time, I’m failing: vision slipping, thoughts twisting—underwater, bloating, in the corner, bleeding out.

Then, Serena. Her spirit, her essence pushes up through the floorboards right underneath me. I feel her—every moment, every touch, every kiss, every time we said goodbye knowing it was temporary. It should have been temporary. She meant for it to be temporary.

With strength that isn’t mine, I take Vin’s wrists and throw him off of me. But before I can make it to my feet, he grabs my ankle.

Another surge of energy snakes through my body—I don’t recognize it, then remember: the rock of the boat, the whir of my line, long auburn locks whipping around my face.

Ginny.

With her strength, Serena’s, and my own, I use Vin’s hold on me to pull him toward the door. The moment he realizes what I’m doing, he tugs sharply back, but my leg doesn’t budge. More surges rush into me; a million memories shuffle through my mind.

Together, we turn, grab Vin by the wrists, and drag him outside.

His body twitches and jerks; his face screws into a knot of rage and pain.

With only my boot on his chest, but the strength of dozens or maybe hundreds of women holding him down, I grab rope from my trunk and secure his wrists to my back wheel.

“It’s the house,” he whispers. “Shut up!” he barks. “It’s the house, you have to—Quiet! Burn—” Vin screams in agony even though I’m doing anything to hurt him. “Daph!” he wails. His eyes snap open to reveal tear-soaked, honey-brown irises. “Burn it!”

I spin to look back at the shack and every hair on my body goes ramrod straight. Kill Joe’s is wobbling, or…or pulsating, or…breathing.

I snag my lighter from the glovebox as Vin’s bellows rip through the night, then run for the shack with a wild heat rumbling through my bones. Destroy. Destroy. Destroy.

The heaving shack recoils, like it’s readying to strike me down, but the moment I roll back the wheel of the lighter, sparks fly forward, carried in the hands of hundreds, no thousands of pearly gray ghosts. I watch in awe as they set fire to the shack, as they consume all that it ever was in an instant.

After seconds, minutes maybe? Vin’s screams dissipate.

I stumble-step back, unable to pull my gaze from the dying flames, and crouch beside him. He’s panting and sobbing. “I didn’t want to…I didn’t mean…I came to help, to apologize for being a dick, not to—”

“I know,” I whisper. “I know.”

His warm gaze settles on me, soaks me in, then as if of one mind, we both turn to face the shack. Instead of smoke rising from the smoldering pile of black, ghosts and memories billow, filling the night sky. I can’t tell if Serena is among them, and yet I’m certain she is.